Road trip — barrisway beach

When there’s been enough rain, when the brooks are high and ragged and the rivers are unfishable, occasional streambeds fill again and sheet down over the barrisway rock to the sea. (Barrisway or barachoix — your choice, though my eye prefers the first.)

They’re not regular brooks, not a home to pricklies below and doctor beetles above, not edged with small forests of dark serrated green mint leaves or strung deep with water weed.

They don’t have a constant course to the ocean, no regular route where the brown water of brooks meets the clearer, greener ocean at a defined mixing zone, accompanied by that strange blending of salt and fresh that creates a momentary tangled and slightly opaque chemistry.

No, the sudden brooks make their routes along the coastline bogbike trails as gravity dictates, never carrying a persistent enough flow to strip away the loose and tire-torn soil of the track, pooling until a decline in bedrock geometry offers a downhill route.

Then, it’s down through the bank out of sight, waterwitched exactly by standing blue flag irises, before burst out of the marshy ground and hitting the round stones of the beach.

Then, my favourite sight: obvious, expected, yet every time I see it I stop, whisper “magic.”

Brooks that are, one moment, coursing across the grey beach stone, the next, wick themselves down through gaps in the stone lattice and disappear completely from sight under the wave-stacked rock. No barrisway pond, no outlet brook: just a sudden vanishing straight down and out of sight.

If you’re lucky, it’s a many-staged thing: if you’re lucky, you can go 10 feet down the beach and watch your brook reappear again, having run into some different equation of stone and airspace: maybe hardpan, maybe packed sand. It doesn’t matter.

The disappeared becomes the reappeared, and often disappears and reappears again before finally reaching the sea, where, inevitably, it breaks out along the flat well-swept decline of the wave-plane in a widening but mathematically even fan to the ocean.

Sit down on the warm round rocks, and you can hear the splash of the brook down onto the stone, hear the waves breaking as they snatch the brook water away. (If you’re extremely lucky, if the waves are low and the wind absent, you can sometimes even hear the burble of the brook moving below the dry rocks.)

Pick up rocks that are the right size to be worrystones, find one with a dent the size of the pad of your thumb, and work that thumb back and forth through the hollow.

Lie back on the hot stone and close your eyes for a while, the poke and prod of the rounded stones different every time you do it, and changing every time you move.

Smell the iodine of the drying kelp thrown up to the tide line, search for round white quartz or rose quartz, for scraps of brick from some forgotten construction that have been thrown into the ocean, and then thrown back by that same ocean, the remaining part of each brick worn round, all corners removed.

Find beach glass: the common brown of beer bottles, the green of wine bottles or old ginger ale bottles, the occasional spectacular vibrant dark blue that reminds you of the Nivea cream bottles that used to sit on many dressers.

Breathe it all in, soak it all in, and you might have an entire afternoon in a circle about 10 metres across and the sudden brook sings.

And, need I even say it, we’re lucky to have it.