Beach Dancers

I looked out at the corduroy sea at midmorning, long lines of waves queueing to crash against rocks and tower with waving fronds of froth.  Such an ocean it was, rocking itself to and fro and seeming to slap its hands together, one set of waves put against another, currents interlacing and joining one another in a hissing madness.

Every person at the shore was watching waves, walking automatically or sitting on rock humps and juts to admire turbulence and order intertwining like wrestling lovers.

A small girl was bent over dangling her fingertips in a small tidepool of ocean water on the beach sand, as if she were playing a keyboard.  She looked to the side, listening? or to watch dogs and people nearby.  But, her fingers in the water kept playing. I might have heard a few notes.  Or it might have been the sandpipers racing at the waters edge, hungry to catch invisible prey only they could hear.  

A dog with three legs ran toward me and then past, intent on the flat wide sand where other dogs were chasing tennis balls flung into the surf.  One of them, fluffy and elderly, a golden retriever on a leash, was spotted by a dancing girl who ran to the dog and circled it, giddy in the bright sun, the sight of the smiling dog, and her own light smallness.  Adults eyed the dog closely, surrounded as he was by the movements of the small girl inclined to pirouette and careen with wild abandon.  The dog might much rather have been hunting ducks in the water hazards where the golfers were yelling, "Fore!" He held his ground and the girl twirled away, a sprite with a bubbling spirit.

A young woman posed between her friend and the wide arch of blonde beach and seething surf, her arms extended like plane wings, digitally captured in as many pixels as waves that broke beyond her.  Once captured, she and her friend checked the image with heads bent together, and the wild smashing currents at Pt Joe took up the dance the small girl had left off.