Something More Like It

That was something a bit more like it, the large body of water risen up and lapping against the little skiff at the dock. Even a day or two before the sight had been a dreary one, a falling away toward the horizon, where the trickery of low cloud had a container ship standing up out of the water. There was no guessing the sandbank now beneath the line of tractor tyres laid as a break for the fishing shed. The pelicans had returned to roost on the tyres; the gulls and swans departed. The last few days the northerly had run the surface water around in swift whirls and eddies; today the wind from the south had joined with the tide, running the waves onward. In three or four days the entry to the bench on the little dock might be impassable again. A few nights ago the waxing moon it must have been was caught in the bathroom window going down for a pee, a backward step needed to take it properly. For some reason crows had appeared, a murder of five or six that recalled Greg’s story of the old sailors. If the released birds failed to return to ship the course for land was clear; hence the sense of the crows-nest in the old riggers. Fittingly, once again the pelicans on the water appeared as if properly equipped with their masked beaks. The regular old canoeist who had a shed further down sent the birds scattering when he made a pass, even in the overcast the man needing his sunnies for his turn there. Pedalling out the light wind had given little resistance; from the dock the industrial kind of churning out in the deeper bay suggested something entirely different, that strangely didn’t make it onto the shore. High tide rising, the far distance closing and that uncanny muted roar all together.