The wounded beach

2 days ago , by Richard Lutz

RICHARD LUTZ surveys the wear and tear of wind and weather

This is my beach before the storm:

and this is my beach after the storm:

It’s been stripped, blown away, ripped and blasted. Seaweed and wrack run a ragged line. The skin of the shore has vanished, evaporated. The bones of the Maidens Beach remain. A winter sun, low and weak, offers a faint January afternoon sky. It’s 3 o’clock on the Scottish west coast:

Here’s that same strand on a clear day before the storm. It used to be a soft bed of sand stretching on a crescent shaped bay:

It’s so easy on the eye I’ll give you another view:

That stretch has disappeared. But it will return. It always does. Today, its remnants have been bullied by the charmingly named Storm Goretti up towards the wild grass, streaked by mineral deposits:

Above the wounded beach, the woods tilt, shoved by year upon year of prevailing winds from the southwest:

Some of the trees, mainly hardwoods, are twisted by gales that roar in from Ireland:

Some, such as this Scots pine, fight against the wind and curve greedily toward the western light:

All things move and change to accommodate the winds, the Atlantic weather and the winter.

Well, most things, anyway.

Above the blasted beach, a lone outrider of a Galloway cattle herd. They’re not nicknamed Belties for nothing.

‘Plenty of mince on that one’ opines a connoisseur of beef.

Come wind, come storm, our stolid Beltie isn’t going anywhere soon. It won’t be blown away nor stripped of its heft, shorn of its bulk nor its beltiness.

It’s rooted in its field of wind, above the winter sea. No one, no thing, no Storm Goretti, with its 99mph wind, is going to push this hunk of beast anywhere very soon. It might as well have been chipped out of the stone bed that now rises from the beach below. It might as well be wed to the earth.