Strolling Aviles Street early this Friday morning, I am transported to an unhurried peaceful time of long ago, a sensation that would be denied to me by eleven A.M. when tourists beyond easy count fill the sidewalk and street, reading the menus of restaurants, browsing antique shops and galleries, and making way for the long trolley trains gliding by with drivers reciting historical details of 16th Century Spanish rule through microphones to their passengers packed in behind them.
Only one car passed me going the other way on Charlotte Street as I walked gingerly along the narrow, unevenly-bricked lane, navigating the numerous puddles from the rain earlier that morning. Because there wasn’t a sidewalk, I had to edge toward the side of the road and lean against a building, where I managed to avoid any spray from the passing vehicle. Alone again, I brushed off the back of my pants where they had touched the cold damp stone and pushed on, eventually making out the gallery up ahead, which was illuminated by the sun rising in the now cloudless sky to my left.
If I had to choose, I would take the ketch, which is moored farther away from me toward the bay’s eastern shore, for I am partial to the lines of older boats and especially so to two-masted ones. But – honestly? – any one of them would suit my purpose at this particular moment.
On at least one star-filled morning each month, I can be found elbow-supported, wooden-railing leaning at the end of the Lighthouse Pier where I gaze toward the sand-duned line along the southernmost end of Salt Run. There, by the light of a sun that has yet to crest those sandy ridges, night’s quiet transformation into day occurs so swiftly that my brain can but register its changes as stop motion animation: changes in the sky where yellow intrudes upon dark charcoals, diluting them into steely blues; changes that brighten and polish smooth patches of water so that channel markers and mooring floats might reflect upon their states; and changes that shear night’s veil guarding a secured ketch till the boat’s emerging beauty seduces me once again.
The sun rises to the south in St. Augustine during the winter. On cloudless mornings then, once the sun clears the trees that line the shore on Anastasia Island, it brightens and burnishes the south side of the Bridge of Lions in a manner that brings to my mind the bridge over River Itchen by the gates of the Royal Court of Arthur.
Someone has tied up a skiff at the southern end of the marina flood wall. It sits hard aground in the outgoing tide amidst sea grasses and rocks. It has no oar locks, so whoever brought it to shore likely used a small outboard and then took it with him for safe keeping (a two horsepower motor can weigh as little as 30 pounds). There are two to three inches of water in the hull so the boat has been here since at least Tuesday when we last we had a heavy rain. Perhaps it belongs to the captain of one of those half dozen sailboats I see moored to the southeast. I wonder where the captain is now, and I turn west to study the houses and inns that line the quay, as though I might see him hurrying along on his business, as though I might learn in which of my mind’s thousand stories he belongs.
Topping the protective dune, we froze, speechless in wonder to see the birth of the day laid out before us.
*Creation
Sunrise stroll ending
Fresh brewed coffee waiting –
Good-morning being
I will never know the breadth of God,
Nor the height, nor the depth.
Yet, I pause in awe of dawn’s majesty
Some early morning walks by the sea.
On the first star-filled morning of each second month, I hasten to the Lighthouse Pier where I take photos in the rosy-dawn light of sailboats at anchor on Salt Run. There, at each click of my camera’s shutter, I find myself inserted into misty images of daring voyages to distant and mystical lands.
Vilano Images 