The Other Face of the Beach
· by Roy Edlund
Most of what I share with you is the calm, the serene. The pink mornings, the still water, the beach on its best behavior.
But the ocean has another face, and right now, as I write this, it’s showing it.
There’s another nor’easter out there redefining the shoreline as we speak, blowing over 40mph, moving the sand around, rearranging the beach, deciding where the dunes go next.
When a storm like this sets up and the swell starts marching in, I grab the cameras and go stand where a sensible person wouldn’t.
It isn’t very glamorous. The wind doesn’t blow so much as shove, it leans on you, moves your feet for you, tries to walk off with you.
And the sand comes off that beach like buckshot and gives you free dermabrasion whether you asked for it or not.
I come home gritty, soaked, rearranged, and picking sand out of my hair and beard for a day.
And I love every second of it. It's hard to explain.
I feel so much joy standing in the middle of all that fury, the roar you feel in my chest, the spray, the sheer size of it, that I’ve never found on a calm morning.
Don't get me wrong the calm is beautiful.
But the storm is alive and I just want to be in the middle of it, camera or no camera.
The fury happens fast. A wave builds, peaks, and detonates in about a second, and the one instant worth keeping lasts a blink. You don’t compose it. You can’t ask it to do it again.
So I set the camera to handle the thinking I’ve got no time for, crank the shutter as high as the light allows, point it at the chaos, and fire away, usually while getting shoved sideways and sandblasted.
Mostly it doesn’t work.
For every frame like this one I’ve got a hundred of blurry, mistimed, shapeless water.
And the storms don’t wait around for me to get it right, either.
This one landed. Look close and the spray’s caught mid-air, every droplet stopped where it hung. It’s not the perfect one, I’m still chasing that.
But it’s a good one, and it’s the ocean the way it really is when nobody’s calling it relaxing.
Black and white, because fury was never about color. It’s about light and weight and the shape of all that water deciding where to go.
Strip the color out and what’s left is the power.
The nor’easter’s still out there as I post this, still rearranging the coast.
I’ll be honest - I’m fighting the urge to go stand in it again, but I'm getting too old for that.
Love from here. ❤️
Prints of the photos in this post are available in the Beach Bum Gallery on paper, canvas and metal.