What We See 01: Tentstation

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Jen Metcalf:

Berlin was once a city of empty spaces. Many were voids created by bombed-out buildings from the war, and a wide scar left by the death strip that sliced the city in half for 28 cruel years. I didn’t move to Berlin, didn’t start “building my Berlin” like a Colson-Whitehead New Yorker, until 2006. But even then – decades after the bombs had stopped falling, the Wall had been chipped away, and the city had stitched itself back together – even then, Berlin was a city of vacancies.

The year I arrived, one of them, a former lido, had become a campsite. Tentstation. It occupied a leafy, paused space smack-bang in the centre of Berlin, right by the shiny new main station. Prime real estate given over to four young Germans on a temporary contract that should have ended after one year, but went on for six. 

The lido’s 50-metre pool remained, drained of water, but still blue-painted and with graffiti splashed over the walls. A basketball net had been fixed up in the deep end. The diving blocks and diving boards stood motionless at the edge, waiting for the swimmers to return. Instead, they got young backpackers, local clubbers, and fashion shows. Then the dancers came.

That was us. A patchwork community of lindy hoppers. We were scientists, teachers, office workers, freelancers. We were in our 20s and still new to the city, or in our 70s and part of the fabric since the days of the Wall. Most evenings we could find each other in spaces all over the city and dance the day out of ourselves to Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and all that jazz. A world away from the techno thudding in Berghain or Weekend.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

Sometime around 2009, we began gathering by the pool on summer Sundays, surrounded by trees heavy with leaves, the needled disco ball of the TV Tower just visible over the top. As we walked down the path from the campsite entrance, the rumble of the city faded, replaced by the DJ’s music weaving through the bushes to meet us. At first just the suggestion of that familiar eight-count beat, the rise and fall of a song. Then hooting trumpets, rolling drums, and Ella singing louder until we were there, at the edge of the pool, its blue floor already part-filled with couples connected in an easy embrace, bouncing and twisting their steps to the beat. One, two, triple-step, one, two, triple-step. On and on in a hundred different variations as the sun set, the fairy lights clicked on, and the night air began to cool our sweat-soaked skin. 

After those evenings I would cycle home, breathless and in flight. Soaring past the Reichstag, through the Brandenburg Gate, and down Unter den Linden. All of Berlin’s proudest buildings and boulevards lit up against the ink-black sky, carrying their centuries of history forward in steadfast, unforgettable bricks and mortar that are familiar even to those who have never visited. 

Tentstation was never going to join those ranks. They are out of its league. And anyway, it was never meant to survive. After six summers, the actual owners of the land were finally ready to send in the diggers. I never saw the construction site, never watched the heavy machinery in action, but I recently found a photograph online. A still life of a death. A white digger is parked by the pool. Its steel teeth have ripped up the grass where the tents once stood, turned it into mounds of dirt and excavated a mess of cables that might be electricity, or maybe they have been brought there by construction workers – ready to tie around a diving board and rip it out of the ground. The pool’s blue, graffitied walls are torn at regular, blocky intervals that suggest the teeth of the digger’s bucket have been gnawing at it. 

When the ground was level and the diggers had retreated, the architects and their team moved in. They built a new, shallower pool, surrounded it with timbered patios, sun loungers, and low-roofed buildings. This is Vabali Spa. It offers Eastern-themed wellness and overnight stays to white-robed, well-off customers. I hear it’s very popular, though I haven’t seen it for myself. This description is entirely thanks to Google Images. A few Christmases ago a client of mine gave me a voucher for a day’s pampering there. It occurs to me now that I must have mislaid it. 

And so the void disappeared. Of course it wasn’t the first, and it was small fry by comparison. This is Berlin. The city is laden with places that were once hollow ghosts of the past, now restored to their former grandeur, or filled with bustling office districts, tourist sites, and shopping zones. Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, and all the buildings we dancers flew past as we cycled home beneath the sky over Berlin. Chances are good that you’ve heard of them all. But I doubt you’ve heard of Tentstation.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

So many parts of a city are never visible to those who don’t live here – never even visible to all those who do live here. My boyfriend has been a Berliner since the 1990s. He is an honest-to-goodness German, not just a card-carrying one like me. And still he had never heard of Tentstation. Why would he have? He has built a different Berlin to mine, one constructed of people I will never know, places I will never remember. 

And yet all of Berlin’s small, secret places like the pool live on, even once they are gone. Not because they are so solid a war can’t crumble them, or so important that they will be rebuilt. But because we were there, danced among their graffiti, took care not to step backwards into the deep end, found friends and a skill we never knew we had. They survive because – to borrow again from the great Colson Whitehead – “what was there before is more real and solid to us than what is there now”.

***

Jen Metcalf is a copywriter, translator, and editor who arrived in Berlin in 2006 and accidentally made it her home. Having spent most of her adult life working on other people’s texts, she recently decided to start creating her own. Berlin is a recurring feature in her essays, which she uses to try and understand her place in a city that now feels like a partner in a long-term relationship -- with all the joy, disappointment and compromises that entails. 

Photos by Joerg Heidemann, who organised the swing dance evenings at Tentstation (and DJ'd and danced at them, too).

Cranes at King's Cross, St Pancras

By John de Plume:

Today, cranes define the skyline of London’s King’s Cross, St Pancras. Their ever presence makes them as if invisible, and yet they are at once unignorable, looming as they do over the proceedings of that immense reservoir of electrical energy. Cranes express the permanent flux of the neoliberal city, the endless growth of capital accumulation made manifest in the endless building and rebuilding of the urban space. Cranes are a concrete representation of the abstract logic of capital, where construction assumes continuation not completion: accumulation with no end other than that of perpetual accumulation as an end in itself.

Each crane alone is an impermanent structure, but cranes and construction remain permanent here. Cranes announce that buildings must be built and, implicitly, that buildings must be torn down too. High in the crane cabin – that liminal space that lays claim to the acquisition of the air by the promised commerce, coming here soon – the atomised subject of capitalist modernity pulls the levers of creation and destruction. Inside or outside of the crane cabin, it makes no difference, such levers are familiar to us all.

***

John de Plume is a writer whose work explores political economy, critical theory, and the socio-spatial effects of place. He is a member of Plan C London.

Three Cornish Landscapes

By Richard Skinner:

i. Over Mevagissey Harbour

from pitch-black night
the first to encroach 
the horizon
a strip of milk-blue
seeping in minutes
into electric cobalt
then comes peach 
bleeding into pink-white, thus
re-enacting day
growing, glowing light 
develops the harbour
spots of red & orange buoys first
then boat names, shop fronts
no clouds yet manifest
the last to drift from  
darkness—
the gift of granite 
& gneiss

*

ii. At Chapel Point

Or sun rising
is a bath of 
golden acid, 
pure voltage, it 
baffles us with 
its infinite patience,
the great silence 
yellow turns to blue 
the day peals by 
autoharp of light 
later
curtain of winter
light, stopped
(hush/bloom)
into the simmerdim,
solvitur ambulando—stride side by side
into the west
Come 

*

iii. Polkerris Bay

coming down 
off the cliff 
through the trees
a bundle of stone buildings 
tantalise below
the setting sun 
scintillates 
through a tangle of 
miraculous leaves 
and the whole scene 
is an abstract painting 
of green on red
the wood spews us out 
onto the beach   
the small bay is a tight curl
with one harbour wall
tiny waves break like ripcords
on virgin sand
there is no depth, everything is on a flat surface 
the bright sky is a pulsing membrane
the kettle drum sun 
hums and all the world 
could plunge into it
at any moment

***

Richard Skinner has published six books of poems. His next collection, White Noise Machine, is out with Salt in June 2023. A great deal of his work has to do with his love of long distance walking and a sense of place. He and his wife spent December 2022 on retreat in Mevagissey, where these poems were written. 

Richard’s website

The Old Fishing Village

By Holger Klein:

For us it was once a landmark, the old rusty wind wheel beside the channel connecting the small fishing harbour with a large lagoon, a former bight of the Baltic. The wheel was the first we saw when we approached the harbour on the new road from the west. Once the wheel drove a wooden Archimedean Screw which drained the surrounding wetlands for agricultural use. In our early years, we visited the wheel occasionally, musing how it works. 

The lagoon was separated from the Baltic by a spit which was extending westward over centuries until only the small channel-like outflow was left. During the last decades I often visited the harbour at the mouth of the channel, but it was only a few years ago when I realised that the wheel is no longer visible from the road. Rusty and motionless, it is now hidden behind high trees and only to be seen from the small bridge crossing the channel. 

In early summer, I took the small path (No Trespass!) through high reeds towards the wheel. I was curious if the Archimedean Screw was still in its place, possibly even workable. But there was no way through. The shaft for the inflow was totally overgrown by thick brambles, unpassable in shorts and without a machete. But a few metres away I found a new drainage ditch where an electric pump took over the wheel’s work. 

For me, this wind wheel stands for all the things that changed during the last decades, in the harbour and in the old fishing village about 2 km to the east. It was by the late 1960s when we discovered the village and the harbour, surrounded by lakes, large beech woods and endless fields in the hinterland. 

On our first visit to the village, we took the old small and curvy road leading north-eastward from the main road directly to the beach near a row of green wooden sheds. Here the fishermen stored their gear, mended their drying nets suspended between wooden poles, or repainted their boats. In the shallow bight small open fishing vessels were gently rolling at their moorings, gulls and other waterfowl soaring in the wind. We instantly fell in love with this place and for me it felt like paradise.

On both sides of the village the cliff line changes into smooth shores. In the west lies the former bight with the channel and the wheel, the spit secured by a long dike. Eastwards lies a smaller lagoon, separated from the sea by a barrier beach. It is also a former bight, connected to the sea by a small, meandering outlet. Both lagoons are surrounded by extended wetlands and reed belts, partly protected as bird reserves. 

All along the coast are broad sand and pebble beaches, surrounding the shallow bight with a seabed of sandy patches, big boulders, and seagrass beds. The colour of the water changes according to the weather, offering a range from a dull steel grey over all shades of blue and green, culminating in a tropical turquoise over the sand beds on sunny days. I especially love sunny days when cloud fields are drifting moderately over the sky, causing a pattern of continually changing water colours with different intensities.

One or two years after our first visit my father bought a holiday apartment on the backside of the cliff. Here I spent most of my leisure time for years: First school holidays and weekends, and later, with my own kids, also a lot of our vacations. Right from the beginning I loved to walk the beaches for hours at all seasons, becoming a real beachcomber, a passion I’m still following today. 

However, gradually things were changing. The little harbour was enlarged and is now a marina for leisure boats, the fishery declined step by step, many houses have been renovated and enlarged, and of course new houses and hotels were built. The pub favoured by young people was closed and a spacious golf course was laid out just a few kilometres away. New green sheds were added to the old ones, hosting a sail and surf school and a cosy café. Today there are only one or two part-time fishers left who still use their sheds for the initial purpose. 

The coastline changes gradually too. Due to heavy landslides after strong, eastern gales the cliff retreated metre by metre over the years, an accelerating process due to climate change with severer and more frequent storms and higher sea levels. On the other side, the local campground at the small lagoon was closed, removed and changed into a nature and bird reserve, a place we often visit to observe birds. Not all changes are bad. 

The surrounding landscape changed only marginally. The lagoons are still surrounded by their broad reed belts, the large beech woods not cleared. Like a long swell on the open ocean, the seemingly endless fields are still waving over the soft moraine ridges, partly still owned by local counts. A few weeks ago, I swam together with my youngest brother out into the bight and we realised that, compared to the last decades, from this perspective only marginal changes are recognizable. However, the locals have to make their living and must adapt to the demands of modern tourism and therefore there are more changes to come during the next few years. 

Some years ago, the municipality set up a couple of plates along the promenade, showing old black and white pictures of the village. They were taken in the first years of the last century, about 120 years ago. Some photos show the proper village and we recognized a few things which we could still remember, though they disappeared during the last decades. Other pictures show the old fishermen sitting together on a bench in front of a shed, smoking their pipes and looking over the bay. Other pictures show them mending the nets or processing their catches in a small smokehouse. 

When we stroll through the village, occasionally times are merging. We ‘see’ how it looked a few decades ago and how things are today. It’s like walking in the same place simultaneously at two different times. And whenever I approach the village on the old avenue lined with mighty oaks on both sides and negotiate the narrow curves and the ups and downs of the road, when I pass the neolithic grave-mound to the right and the manor house and the wide view over the great lagoon to the left, I’m the boy once more on the day we discovered the village. 

***
Holger Klein is a retired oceanographer who spends a lot of time exploring the coasts of the Nordic Seas and isles, and is a regular hiker in Lapland. 

Passages: on the Rue des Thermopyles

“It was a beautiful street. The street of homeless cats, she often thought. She never came into it without seeing several of them, prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud. Sympathetic creatures, after all.” – Jean Rhys, Quartet

By Anna Evans:

In the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, starting from Metro Denfert-Rochereau. On the trail of passages and impasses, courtyards and gardens. With a scattering of notes and addresses to guide us through our route. Wide streets branch off in different directions from the centre, where the great lion looks out. We walk along the Avenue d’Orléans, renamed Avenue General Leclerc after the liberation of Paris. The old street name has been retained only crossed out. Strikethrough: a line drawn through, as though to keep the name still present. 

Along Rue Daguerre, past the pink house that was Agnes Varda’s, there are patterns of white cloud where the sun is starting to break through, to dazzle. The elegant white facades of the buildings appear lighter, so that the street seems to open to us, as we absorb the decorated iron balconies, shutters and flowers in window boxes, pavement cafés, and glimpses in shop windows. We like to spot the launderettes and tabacs, the neighbourhood shops and bakeries.

In Place Jacques Demy, in a square shaded by trees, we sit and drink coffee. In the park there are basketball courts and ping pong tables. An old merry go round and tables with chess squares painted over them, a few old books left there for the taking. The sun makes patterns through the trees.

In photographs taken along the way are glimpses in passing of buildings and streets. Compositions of a moment in time. Walking along the Rue des Plantes in search of an impasse. Impasses, the streets that come to a dead end, a cul-de-sac, that most evocative of Parisian place names: a passage with no way through. 

The Impasse du Moulin Vert. An enclosed passage, a cobbled street with the feel of a village. There are houses and buildings of different styles, statues and carvings, hidden entrances. Gates conceal gardens and terraces, trees growing tantalizingly across the walls. At the end of the passage, a courtyard with old style lamps and green shutters on the windows. There are pots of flowering plants, pink roses, geraniums, and begonias. An elegant pink and white building with iron balconies and ivy growing up its side. Shadows of trees make patterns on the walls.

The streets of this area, Pernety, have the feel of another time. Narrow streets and smaller houses, shutters and chimneys mingle with Haussmann-style facades. Enclosed gardens tucked away behind trees and railings, with enticing corners to sit and read among grass and sunlight, green and shaded. The village meets the city as people gather with friends or pause to eat their lunch, making use of the space, scattered sounds of music.

A mural with flowers and bold lettering along the wall, the words of Louise Michel, a revolutionary of the Paris Commune: La révolution sera la floraison de l’humanité comme l’amour est la floraison du coeur[1]. 

Turning the corner to find a passage, the Rue des Thermopyles, a narrow street paved with cobblestones that feels quiet and secluded. There are low-rise houses linked by leafy arches, blue shutters, and red flowering roses. Some of the buildings seem like artists’ studios, the sense of Montparnasse in another time. Climbing vines and wisteria grow across the passage and trail between the houses and branches cover windows. Window boxes and planters, pots of different shapes and sizes, imperfect, unexpected, like a story opening outwards.

On the corner is a yellow house with a black painted door, creepers grow across the building and pots of plants and flowers. We hear music, the sound of a piano through the open window and a voice singing, soaring like a moment in a film. Each day, a reel of moments. 

Looking back along the cobbled lane there is a sense of green everywhere, hushed voices from the shared garden. The shade of trees and dappled sunlight, rooftops, and blue sky. Each glimpse is like framing a different fall of shadow and sunlight and sometimes the street seems to lengthen depending on the angle I look, as figures emerge and fade into the space of the passage and around corners. I want to notice every detail, to know the story behind every door.

Cats emerge from behind windows, unobtrusively free, and stroll along the cobbled alleyway looking for a patch of sunlight to sprawl under. I think of the city as viewed by its cats, who prowl its spaces, its hidden courtyards, and enclosed places. For the cats there are escape routes in every dead end, and no forbidden entrances. 

We take our time, absorbing every angle, torn between the wish to linger here, and the draw of the blue sky ahead and what comes next; of what other hidden places we might find. The city becomes an endless series of movements, experienced in passing. A passage is made to be followed.

***

Notes: [1] The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Hill Haven

The poet’s father on his tractor, by Bill Clark

By Carol Barrett:

After a poem by Craig van Rooyen

They aren’t moles. I’m told nights are too cold for moles in the high desert. Then what -- gophers? Ground hogs? Prairie dogs? In the damp soil west of the Cascades, moles were plentiful as robins. My father got his supply of traps at yard sales for two bits, some farmer having given up the harvest ghost. Whenever hills popped up, he’d dig down a few inches and lay them in, warn us to stay clear. He didn’t want an ankle enmeshed in the gears, a toddler’s curious hand clamped to the earth. When he got one, he’d announce it supper-time, bury the sleek body in the apple orchard, or along the edge of the woods, where alder leaves made for soft mulch.

I never looked one in the eye. But I spotted plenty of mounds, out digging potatoes or tearing corn from the stalk, peeling broad squash leaves back for a golden bonanza. One year a new ordinance forbid trapping them, on account of cruelty to animals. My father kept up his solution despite the risk. He figured, more humane than shooting them, and no law against that. He was especially perturbed when they dug up the lawn, clipped short for picnics of a summer evening, cedar table re-varnished every five or six years to restore what wind and rain had roughed up. The trap wasn’t an instant success. You had to wait for the critter to come up for air. It could take days, even weeks.

Here my hidden low-lifes stay quiet all winter, perhaps hibernating. But come spring, their handiwork pops up all over the yard. I scoop lush mounds into flowerpots for the pine seedlings that spring from ample cones. The soil is just right – combed and softened, free of roots, fine as biscuit dough. When I first started repurposing their primordial heaps, I feared I might slice one with the shovel, but it’s never happened. They dig their tunneled dugouts well below the planted surface. And they won’t cave in. When I tamp the excavated soil down, the lawn is flat as before the latest hill happened. In time the grass will spread across the brown moon, fill in with the help of whirling sprinkler.

We manage to co-exist. These creatures save their building frenzy for late at night when I’m already tuckered. When I open the door to a new day, I may find another hill to salvage for my tree farm, small but growing on the back deck. Sometimes I’m blessed with two or three, yards apart, a quick jaunt with the garden cart, sun on my neck. Life goes on as usual underground, my father’s ashes on a tunneled slope. He is getting acquainted with new friends, inviting them to watch reruns of Perry Mason, where it all turns out okay in the end, his pipe smoke mingling with the damp and porous earth.

***
Carol Barrett coordinates the Creative Writing Certificate Program at Union Institute & University. She has published two volumes of poetry and one of creative nonfiction. A former NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has lived in nine states and in England. She currently resides in the high desert of central Oregon. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines, and in over fifty anthologies.

Statue in Bronze and Andesite

By Fiona M Jones:

The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours. 

History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away. 

You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win. 

St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals. 

And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago. 

***

Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

Blowout Tide

By Joe Labriola:

You shift across the pebble-pocked sand, scouring the pale flaxen dunes for all manner of seaside treasures. Pink spiral shells and sand-smoothed stones are among your favorites, peeking out from the wild patchwork. But among these beautiful bits of beachside bounty, more than all else, you find trash.

You’ve noticed more in recent years. More and more. Harder and harder to ignore. Bleached water bottles and frayed strings sit tangled within the tidal muck. White bags hiss upon the tips of inland reeds, rippling in the cold March wind as if waving, as if wavering, as if breathing their surrender.

You aren’t a vagabond can collector or a hipster hobbyist. But you see. You see candy wrappers and drink caps. Glints of plastic waste simmer in the sunlit brine. You can’t say why you do it. You can’t say how much it helps. All you can say is that it just sort of feels like the right thing to do: picking it up, one piece at a time.

You and your four-legged companion work hard. Harder every time. You are the only two who seem to care, even as the ocean vomits more trash each weekend, seemingly to replace whatever you’ve filled your big black bag with, and then some.

“We just gotta keep at it, boy,” you say, struggling to maintain your balance upon a steep tuft as you pluck battered sandals and cracked milk jugs out of the weeds. “We’re doing good work.”

Your dog just sniffs and stares.

You continue this way for months. Years. You never venture beyond your route from the parking lot to the pier. There’s always plenty to clean right here. Always more and more.

But one day your old dog pants and wheezes. He sighs and slumps. The vet says he doesn’t have long. Maybe days. Maybe weeks. But not long. You know the truth but don’t want to believe it.

“It would be for the best if we put him down,” the vet tells you plainly.

“Not yet,” you strain to say back. “Not just yet.”

The next morning you take your old friend for one final stroll. It’s breezy, breezier than usual. But that’s never stopped you before. It’s slowed you, yes, but never stopped. You follow your usual path. Of course you don’t come close to getting it all. You never do. But you needn’t go far. You still fill your bags, and that seems to count for something.

“Biggest haul yet, boy!” you say through a gust, loading your garbage and recyclables into the trunk.

The old dog gazes back at you with big, shadowed eyes. He tugs on his leash. A weak motion but with conviction all the same. Maybe he knows?

You glance up toward the opposite direction where you’ve never ventured on your weekly cleaning treks. But why not? Why haven’t you ever gone that way? Because you like your way? Because you’re just used to it?

You don’t know such answers. But you smile tiredly and grab one more bag from the car.

You trudge down the beach together into the cutting wind. There’s even more trash this way. Much more. “Won’t get it all today, boy,” you call down to your friend. You continue, smiling as best as you can.

You stop after you reach a sharp bend along the dunes. You almost turn around here where the wind is strongest, rippling your loose shirt. But then you notice a small brushy clearing atop a stout cliff not far in the distance. Perched upon its edge are a group of teenagers: five or six scraggly-haired youths. They lounge in various positions, surrounded by beer cans and take-out food containers. Some of the debris has already trickled down the crumbling wall of hard-packed sand. You watch for a while. One kid hurls a sack of fast food remnants out into the water. Another chucks a half-empty beer at his friend, who dodges and shoves his friend back playfully.

They all laugh freely.

You open your dry mouth to cry out. But the warm wind sucks at your breath. You stare for another moment, and then finally just plop down in the sand, watching the trash-ridden tide rise closer.

“That’s enough, boy,” you say, scratching your old dog’s ear. “That’s enough.”

***

Joe Labriola is an author, podcaster, and professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University in New York. His short fiction usually features some speculative or environmental lens with the goal of helping to raise awareness about ocean plastic pollution. He regularly hosts beach clean up events, presents lectures, and tries to spread awareness however he can. You can most often find him scouring his local shores filming his detrashing experiences—and enjoying a swim once the water is cleaned.