beyond the pines

We ran down the sloping dunes through the coarse ruffled grasses, our sandals off and trousers rolled up our legs, to cross on foot the wide saline channel that in myriad unheeded parental warnings would take (a euphemism to straddle the spectrum!) the children come the high tides that occurred very rapidly on that corner of the coast, lost forever behind its impenetrable fluid barrier, the water up to our thighs and rising as we slowly neared the sea still many metres from where the beach began back among the pines. When we reached the gently breaking waves at the water’s edge as soft as bathtime I ceased but she went yonder, straight into the icy sea. I suggested she too ceased but “no”, she told me, already in the front crawl position and accelerating away from the shoreline, and she “must see Norway!” Weird I thought but reasonable too in its way, these both the reasons I had ever fallen for her. I watched until the speck she became on the horizon fell out of sight then returned to the café in the car park for a 99.