Downpour

When I probably should have been cooling down my hot brain, I took Ned for a ride. We went two hours south to Long Beach Island, specifically to that fine stretch from North Beach through Barnegat Light with its lagoons and Japanese black pines. I suppose I needed to be in motion after a week of sitting in hard chairs. As soon as we reached the causeway, though, the clouds swelled up. The rain wouldn't let up, even after we tried to wait it out at the inlet with the engine off. Ah, motion: so much for it. Fogged windshield, smell of wet dog--already the sensation that our day was going to be better in memory than in the experience itself. The experience itself was air conditioning vs. muggy air, fleas in the weeds, one black fly biting my ankle over and over again in the closed-up car. But it's something else inside these frames. This landscape's always been my ideal vision of seashore: trees beside water, red channel markers, gravel, style, a little wildness.