Winter is a clarifying time. Greenery gone, the short, gray hours invite reflection. On this bleak February day, encased in drysuit and neoprene, I launch from the Saugatuck boat ramp under the clatter of I95, and paddle out the river’s mouth at Longshore. Arcing left around Compo Beach, the bow of my surfski swings north, tracing the stretch of coastline from Westport to Fairfield I’ve traveled by land and water so frequently before. The Connecticut coast, like many coastal states, is largely private. Town beaches and public access spots are few and far between, with the majority of sandy spits belonging to the mansions that dot the shore, or the private beach clubs with low lying cabanas and clubhouses. My route takes me past Southport, to a turn around the green buoy can off Jennings Beach and back, approximately 14 miles.

No one else is on the water in my field of vision. It is calm, with a light wind texturing the gunmetal gray surface of Long Island Sound. In the distance toward Smithtown Bay, squat the dark hulks of several moored barges. I stay a hundred yards or so off the coastline, far enough away to skirt the rocky outcroppings of jetties, close enough to impart some sense of security. The flame graphics on the bow of my ski, ‘Ring of Fire’, are an irony cutting through the fetch of the icy water that hovers at 37 degrees. The cones of the hut-shaped buoys that line the coast are sugar coated with ice. Spare groupings of seagulls wheel overhead. An occasional miniature lone silhouette, or pair of figures, arms linked, walk a pocket beach, accompanied by a leaping dog, perhaps two. The distant inland traffic drones softly, faint white noise carried as static over an empty radio channel. Beyond that, it is quiet. The summertime sounds of the shore are conspicuously absent. The silence is a tangible thing.

Everything appears different from the water’s perspective. There is the world of the land and the world at the surface of the water. And there are the levels beneath, where the blade of my paddle fades away from sight at the catch, suddenly breaching with a splash past my hip. It resembles some living thing in gasp reflex…a smooth black back catching its breath, only to dive again.

Hugging the hook of familiar Southport Beach, the curved seawall hunkers as arms crossed across the chest of the land. Faceted by stone after stone spilling onto the sand by the rusty culvert, large, roughly hewn boulders mark the place for conversations on the rocks, real, or imagined and hoped for. In the summertime, this strip of beach is alive, abuzz with vehicles pulling in, pulling out. Runners, and cyclists, and Rollerbladers roll along the roadway that parallels the water. The seawall is an open invitation for picnic lunches and dangling legs, cement scorching the backs of bare thighs. Ducks and oily baby geese dabble the shallows at low tide, the domed helmets of horseshoe crabs piggybacked in tidal pools. Before sunset, the light across the Sound is blinding; the water and sunlight are one, dazzling. You must squint into the sea to discern the horizon. At dusk, bats swoop low over the strip of grass dividing the seawall and road, scooping moths at the single yellow bulb above the doors of the restroom outbuilding. By night there is an owl, a great horned (rimmed), perched in the tree across the street next to the salt marshes. By night, I might imagine, it is the place to share stories over bottles of red wine gazing out over the water, watching painted dabs of moonshine ripple and shimmer across the Sound.

This is not that time. Everything is cyclical. All that I know about cycles and seasons insists the waters will warm again, the leaves will green; time passes. But what is real? What is imagined? To have crazy faith in circles and cycles is not enough. Sliding by purely as passerby on this day, as one might gaze into vacant store windows that blankly return your stare, I no longer belong. It is cold; the chill saturates my bones. Numb, I am neither here nor there, between worlds. And always, time just passes as I move out of the elbow of the land into open water, leaving my beach behind. I do not deliberate; I simply go through the motions, one repetitive stroke after another, moving in circles, always in circles, with no other intent but to move me away. It is hollow out on the water; it is lonely and barren and exposed, an empty vessel with the walls lifted off.  ~Mark Ceconi