Spellbound at Chincoteague

Literary Review, Summer, 1994 by Jane Bradley

"Rock You House?" rolls and pounds from the boombox now, and I can almost feel the cottage rocking with the thumping, dancing rhythm of the music and the girls. I watch the woman sweep somehow in time with her broom, and I see the spray of water fly out the door across the stoop and into the grass, where it almost evaporates in the heat before it can sink into the ground. I feel the island rocking, knowing it's not only Assateague that is rolling over into the ocean. Chincoteague is rolling also; it is all shifting, sliding away. I can see myself throw a line with a huge weight onto the mainland and I stand over this island, try to make it stand still. I see my line grow taut, knowing the weight won't hold the way we hope an anchor holds a ship. I can see again those brown foxes, fast smears of motion running across a dune leaping for gulls that fly out of reach.

Now Sarah's father, John, steps out from his cottage with his camera bag on his shoulder, ready to go back to Assateague for more photographs, and I wonder what he sees through his lens. He smiles and knowing, watching me scratch notes on my legal pad, asks: "Are you writing?" I say yes, just noting how I'm sitting on this stoop, looking at that island with its birds and deer and ponies and listening to our girls inside dancing to Paula Abdul. He steps closer, leans and listens to the thumping laughing life of them. He looks back toward the island and we both silently laugh. Then he tells me how at sunrise this morning from the beach of Assateague he has seen the surface of the ocean blossom with the swirling purple pink and turquoise colors of an abalone shell. "It's like that, it's just like that," he says. He tells me that the sky slowly lightened to pink, gold, silver, then blue. And the ocean turned its green color and the sky went to its regular shade of blue. He says that after watching the sunrise, he turned back again toward the marshlands, and he stopped, looked at the fields that he says seemed to be full of diamonds where the hundreds of spider webs caught the sunlight in hanging drops of dew. Through his binoculars he saw the webs glimmer, the precise drops shimmer with water and light.

I watch the island now with him, as if now at this moment in the heat of the day I can see the sunrise. We both stare out at the island rolling daily to the sea as if we can see it move. "It's a gift," I say, as if this world is something we can have. He nods almost sighing, grateful that without going, without seeing through his binoculars, with only the few words he gave me, I have caught the vision he has had. I have seen it, swallowed it, taken it all the way in, and it pulls me the way words pull my daughter toward something she hasn't yet dreamed of as she dances and sings. I look out at the island and roll with it, let it pull me in.