The Ocean Gives Back What Man Casts Away

4:40 p.m., the beach: Everything is gray.

A roiling sky. Wet sand. Slick jetty rocks. The air itself, heavy with seaborne mist, seems stained gray, as if pigmented by a serrated clay sea.

There are 30 minutes to go before light gives out altogether. Then, this sodden gray world will lurch to black. Until that moment, the best of winter beach events occur.

Just above waterline, at low tide, the sand is hard, smooth pavement. It is broken, however, by two odd patches, each oval-shaped. The larger of the two is a field 200 feet long and formed by more than a thousand sea gulls sitting squat and puffy; motionless, they look expectant, like bundled retirees taking in the sunset on a cruise ship.

Nearby, the smaller oval is but 40 feet across and a potato patch of jewels: green, yellow, purple, brown, white, red stones, each worn by years of grinding and washing and pummeling into textured loaves and spheres. The ocean has washed them up here, capriciously, at the beach near Ventura Harbor; it is a ritual offering from deep places. The deep, saturated color of the smooth stones relieves the unrelenting grayness.

I have lived near water most of my life. I have mined stone fields such as this always: for the odd rock, for the figure created within it by a crease or bulge, for the mineral color made neon by reaction to salt.

But few things are more engaging than looking between the rocks for signs of civilization: shards that started on the ground, got dumped into the water and then found their way back, transformed. Sometimes they are mere curios. Sometimes they suggest whole stories about people, time, place.

In Positano, Italy, portions of the stone beaches are littered with half-inch chunks of once-glazed royal-blue tiles--washed-up, 100-year-old fragments worn down into touchstones of powdery blue and terra-cotta. To hold one in the hand is to connect with the elaborate hand-painted mosaics that make the city’s mountainside architecture so vivid and singular.

Here, indigenous litter has its own glitter. This winter’s stone patch is sparkling with broken glass, each piece worn smooth but clear enough on the edges to carry the last light of day. One piece is deep cobalt--from a ship’s medicine cabinet or just a landlubber’s Noxema bottle? Another piece is lime green and thick with burled edging--from the bottom of a cognac bottle tossed overboard? Yet another piece, an apparent bottle bottom, is clear and retains fragments of typeface in relief:

BEST FO DS

REG.

DES GN

ATENT

90918

In each case the glass is rendered blunt, harmless, sand-blasted on its flat surfaces and clear on its rounded edges. In each case it wears the ocean’s power and unrelenting force.

Other pieces of the man-made world go incognito amid the rocks. There is the perfect oval of red stone that bleeds its color upon the skin when picked up; it isn’t a stone at all, but a common building brick, perhaps Castaic, of red Bakersfield clay, after a five- or 10-year romp in the ocean.

There is the two-tone, two-pound chunk of concrete mated with red coarse clay, a turn-of-the-century building practice in some oceanfront patios--wherever those might have been. And there is the piece of poppy yellow dinnerware, a chunk of plate whose glaze is crackled, edges worn round, yet whose color retains depth, even life. Where and when, if you will, did it serve its last supper? Was it on land or at sea?

Here, where colors underfoot defy the gray, light starts giving out at 4:55. It is time to pocket the best of the jewels, to walk home in blackness with gems that throw light.

The rule, always, is to leave the natural stones in place, if the beach can be said to be their proper place, and filch only from mankind’s legacy to an ocean that never needed garbage, harmless though bricks and glass might be.

Along the horizon, a sliver of sky tears open. Pumpkin-colored light blasts through, splashing against the gray everywhere. A flock of gulls rises, their wings amber brush strokes against charcoal nightfall. A young couple, frozen in place between the gull field and the stone field, put on sunglasses. They are bathed in orange light, as if witnessing a faraway explosion.

For a moment, the stone patch shines with new strength, though in an unnatural warm glow. A round purple stone near the edge--the real thing and nobody’s garbage--radiates a haunting eggplant hue right through the orange light. It’s flat on the underside and rounded, like a turtle, on top. It fits perfectly into the palm of the hand.

It’s too tempting to leave. Just one stone, shining and burnished and molded by forces incomprehensible. Just one stone--and all that glass.

It’s a big ocean, after all, an ocean that makes its beach deposits randomly and without heed to whether its bounty can be seen in the warm light of summer or the brooding gray cold of winter. Sometimes, people need things to light up the darkness. A rare pumpkin winter light seems only to make that clearer.