I walked down to the mud flats this evening not long before nightfall. Description: big, huge, wet, black rocks. These surrounded the pier, mostly, but also strayed from the herd, out along the mud flats. Smaller rocks, no doubt hemmed by tides from the bigger ones and chunked piecemeal, all edged and blunt-pointed. A sheer blanket of clamshells, acres of them in total, often whole but more often minced! So that the ground was covered in little tiny bits of clamshell, all up along the edges of the marshy bamboo things that line Water Street. You walk on them thinking, "Graveyard, holocaust of clams, ground of calcium." Crunch, crunch, crunch. Hundreds of thousands of clams' worth of little tiny bits.
Also: big huge rotted-out logs, all jutting on the ground parallel towards the sea, as if an old dock of gigantic proportions, disassembled and its foundations abandoned. One big log that had broken away and swung back to lay along the shore, much of it embedded deep into the sand-mud. Grassy bits where it is slippery and still waterlogged. Everything waterlogged, really. And garbage! Wrappers, plastic bottles.
I found three glass bottles - one green, one clear with the cognac label still on, and one clear with interesting little floral textures. I decided to keep them as decorations. I also found two fishing bobbers of the red-and-white variety, plastic, the line pinching mechanisms too rusted for use. I kept one of the bobbers as part of my hypothetical Harbor Shrine that I will erect somewhere in my room. How 'bout that. Interesting stuff. What else.
The mud flats smell like fish and clam and dirt and mud and brown grass and rotting wood everywhere, lovely, permeating everything. I discovered that underneath the pier, if you walk next to it, you can see a wide space, about three feet tall, between the layer of concrete underneath and the wooden planks up top. A great place to hide something, if you ever need to hide something. Do you need to hide anything? I've got the spot. Of course, it will get washed away at high tide. So it's a really good place to hide something. Or lose it. However you choose to see it.
