First Light

The moon was going out, a thin penny of light in the western sky. Below it, the land came slowly clear — the broad leaves shouldering out of darkness, the Pacific Ranges cold as the backs of sleeping cattle.

We came through a gap in the dunes and stood where the beach opened, flat and empty as a page the tide had left for us.

The sea was dark, a long strip of iron, with one white seam along its edge. Then, behind it, the clouds began to redden, not all at once but by degrees, as a fire catches under damp sticks.

Crimson to copper, copper to gold.

The sun lifted its rim from the water and the light went spilling ahead of it, scattered across the waves by a sleepy watchman trudging home, a crack in his thermos where the light gets out.

The breakers came in, shouldering, rubbing their white backs against the shore. The gulls lifted and wheeled above them, small as scraps of holiday tinsel, their cries carrying farther than their bodies.

We watched the coast withdraw into morning. The dunes lost their separate shapes; the far headland blurred and settled into the level of the sea.

Nothing moved that we could name except the water and the birds and the slow fire on the horizon.

Yet standing there, with the cold sand working under our feet, we felt the world being made again — not out of nothing, but out of what had been there all along, waiting for the light to find it.