In the Beginning

A Recollection

As wildfire smoke began to clear from our air at least for a while, I felt an urge to be once again in the place where these dawn pilgrimages began, a place where I return often because somehow it always returns…me.

***

For some days, the air had been opaque, dense with woodsmoke from wildfires burning to the north and west in Canada and Minnesota. Our corner of the world had smelled like a campfire. Eyes watered, lungs burned on exertion, heads mildly ached, and one evening, the atmosphere was colored in an eerie shade of amber as if the air itself had been bruised. So when the forecast called for a respite in the form of early morning clearing, the shores of the Atlantic Ocean at Watch Hill in Rhode Island beckoned.

There were still light traces of smoke in the air when I arrived, especially murky on the distant eastern horizon, but the clearing sky’s predawn rosy-salmon colors were hinting at the possibility of a scarlet sunrise. The ocean was calm with easy swells rolling over a dead low tide, sifting in through the dark rocks below the lighthouse as a lonesome fishing skiff trawled just offshore. Wisps of sweet brine floated on an easy, westerly breeze that barely lifted the flag off its rigging. I hopped over the bulkhead and took a seat on the dry boulders above the tidal rocks. Save for the gulls, I had the entire lighthouse point to myself. In the comfort of this easy, summer-warm morning, peace and contentment began to mingle with memory, and I recalled someone who had come up in a conversation just a few days before — one who had preceded me here — a way shower, it could be said.

I’ve heard that we humans do not fully pass from this world until the final memory of us dissolves, and that our reach is longer than we may suspect. I wonder if my old friend could have known how he would reach across many sunrises lifting over many beaches after he passed. He was the original Dawn’s Pilgrim, and from across a table years ago, had casually initiated me into the rites of sunrise when I least expected it, suggesting that witnessing daybreak from the water’s edge could have life-changing implications. His primary implement for marking the occasion of a new day was a surfboard. Mine, a pen. No matter. Both are good ways in. Both have a decent reach.

This dawn proved a moody one; the sky’s colors were muted, the sun materialized from out of a dim, gray smudge across the horizon — more a sigh of a sunrise than something spectacular, but nonetheless mesmerizing.

These Watch Hill mornings unfold in layers. There are the quiet moments of arrival, rolling through the deserted village in the predawn dusk, then out to the lighthouse and settling onto the eastern face of its point. And after the sun has taken the sky and contemplation winds down, it’s back through town to Napatree Point — the barrier spit that shields Little Narragansett Bay and Watch Hill Cove from the Atlantic Ocean.

I could always imagine my predecessor surfing the usually stout ocean swells on the wild, mile long crescent of the Atlantic-facing side of the point. But as I walked toward the base of the path that would lead me up and over the high dune toward this day’s calmer ocean surf, I paused and recalled his mention of being drawn to the easy charm of the bay side as well. I could have almost felt his hands on my shoulders directing me toward the packed low tide sand, and the deep, lush grasses and scrub brush that lined the flat calm waters of Little Narragansett. Walking the cool sand in the newly lifted golden light, with terns and plovers flitting all about, felt like I was at last coming to know the quieter side of Napatree’s personality — a place that breathes in from the ocean, and exhales into the bay.

Every sunrise in every place I visit is like this — following a direction that simply arises out of nowhere to now here, and then just a little further in.

***

I still can’t place the conversation in time, but I know it was several years ago. Isn’t that something? A moment that proved to be such a pivot, and all I can remember is a face across a table at an outdoor party, a fleeting moment when there was no table, no party — only an intensity of expression on a ruddy face and words from a voice, the tonal quality of which has escaped me. And on this day, this Friday in mid-July, 2026, I am walking through this perfect dream with the intention of placing one more sunrise into this space for the 54^th time over 71 articles.

We can never know the depth and weight of our words and actions as we pass through this lovely life of ours. We can never know. There is a freedom in not knowing. All that is left to us is to be well with each other and true to ourselves, and in a world that seems to have gone a little astray, maybe that is enough.

Such is the reach of an old man with a surf board.

Peace,

Stephen