Fox Run on Crescent Beach

At Fox Run on Crescent Beach I plant myself beside a Tree, then keep on riding to a Golden Marsh spread out between a dense Red and Green plaid forest, the ground an earth Grey as old and sacred as the bones of elephants, sun bleached and standing, their roots tied to silent stories of other Great Fallen Trees, packed in wood, leather trunks sounding in the wind, branches waving, fading to black like lost tales of a generation behind the gates of a hilltop mansion. The gossip heard of Long Island whatnot, the drinking and the dancing, the lavish Pratt children, neighbors to the island of J.P. Morgan, a private man with plenty of fights long forgotten and good memories in what we like to call, The Gatsby days. A time of well trodden paths made by men with good horses and ladies in long dresses, picnic-ing with umbrellas, smoking and walking out to the pier with the view of East Egg and the approaching sails and flags of visiting friends. But now its the age of Billy Joel and Biggie Smalls. Welwyn is to Glen Cove as the fallen tree is to the forest, a seemingly random set of trails between The Hallowed Sound and The Holocaust Museum, the decrepid sheds of dead care takers, their tools rusted, red brick with vines crawling up the sides, decomposing together a little each year. There is mystery in the mud at the end of Dosoris, once a driveway now a highway history paved over to the cobblestone gutter where today's noise of the news DJ's and talk radio, singing the blues and the beats to the heat of another summer afternoon, road games turning to rage, the honkeys and the Harleys, the hardasses, and the construction traffic, the punk ass fuck you fingerflickers, the leaf blowers and the weed whackers, all this shit on top of whatever leaks inside, keeps you from hearing of how it once was, the silence, the pitter patter, the breeze, and the donkey, the swans dilly dally to the geese in formation. Moments of silence you don't need to look for, plain, without signs, with the wisdom of ether. Here you can hear it, and smell it, the truth. The sweet musty mildew of decomposition, smothered by The Sound, so clear you can hear it like a salty taste in your mouth. Call it a coincidence or a miracle, watching a plover pecking at some leaves, and just as the sign says, above the osprey screams. I contemplate taking a picture, hunting for that something beyond the distraction, something close enough to cling to, the slightest suspension of a short span of attention, when under my nose I catch real red running, like a smear or a seizure my mind went sprinting, a beautiful auburn rather than a rose, it was The Fox running along the muddy edge of the ebbing tide, leaving footprints as fleeting and timeless as the seasons, the automatic answer to all of my reasons suddenly caught in the corner of my eye, that great moment of stopping, latching on to the coursing of animal fascination passing me in real time by, riding his back as he rounds the arc, panting like the beast's very breath, then gone for a lifetime.