One person, two shadows

This morning I was able to enjoy a rare solitary walk along the length of Ropes Beach. Jan had an early appointment, otherwise she and the pups would have joined me.

I had been a cold night last night. We have been having a string of clear, star filled evenings that left the beach ice-cube hard. My running shoes left a slight dusting of a footprint as I walked in brilliant morning sunlight. Approaching a dock that had been disassembled for the winter, I noticed a odd shaped bump on the railing. Stepping closer it revealed itself to be large bird - a heron of some sort - evidenced by the long gangling yellowish legs and dagger of a bill. I was reluctant to disturb the bird, hunched upon its post, imagining it was trying to gather each strand of warming sun. If only the bird understood my motives. I wished merely to quietly pass and take in the details of this feather statue . But crossing some imaginary line, I suddenly became a threat, and the heron spread its massive wingspan, and launched across the bay. It was a Great Blue Heron, and in flight it seemed thrice the size of the mound that had hunched on the railing. Arcing back toward the shore, the heron settled up the beach on the path I was walking. "Shit, we are doing this dance again" , I thought. And we did. I crossed that imaginary line, and again the heron took flight, landing just up the beach. This time it landed on a the railing of a steep set of stairs leading down the embankment. This appeared a precarious perch for a creature more accustomed to wading through low tide mud. Approaching that line once again, the heron stutter stepped and flapped its wings awkwardly in an attempt to either regain balance or take flight. Flight won out, and unbeknown to me, another heron suddenly launched from the same location. Untethered from earth, the two herons gracefully winged across the bay, to be disturbed by me no longer.

The beach ended at the mouth of the tiny Santuit River. Here the black stained water of the stream mixed with the water of Cotuit Bay. I turned and back tracked feeling the increasingly warming sun. As I walked I noticed that I had two shadows. The first shadow emerged predictably from my feet and followed each step. Nothing unusual. The second was a ghostly, more diffuse shadow that was projected twenty feet above me on the embankment. I deduced that this shadow was coming from the strong sunlight reflecting from the water at some obtuse angle before striking me. I felt a companionship as the three of us - specter, shadow and I -continued to the termination of our morning walk before resuming a day hidden from the sun, writing code in the dark sanctuary of my office.