The Prints Of Tides

A deeply plowed car-wide swath emerges from the sea and carves a sinuous track through the sand toward the wrack line on the beach. In its center is a conga line of pencil-thin exclamation points – drag-dot, drag-drag-dot. Skewered totem-style on this spine of punctuation, pinwheel swivels describe an inner track. They are bracketed by ankle-deep marginal furrows. Such is the regularity and robustness of these treads that it is difficult to believe that they were made by anything other than some mechanical behemoth. The rising sun fills the track gouges with deep shadows. A light breeze teases the sugar sand off their crests. Gulls wheel in the dawn-tinged sky and the relentless “kachunk” of the surf pounds out an otherworldly score. As I stand there on the beach with two Fish and Wildlife biologists, I have a sense of us as actors in that scene in a sci-fi movie where the stunned scientists puzzle over the freshly discovered alien artifacts.

Read the entire article in the March 2002 issue