Micro Tide
The path is lined with rose hips, their sweet and powerful fragrance wafting in the breeze while bees buzz about their thorns. Herring gulls pass by, gently flapping winds carrying them over spilling waves.
On a Wednesday morning, there are two painters standing at easels of half-done paintings. One, standing on the rocks below, paints the shore rocks a mix of grays, the water almost white from glimmering sun, and the distant rocky islands black and green. The other painter stands just off the path, painting the dirt trail and its bordering flowery bushes. Like the first painter, I look straight to the sea. There are rocks and seaweed in my view, but what I really look at is the water.
The Giant Stairs are a staircase of basalt ocean rock intruded into a larger metamorphic schist outcrop. The dark gray stairs are uniform, rounded by weathering, but with no identifyable segments. It is all a dark ooze that came from deep within and cooled to solid rock. On either side, is a stark opposite to the dike of oceanic rock. The walls of the staircase, a giant’s handrail, are hundreds of layers of schist stacked together into rock. It is like there was a giant stack of paper, squished and cemented together, then flipped on its side. The pages slump a little, so they are not all vertical, but nearly so. Still, the upper edges lean slightly to the sea. Follow the sheets straight up, and they point to the mid morning sun. Yet these sheets are far from bleached white and 8.5x11. Their edges are cut, smooth, jagged, and rounded. Chunks are missing, detached boulders are elsewhere. The sheets are a light gray, lighter than the stairs, with brown and orange stained rust patches. Silver mica specks gleam in the sun. The sheets have white veins—crosscutting quartz that pushed in and crystallized. In many spots, the quartz that flowed between sheets was squeezed by heat and pressure forming squiggles and even pinched off sausage-shaped boudins. These rocks stand sharply and regally toward the sea. Lower down, the rocks are blackened by cyanobacteria in the splash zone, then even lower they become an unrecognizable mophead in the intertidal zone. The base of the staircase is softened -- the rocks are a massive carpet of seaweed. Rockweed covers the intertidal rocks, leaving nothing but small pockets of barnacles exposed.
The water has soft swells along the shore and countless ripples facing the open ocean. The sun momentarily hits each ripple making the deep blue expanse endlessly shimmer. It is like the specks of mica shining out from their rocky substrate.
The nearest lobster buoys float forty meters off shore. The line at their bases are the umbilical to the lobstermen’s catch. The sticks at their heads face the sea – the water in flowing out toward low tide.
Just as the oceans slosh up and down the shore making the day’s tides, each swell sloshes into and out of every rockweed-covered crevice at the water’s edge. The wave’s energy pushes toward shore, propagating through each water molecule. As it meets rock, the water slides over a ledge, frothing from deep blue to the white foam of a crashing wave. Here, the bubbles spread and slide, crawling up over the rockweed. At each crevice, the water rushes in then ebbs out just as fast. It is its own micro-tide happening thousands of times a day.
The path is lined with rose hips, their sweet and powerful fragrance wafting in the breeze while bees buzz about their thorns. Herring gulls pass by, gently flapping winds carrying them over spilling waves.
On a Wednesday morning, there are two painters standing at easels of half-done paintings. One, standing on the rocks below, paints the shore rocks a mix of grays, the water almost white from glimmering sun, and the distant rocky islands black and green. The other painter stands just off the path, painting the dirt trail and its bordering flowery bushes. Like the first painter, I look straight to the sea. There are rocks and seaweed in my view, but what I really look at is the water.
The Giant Stairs are a staircase of basalt ocean rock intruded into a larger metamorphic schist outcrop. The dark gray stairs are uniform, rounded by weathering, but with no identifyable segments. It is all a dark ooze that came from deep within and cooled to solid rock. On either side, is a stark opposite to the dike of oceanic rock. The walls of the staircase, a giant’s handrail, are hundreds of layers of schist stacked together into rock. It is like there was a giant stack of paper, squished and cemented together, then flipped on its side. The pages slump a little, so they are not all vertical, but nearly so. Still, the upper edges lean slightly to the sea. Follow the sheets straight up, and they point to the mid morning sun. Yet these sheets are far from bleached white and 8.5x11. Their edges are cut, smooth, jagged, and rounded. Chunks are missing, detached boulders are elsewhere. The sheets are a light gray, lighter than the stairs, with brown and orange stained rust patches. Silver mica specks gleam in the sun. The sheets have white veins—crosscutting quartz that pushed in and crystallized. In many spots, the quartz that flowed between sheets was squeezed by heat and pressure forming squiggles and even pinched off sausage-shaped boudins. These rocks stand sharply and regally toward the sea. Lower down, the rocks are blackened by cyanobacteria in the splash zone, then even lower they become an unrecognizable mophead in the intertidal zone. The base of the staircase is softened -- the rocks are a massive carpet of seaweed. Rockweed covers the intertidal rocks, leaving nothing but small pockets of barnacles exposed.
The water has soft swells along the shore and countless ripples facing the open ocean. The sun momentarily hits each ripple making the deep blue expanse endlessly shimmer. It is like the specks of mica shining out from their rocky substrate.
The nearest lobster buoys float forty meters off shore. The line at their bases are the umbilical to the lobstermen’s catch. The sticks at their heads face the sea – the water in flowing out toward low tide.
Just as the oceans slosh up and down the shore making the day’s tides, each swell sloshes into and out of every rockweed-covered crevice at the water’s edge. The wave’s energy pushes toward shore, propagating through each water molecule. As it meets rock, the water slides over a ledge, frothing from deep blue to the white foam of a crashing wave. Here, the bubbles spread and slide, crawling up over the rockweed. At each crevice, the water rushes in then ebbs out just as fast. It is its own micro-tide happening thousands of times a day.