Sunset in America

This morning I was in London but now I'm in here in Narragansett, Rhode Island, which is a far-away place unless you live here, I suppose. People fly their flags in this town. Getting here was so quick. My brain hasn't caught up. I recall Heathrow airport in some bug-eyed waking dream, then several hours of plastic meals and Will Smith slaying zombified New Yorkers in the in-flight movie, and a plastic woman with artificial hair asking, again and again, did I want coffee? And always my foolish answer was yes, and so the next thing that happened was a train ride that went by in a silver flash through swamps and gloomy gravel works, and now here I am in the midst of beauty.

I have to make a big speech at the university tomorrow so I was nervous and I went for a walk on the beach. There was a glassy swell this evening, maybe a two-foot swell, and a cold offshore breeze holding it up. Half a dozen of the local kids were surfing longboards, in thick wetsuits and hoods. A couple of them knew what they were doing. We're way out of season still and the beach here is long and bleak and beautiful, and the surf rolls in like there's no great hurry. I love these kids who still have time to learn how to surf. The sea mumbles and rolls like the big always.

In between waves the oystercatchers scurry as far out as they dare, and they dig their faces full into the wet sand that roars with retreating water. At first they're frantic in their greed for whatever godforsaken mollusc they prey upon, but then some unseen moment sounds and they skitter hysterically back up the beach, each bird racing a single inch ahead of the white spume of the next advancing wave. They teeter with such insouciance, those birds, but I can feel the terror that animates their comic little legs as they scuttle one inch ahead of annihilation. It's the same terror that informs my working day, after all.

Far out to sea, as the sun set between the lowest edge of the cloud base and the highest extent of Earth, a sullen purple flashed on the white superstructures of the container ships that snuck across the horizon. I went for a drink that turned into another and then a meal at the only restaurant in town that seemed open. Someone told me I really should stay awake till bedtime on the East Coast, so I was in that restaurant trying to stay awake like a good little soldier. I was so hungry. I'm hungry now, just thinking about how hungry I was. I was the only customer in a sea of white tablecloths that mumbled and rolled all around me as if there was no great hurry, and I took a table for two - just me and my jetlag - and I ordered the thing the waiter advised me to order. I admitted I was too tired to know what I wanted, and he told me to try the local paella. I came to Narragansett ten years ago, he said, and that's my favourite dish, and I stayed here ever since.

People around here seem kind and they have a little more time. They fly their flags and if you don't know what you want to eat, then they will serve you what they would have eaten if they were you. The paella was good. It tasted of the ocean I flew across.