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By midday the shore becomes clogged with people and I have to start being very still. I don’t like being still and I often start to count the hours. I listen for the sound of the shore and the laughter and crying of the children. The shore becomes second hands counting the day for me in specific increments. However, I know a hcildn’s cry meets the end of high noon.

Before I knew it, it was summer. Children had begun to play under the pier. In the early mornings they would be silent. skittering around the edges of the shore, staying clearly away from me who had learned during the days of fog how to fold into the crevices of the pier and the shore. You would barely notice me Kate. I don’t even mean my appearance. Even if you could look past my skin and the scabs and the smell, you still would have a hard time finding me. Long ago, would you have started to pass me by as the sun reached high noon in my estern town. You would walk past me and all the rest of the gentlemen under the pier. Our clothes long ao had lost hteir color. Our skin had become the same hue and the sand and we long ago learne dto be quiet when thechildren skittered along the shore. No, Kate, you would have long ago forgotten what I looked like and certainly, I know, you would have lost me with our family as you passed by me under the pier on the shore for I had learne dto be lost. I saw you a number of times though. I saw you there, with him, lost with your children. Avoiding my little nook and cranny. I saw you. Even if you didn’t see me

Coney Island. NYCSummers underneath the boardwalk would be easy. I noticed this the first time that I ever set foot in Coney Island. I stepped off the train into the foggy streets of southern Brooklyn and stepped into a ghost town, something out of an old western. The boardwalk provided the perfect liminal space, perfectly flat, a desert of concrete with the square buildings of the Freak Show and Nathan’s hot dogs inviting you out from the fog. The fog separates out this little town on the edge of the Hudson River. It buffets it from the rest of Manhattan with the walls of the Cyclone and the Freefall, along with the amateur baseball stadium acting as garrisons from the impinging commerce that inevitably surrounds Manhattan and Brooklyn. This little world unto itself was where I knew my experiment would be most successful.So of course I headed toward the pier. I knew that there, along the underlying fog was where I would have the most success. I kicked off my shoes as I passed the public toilets, still quiet before the spring surge that inevitably came to Brooklyn each summer season. I kept this very notepad and a pencil. I knew I didn’t need more. The shore was what I was looking for, the gray crests matching the sky. The smell of sea was thick there. Lost to my other senses was the site of garbage. Nowhere in the sounds of Coney Island were the plastic bags, and the cans of soda. No. As I closed my eyes, I could only smell the salt of the sea, the sweet tinge of soaked wood and the ever present sound of gulls and shore. This would be perfect. In the fog. In the sea. I would fully understand what it was like.