Around 7:00 p.m. last Saturday, full dark solstice evening, we were on the dock in Newport–nicely sated on roasted garlic and Dungeness crab soup, smoked salmon salad, and Prosecco–wanting to stretch our legs and look at the fishing boats before heading back to the inn.
The water was full of tiny fish: two inches long, nearly transparent bodies, giant charcoal eyes. The boats were docked, though one or two were staffed with men coiling ropes, smoking, and otherwise looking to the before and after tasks of fishing. The weekend crabbers had pulled in their pots; no one was casting out a line. It was the herons’ turn, and the seal’s.
Standing on the dock, we watched the heron’s preening step, neck up, throat stretched, each foot extended, toes splayed as if displayed for admiration before touching down. There were two birds. And one point we approached–so slowly–the nearer heron only to see, just behind yet partially hidden by a fishing boat’s prow, the other peek out, then pause, then peek again.
The heron is night colored, oranged by the dock lights to a darker gray, visible and then hidden and then visible again. Sometimes it would lean forward, stretching out from the dock, as if deciding whether to jump in. Finally, once, a dive. Or a hollow CAW! into flight.
There was a seal in the water, too, speckled silver, floating on its back, splashing after fish, turning in an impossibly tight bend and sparkle of muscle.
The water was glassy still, save where heron or seal disturbed it. The air wasn’t too cold, the fine mist was most evident under the lamps (we barely felt it on our hair)–rain to see, not feel.
I felt fortunate being there to watch. The heron’s cautious, balletic arrogance; the seal bent double, glowing white under water in the dark; our breath clouding into the darkness. Near shore, another heron up to its knees in the dropping tide, fully reflected in an inverted, mirror heron at its feet. A boat’s mast, too, reflected in the water in such a way as to suggest an almost other-worldly depth, a full Atlantis. Every living thing out of doors.
(My straight-to-phone videos are proving too long for this post, or my editing skills too limited. Imagine a heron leaning, leaning, leaning, and then taking off, vanishing, oddly, out of the darkness and into the brighter lights further down the dock. Imagine a seal arcing itself like a paperclip, a silver underwater torpedo, an evident fur of fun even in pursuit of food.)