Literary Mileage
Living in the Littoral Zone

Littoral: Of or pertaining to the shore; existing, taking place upon or adjacent to the shore. The littoral zone lies between the high and low water mark.**

Walking south along the Atlantic shoreline on this low-tide morning, I come upon a long smoothly rounded hump of sand that the incoming waves flow over shallowly, creating a small pool on its shore side. It looks like a giant beached whale. It is completely obscured during high tide. That is when the sand becomes loose and rather unnerving under the water, grabbing and encasing your feet, threatening to pull you under.

The littoral zone here holds the detritus of the sea –clumps of brown seaweed, a coconut, shell fragments and sea glass, an occasional dead fish, a piece of wood. And what people leave behind–a bottle of water, remains of a plastic cup, a child’s pink flip-flop, a black comb, a beer can.

This place on the edge of the water is incredibly wide in some spots, and quite narrow in others, where the water has eaten away the shoreline. This means that I am temporarily ‘trapped’ between the incoming water and a sand cliff that is taller than I am and that I wouldn’t be able to scurry up. But, I enjoy my rather deliberate entrapment as I let the warm water crawl up over my knees.

I once assumed the shoreline remained unchanged from day to day, that I could come back to this point between lifeguard stands 3 and 4 in Delray Beach, and it would be the same as the day before. Every single tide, wind velocity, or weather event changes the littoral in one way or another.

I have learned this by coming here every day for two months, enough time to gain some understanding of the sea, the shore, and this odd place in between.

** With much thanks to the Key West Literary Seminar for my discovery of the word, littoral, which is the name of the seminar’s blog. It can be read here: www.kwls.org/lit/kwls_blog.