Grey and Brown

The skies have been uniformly grey since I have been home. All the leaves are gone. Bare branches against the grey sky. One of the loveliest sights that I know.

One day – there was a heavy fog. Normally, in Rhode Island, the fog lifts by mid-morning … burned off by the sun. But this fog lasted all day. A heavy thick blanket of fog. Beautiful. I took a walk around the neighborhood, scuffing my feet through the brown leaves, hearing the sounds around me … squirrels scurrying up the tree trunks, the mild dripping of water off the leaves … but I couldn’t see any of it. The fog covered it all.

Later that night, I stood on my parents porch … the fog had lasted into the night … The lights from the house across the way were blurred, haloed. Everything took on a … I guess I would call it a poetic look. Black trees tangled up in fog.

My parents and I went and took a walk on the beach during the foggy day. The waves were crazy – thrashing grey foam, continuous pounding on the shoreline. My favorite sound in the world. I found a couple of pieces of beach glass to add to the collection.

One of the amazing things about our walk on the beach was this: There was all this debris down on the shoreline. By debris, I mean flotsam and jetsam really: shells, pebbles, random crab legs, rocks, seaweed … But mixed in with all of this ocean debris, were piles of sodden brown oak leaves. Oak leaves? These oak leaves were remnants of that massive 2-day windstorm we had early in November. Amazing. There are no oak trees near the beach. These oak leaves had traveled a long way.

I took a walk to a pond near my parents house … a pond where my friend Mere and I went skating once when we were in high school. There is a little open-sided “lodge” on the edge of the pond, with a stone fireplace and a couple of picnic tables. It’s in the middle of the woods.

I love it down there. Nobody’s ever down there.

I stood at the edge of the “pond” – which was crowded with brown weeds and grass …. the trees standing tall around the edges …. the ground completely covered in wet fallen leaves. Ah, autumn!! This was during the foggy day, so nothing was clear-cut, or clearly seen.

And suddenly, I could hear the call of the geese. The geese leaving town.

That sound … something about that sound … pulls my heart up out of my chest. There is something so mournful about it. I don’t know why. But also exciting.

Because of the fog, I couldn’t SEE them above me, couldn’t see the “V” formation which I knew they were in. But it was like … a Doppler effect moment. I stared up, into the thick grey, seeing nothing, but followed the sound of their “goodbye till spring” call across the grey sky.

My friends and I went out on Friday night to this local bar which is basically a fisherman’s hangout … a dirty rickety SHACK which stands literally on the beach. It has a deck, teetering on stilts … and when the tide is high the waves roll under the deck.

The foggy day had turned into a wild windy night. We sat at tables by the window, having our drinks, looking out at the ocean. Which was now completely rough, wave after wave after wave after wave.

The lights from the bar spill out onto the ocean – so even though it was a night, we could see out there.

Seagulls hang out on the ocean there … bobbing up and down on the waves … so at night … what you see when you look out the windows of this bar, is black ocean, white foam, and across the top of the black, these little white origami-birds. It’s a very odd and beautiful sight.

But this time – because the waves were so rough … the seagulls were having quite a time. The origami-birds kept coming to life, flapping their wings, fighting against the wind, flying over the foam, trying to come to rest somewhere.

We called them “the party birds”. All the other seagulls were calmly sleeping in a parking lot somewhere, shielded from the wind. But not these birds. They wanted to fight the elements.

As we sat there, talking, having our drinks, the night kept getting wilder and wilder and wilder.

Rain began to pour against the windows, coming off the sea. Pounding against the glass. Coming at us horizontally.

You know what it looked like?

It looked like … the moments in Star Wars when Han Solo pushes the Millennium Falcon to go into ‘warp speed’ and all the stars turn into streaming lines.

It looked like the BAR was moving through space.

It was unbelievable.

People were warm and dry, having their drinks, talking over the music, and then suddenly would glance at the windows, and exclaim, “HOLY SHIT.”

Then the rain stopped … but it was still the wind … There was mist on the ocean and it was being beaten off the waves by the wind. Betsy and I went out onto the deck, struggling against the wind. Because of how the rain had flown off the ocean … the sides of the deck were completely dry. We stared down into the foam … the waves were now crashing on the sand and coming directly under us.

There’s a lot I am thankful for … but one of the things I am most thankful for is the beauty of Rhode Island … the beauty of the beaches, the woods, the fog … the eerie dying beauty of November’s greys and browns.