Ordinals

We had arrived at the shores of the Coral Sea by plane, train, and finally a bus that nearly broke down, the palms dancing now in the midsummer heat of Christmas day as we walk barefoot to the edge of the last substantial earth and looked east toward Vanuatu, and beyond that Fiji, the last ordinals of civilization before the vast, barren Pacific Ocean spreads in all directions for thousands of miles of earth foreign to those of us who live above the waves and reefs, the trenches and the unseen cyclone currents.

I realize then that I have been to the end of the Earth more than this once – looking for some hint of Cuba from Key West, pondering the strata of the dinosaurs and the even wilder things that underlay them now in the red and orange bands of the Grand Canyon, at places nearly a mile deep and billions of years old, or stepping off an old railroad trestle into the void between river and good sense once long ago.

These are the places where directions are no good anymore – there is here, the edge, where everything else is out of reach, and there’s a sort of satisfaction at having no further moves to make or decisions to ponder; there’s a kind of peace in having your options pared down to the one thing that lies directly in front of you, every past turn or feint reduced to a single, vanishing point behind.

The waves crest and sparkle as they run to their limits against the sand; even the unthinkable power of the sea can only go so far until it’s turned aside and, having been as far as it can go, settles back to rest a moment before having another go at it.