The Great Not Me

They go to the beach beyond the big trees. A salt march where the sound tumbles around them. They walk through their unfamiliarity and differences, taking a hundred photographs. Strange to walk through sand in the cold, passing remnants of broken brick walls, shrines made of plastic, steel rods and flags. The sea birds wired together swirl overhead and damp down like a foamy cotton bedspread on the shallow water. They look for deer but don't find any. So much history here but the story isn't pieced together and narrated for them. They can just see the outer edge fragments that penetrate into their own time. The animals go about their business, surviving the winter as the companions walk through the sand with their imperfect shoes. What the animals do is not their business. Spying on the animals is meaningless. Their origins are not known to them. They don't own their own histories, have no claim to them. It is owned by people who no longer share their knowlege bubbles.