Photo of the Day: Morning Wave

2012 was a very bad year. And a very good year. I was extremely restless. I spent a couple of weekends a month in various ratty motels up and down the Jersey Shore. It was this thing I HAD to do. Nothing particularly bad about that. I love hotel/motel living particularly if the hotel/motel is near something interesting. I was working – I had a job at Martha Stewart – so I had a little bit of extra cash, and I would book a motel, even off-season (particularly off-season). In fact, once it was so off-season, that a nor’easter blew in – don’t let the cute folksy name fool you – East Coasters know that these are a BITCH – and it got so crazy that I felt trapped. Power lines went down. We lost power. The roads were flooded. I couldn’t have fled if I wanted to.

But besides that dramatic one, I would mainly just sit in my room and watch cable TV – stupid shit – I was having a very hard time relaxing and found it easier to do so in an anonymous new environment.

There was a lot of other stuff going on. My script, and preparing for a big New York reading of it – at the Vineyard Theatre no less. Plus a new man. It was kind of cool that I had to split my focus among many different things. I was too busy to get too invested in just one of them. (That didn’t spare me from eventual disaster, but whatever). Things were so busy and frenetic I looked forward to these weekend jaunts even more. I’d get takeout and bring it back to the motel and watch Intervention or The Bachelor, lying in the uncomfortable bed, feeling peace, feeling NOTHING, which was a relief. During the day, I’d go down to the beach. Whatever motel I picked had to be in walking distance of SOME beach.

So one chilly June, before the summer season really started, ocean still too cold, I booked a room for the weekend at a little beach motel in I forget which town. The motel was literally right on the beach. I walked out my door, took 20 steps and was on the sand. I had my normal ritual, of hanging out in the room, reading, binge-watching episodes of Extreme Home Makeover or Hoarders, and … doing NOTHING. I would wake up before the sunrise and sit on the beach. It was still cold, particularly before the sun came up, and one morning the ocean was really wild.

Waves would literally rear up, hover in position, and then crash. The light was stark and dramatic, and almost monochrome. The light from the sun rising was silvery-white, not soft pink or purple. There was a strong chilly wind. I sat on one of the rock jetties, jutting out into the ocean, and just watched the show. Every wave was beautiful. Every wave was unique. The sound of crashing waves filled the air. I thought nothing. I was not distracted. All I was doing was watching, listening, and occasionally taking pictures. I took a lot of pictures that morning, everything was so glamorous and beautiful, and the light changed every minute. When you take a lot of pictures, you take a lot of “nothing” pictures. You haven’t caught a MOMENT. Or … what you saw was somehow not translated into the photo. You didn’t “catch it”.

This one, though. This one stopped me. That was what I saw. That was what the morning was like. Morning waves, darkly-grey, rearing up, with spray lifting off the top by the wind. Waves like this make me think of those lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” about the mermaids:

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

“Combing the white hair of the waves blown back.”

That’s what I saw. And heard. The mermaids singing.