CAMPING BESIDE THE SEA

On Wednesday friends came through, inviting me to go with them to the Yucatan's northern coast. While they spent two days taking the flamingo-viewing tour, eating seafood and strolling along the breezy Malacón at Río Lagartos, I camped on a beach far from town, in splendid isolation.

With alpine camping, you feel like you're atop everything, and cast an understanding eye over what's spread below. At the coast, you feel on the edge of things, away from the interior's hurried clutter and tension, yet also beyond reach of the sea's submerged, unseen powers and dangers. The beach is simplified, elemental: Pure sunlight, pure wind, pure sand, booming of breakers, and the call of the gull, all no more or less than what they seem.

In late afternoon, the wind is stiff and the crashing of waves unrelenting. I feel cozy inside the tent, cloud-looking, sky-looking, wave-looking through the see-through netting. At this hour there's sharpness to everything, but the tent is a soft, yielding cocoon, and this is what the waves say:

"Don't let the regularity of our rhythmic comings lull you, for we belong to powerful storms and currents beyond the horizon. And the vast, impetuous sea itself is but a pool beneath the air-ocean, the lord of all storms and mountain-high waves. Together we sea and air may send against you winds, waves and currents that will undo all around you, reconfigure the whole coastline, as we have done throughout all time, and will do soon again. All about you at this moment is temporary, about to be removed. Pay attention. It and you soon will be gone."

At dusk, my old ears can't hear the high-frequency sounds I know to be there, of wind whooshing through nearby scrub, of sea-returning wave-water hissing over sand, but I hear the lower frequencies very well, the pounding of waves, the flapping of tent fabric, and now thunder from storm clouds on a purple-bruised horizon -- just brutal undertones drained of airy melodies.

Yet, this also is good: Deep, honest, rhythmic, throbbing reality laid bare, and I am satisfied with my temporal presence within it.