Return to Dead Horse Bay

I accompanied the adventuresses to DHB yesterday, the first time I’ve been there in about six months. It was low tide, so the bottles, shards, and mysteries were spread out nicely. Just as we hit the littered beach, a few drops of rain fell, but our couple of hours there were mostly grey, with a brief interregnum of blue and sun. There were two American oyster catchers yakking away; gulls savaging crabs, black-backed, herring, ring-billed, and laughing; a fleet of brant were floating off-shore, occasionally dipping ass-up for a snack; a lesser yellowlegs and two willets were patrolling a tidal pools; a grackle worried some tidal delicacy. Found of number of things, but so far I’ve only managed to clean one of them, the one-inch long head of a figurine above.

One other person was there, worrying that hoards would descend upon his beach and strip it clean, but I think that generations of junk remain for salvage. He shared the toy metal car, surprisingly freely of rust, and a fine key, he’d found. He’s showing his art at next week’s BWAC Show in Red Hook; go before Ikea, Swedish for “traffic,” destroys the neighborhood beginning in mid-June.