We like being the first out, while the sand is still unmarked by dogs and people. Usually we find prints and recognize by position who they belong to. That’s John out for his run because the bare feet make prints so close together. Larry drags a bit. Tammy walks close to the water. The tracks of dogs are familiar too. Roxxie and Charlie and Hank.

In summer we have been out on the sand before five in the morning. Real time is nearly 6am just now. [Have we all forgotten that time is not purely a human invention? Noon, for example, is a genuine natural event, that instant when the sun is highest in the sky, and is now marked on the DST clock an hour before it occurs. Like summer and winter, noon is not a fiction, but part of the natural way of things.]

Summer is long gone. Two days ago tides swept away our entire pathway cleared through the stony edge of our beach. Gary cleared that path in spring and it remained clear all this time. The beach is routinely washed free of sand in the winter months, but that day did not show a particularly high tide measured in feet above and below sea level. We check the tide table each day. Their numbers do not reveal the entire story. High surf from a storm at sea, a tame ocean under heavy clouds.

It is the wave action, sometimes showing only one or two low breakers, but this past Thursday breaking nearly to the horizon, breaking over the top of Castle Rock, thick and foamy at the edges. We had walked early in a gale. Our sitting log is gone and an enormous log that rested high up into the hedge fifty yards north of us. Thirty inches across and thirty feet long, that rotting monster has found a new temporary lodging further up the beach. Our sitting log (the one the visitor to a neighbor’s house used to pee in public) has vanished altogether. We walked a mile without finding where it had drifted.

I no longer take photos of waves crashing up into the air, a hundred feet above Castle Rock. I have those photos from previous autumns, dozens. Now I watch.

The surf is up, as they say. We watch with concern when tourists take their little children onto the sand during at out-going tide. A former student drowned, a strong swimmer, and on a pleasant day. No telling when the sea will swing her skirts.

A single wave in January of 1999 pushed the basalt stones up out of their bed and into a ridge along shore that we have never seen before. Until that winter, summer tides brought sand in from the offshore bar and nearly covered the rocky edge, and then for years we did not have a clear sandy beach at all.

The sand has come back, though the rocks have not been completely covered for twenty years.

A friend came to lunch the other day and asked me whether I spent much time watching the ocean. Yes, both of us do. Even after all these years—forty so far—we watch the ocean and shore. When we think about moving, that is a major sticking point. We are accustomed to the view. Watching the weather come in, tracking the birds in the air and in our tiny front garden, the shift of sand and tides, wave action. Nothing new, always different.

When we walk north, the shoreline dips and rises on our right. Some neighbors need long stairs to get to the beach. Our property is set low, just a few feet above the beach. My grandfather’s old path through the hedge, built before the Great War, is completely overgrown. There were no more than a half dozen concrete steps. That stair might still be there buried under salal and sand and basalt rubble. From our western door we walk through a new path in the middle of our hedge and down a short stretch of stones Gary has placed to ease our steps down to the shore.

This is what counts as “a lot” of sand. At low tide there might be a couple of hundred yards of sand between the black basalt and surf. I paced off the distance other day.

The out-of-state owners of the rental north of us, after their first autumn, asked what happened to “our sand?” Gone for the season, I told them. Visitors have asked us whether the sand is trucked in, where we get the rocks brought in to protect the shore. Tourists try to “save” resting baby seals and fully grown eagles. It is hard for us, who live here, to imagine such ignorance. We have watched the flow in and out, the fledging of birds and the drowned onshore, the shift and shuffle of sand, the rare hard freeze, the slow progress of water and wildlife.

The sand is leaving. Maybe it will return in the spring. We watch for that.