The Secret Seventh Wave

I walked down to the beach at the end of our fields last week. I do not go there often enough. I was feeling ragged and disconnected and sitting on a smooth boulder watching the tide come in helped me untangle the knots in myself. Because I love the sea but grew up in the middle of cornfields, I give it a wide berth. Long before the boulder on which I sat might have become an island or a submersible, I was heading back to land. Moreover, I always resist the idea of going all the way to the edge to watch the foam curl around the brown, stairstep rocks that march into the kingdom below.

I admired the tiny round birds that move like wind up toys down to the edge of the water and back again. I watched the gulls working in the old fashioned way-diving for fish rather than scraps out of bins or handouts from diners in seaside restaurants. While I watched the waves curling into the ends of the rocks from my cautious distance, I wondered once again about that old notion of the seventh wave as a big one. Seventh from when? or from where? I tried focusing on the edge of the roll and counting to seven. I lost track, lingered a while longer and then turned for the walk home.

I climbed over the rocks where the last of the thrifts held on to their spent blossoms. Using hands and feet in ungainly, grunting movements, I followed along a steep ledge that must have been carved by sheep's hooves and then over the sand bank where the gate now hangs slack and gawking into the sea as if it would join it, which no doubt in good time it will.

"They wanted to feel the sea foam on their faces," the newspaper article reported. Some might read that and shake their heads or cluck their tongues, but we all understand it: the sea has a dangerous attraction for us all. Two sisters clambered over the slippery rocks farther than their companions to feel the foam at Stoer Point, a wild and tempestuous jumble of rock in an uneasy truce between land and sea. There is a lighthouse there to warn ships and boats away, but there is only caution to keep people away from the rocks. When the secret seventh wave rose up, it swallowed one sister and left the other on the rocks screaming her anguish and helplessness.

Her young husband, a former Royal Navy diver, answered with his heart, which leapt into the cold churning waters and took the rest of him along with it. He might have made it back, but he went to help his sister in law. His body was recovered not much later, but her body has not yet been found. Perhaps it never will be or perhaps some other secret seventh wave will send her back to land as willfully as she was stolen.

http://www.northern-times.co.uk/News/Polish-widow-faces-new-heartache-2793.htm

http://www.northern-times.co.uk/News/Polish-widow-can-stay-but-her-troubles-arent-over-2891.htm