Some Things Will Only Yield to Verbs

A coastline sometimes continues to exist by breaking apart. Cape Cod’s spit is cut open by storms, and an old connection is severed; after a while, sand and waves push a new connection back somewhere else. The earlier place remains broken, and the later place has not returned as it was. They cannot cancel each other out; they simply remain at the same time on the same stretch of coast.

In satellite images taken years apart, the barrier beach is lifted, shifted, torn open, and joined again elsewhere. An inlet opens, an old path is cut off, and the beach slowly moves inland. To call all this a line is already too early. More troublesome still, the shorter the ruler, the longer the coast; coves, breaches, and the edges of wet sand are all counted in. Length borrows part of itself from the posture of measurement.

At this point, when someone says again that “everything is telling a story,” the danger begins to show. Stories often press verbs back into nouns: they call a boundary still in motion disappearance, and sand temporarily joined on elsewhere recovery. They arrange an ending for the process too soon, so that we can look back on it as though looking back on something already complete.

But I cannot drive story away altogether either. In climate research, storylines are sometimes precisely chains of conditions: if these drivers hold at the same time, how will water, storms, and risk stack up? They do not round the future into a finished tale; they simply refuse to pack the future securely into a falsely precise number.

The question is not whether to narrate, but whether the narration leaves the conditions intact. A storm is not a period already placed in the past, and sand is not an eraser wiping away the coast’s wound. The old opening is still there, new sand pushes up again, and water level, wind direction, waves, and the next storm will continue rewriting their relations. A good narration does not find a more comfortable noun for these actions; it only lets them keep colliding.

Some breaches are later filled by sand; some remain. The beach is still moving inland.