In May the paths into the dunes are roped off from foot traffic because the birds amass to breed.

You can watch them through binoculars from the edge of a parking lot, white invisible deltas that drop

and glint, cataractic floaters against the sun rising from the sea or fluttering midday from nests

spiked inside the broken clumps of compass grass. Or on a plaque read about a lighthouse stretched

like bones beneath the waves. When Herakleitus observed, “you can’t step twice into the same river,”

he didn’t mean you couldn’t trust experience but thought to illustrate how “nature loves to hide” beneath

its own swift surfaces. He meant there’s pleasure in deception not despair, delight when we recognize

a tern’s or plover’s flash and glitter, silhouettes that navigate the thermal river, declare themselves like scraps of paper

then disappear.