meet me in montauk

I miss the wolves that used to live in New York City.

I wake up at 4:45 am and in my excitement to leave I forget several things, including my notebook and my jacket. The drive is easy and foggy, it’s 117 miles but it’s gone in the blink of an eye.

I leave the city behind me and turn the radio on, but it’s not really a radio is it? It’s my phone, but I’ve always liked the aesthetic of the radio better. I can even pretend it has old timey dials even though my car was built in 1999. John Denver fills up the empty spaces around me; I put the song on repeat.

I can’t help but think that the ocean smells so much better here than it does at the beach of Far Rockaway.

Coastal towns always feel like foreign countries to me. But I’ve always been a mountain girl. There’s an odd mix of tourists and locals, even though it’s late in the season. I didn’t think they’d still be here.

Every 12 Mississippis a horn blows but I don’t know what it’s for.

I don’t even know if wolves are coastal creatures but the air is different out here and it’s easy to let the time break down when you’re sitting on the beach in a state park.

Never have I seen a beached filled solely with fishermen.

The crows are talkative; they argue with the seagulls over the dead crabs that are washing up on the rocks.

There’s no shortage of wonder and color in the dead things on the sand.

I meet two men from Istanbul. They woke up at 2:30 am, but they didn’t catch any fish. They’re leaving and I’m staying, but I still wish we could’ve talked longer.

There are things I have to do.

The pancakes at Mr. John’s Pancake House are unequivocally the best pancakes I have ever had. They are the perfect mixture of sweet and fluffy and just a tinge of buttermilk-sour. I eat so much I can barely move out of my barstool; two Locals come to sit next to me. They order eggs and hashbrowns and a side of toast, I think.

In the silence I hear my heart breaking. I’ve heard that somewhere, I know, but it sounds good. It sounds right, though I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere that’s that quiet.

There’s more than one beach in Montauk. I visit two of them.

In the most poetical sense, I think it would be very easy to die in the ocean. When I’m standing at the edge of it and the waves break around me the water pulls me in, steals the sand from under my feet so I have choice but to go forward. When I turn around to leave the receding tide on the sand casts an optical illusion and it feels like I’m walking in place or backwards, and the breeze that tangles my hair just seems to whisper stay, stay, stay.

It fills up my senses.

That was The End.

Driving back into the city I pass under an electronic sign that says:

“INTERSTATE 495 TRAFFIC MOVING WELL.”

But my odometer reads 15mph. Is that irony or just an observation?

In Virginia the coyotes used to stalk around my mailbox at dark, waiting for the white-tailed deer to jump the fence from the neighboring cow field. In Virginia the coyotes are starting to assume the role of the top predator; they’re getting bigger and stronger and bolder.

Sometimes you just have to turn yourself into your own type of wolf.