On the edge

The witches are frequent visitors to this stretch of shoreline. At this place where the huge arc of the gravel beach seems to bow inwards, away from the sea, to yield to the force of the Pacific relentlessly pounding in. Not a beach you'd go swimming on. The undertow had grabbed people, dogs, and pulled them out to sea. And as though to assert its menace, the beach constantly makes a low grumbling sound, as the gravel all moves about. A sound of constant, seething anxiety, like grinding teeth. One late summer's evening when I visited with friends for a bonfire, we found the remains of the witches' rituals. There under the vast dome of a southern twilight lay the curious bits of animal, arrangements of sticks, stones, bones. Perhaps a solstice ceremony, the longest day marked by some sacrificial event.

But this day there was a haunting by something else. Always an elemental place, where the plains meet the sea, a minor subduction, it becomes even more eerie on foggy days. The long line of the coast disappearing in the fog, like this is truly the end of the world. And today, amidst the fog, there's a smouldering heap on the shore. Just up from the high tide line. The smell of the driftwood burning is sweetish, but there's something else. A smell of unease. In my mind there is a painting. It's by Louis Fournier, from 1849, and shows the funeral pyre of Percy Bysshe Shelley who drowned in 1822 after a shipwreck ... an image which lingers, brooding ...