The North Shore in the winter is a special place - bereft of beachgoers and out-of-town traffic, cold, stark, and beautiful. We’re driving up the coast in the pre-dawn dark, through curtains of alternating snow, mist, and empty grey sky. It’s been a busy few weeks in the hospital, and Jane and I are looking for a bit of time - any time, even just a morning - away from the city. Plum Island, in the northeastern corner of Essex County, has been on our wish list for awhile. An prototypical barrier island situated on the Atlantic flyway, Plum Island, with its great marsh and dunes, is a birder’s paradise. Thousands flock to the island’s refuge (Parker River NWR) every year to see shorebirds, seabirds, and migratory visitors from far-flung nesting grounds in the Arctic. For me, the binoculars stay in their pack for most of the morning. I’m mainly here to spend some time with the camera, wander the lonely outer beach, and get lost in the howling wind - and in my own thoughts.
We arrive at the entrace gatehouse shortly after sunrise; after leaving our entrance fee in a little envelope, we walk the short boardwalk over the dune grass to the gently sloping beach. As the sun rises into a bank of purple clouds, the tide is coming up over a narrow bench that separates us from the breaking waves. The water chases Jane up the beach, leaving sinuous curves and gullies in the sand. Light is beginning to show on the beach houses in the nearby village of Newbury. My fingerless gloves prove to be downright masochistic amidst the morning’s severe windchill; I manage to snap some nice compositions up and down the beach, and along the dunes, before we retreat back to the car.
Back on the refuge road, we drive the length of the island, down to the boardwalk near the Emerson Rocks. I climb a nearby observation tower while Jane warms up in the car. We walk the nearby boardwalk to reach a beach covered in snow - a first for me, after a childhood in California and years of mild weather in the Mid-Atlantic. I find that the demarcation between snow and sand, at the high tide’s strand line, makes an interesting element for black-and-white compositions. Jane wanders down the beach, watching a flock of plovers and sandpipers foraging for breakfast in the surf. After short walk to the nearby bluffs, we return to the car and grab breakfast in town, and are back in Boston by late morning.
