The last dragon

This weekend I went to Crane Beach, on the Boston north shore. Spring has still not arrived in this part of the world, and the water is still chilling, with little slabs of ice floating around. To avoid being thrown out from the beach just before sunset, we reached the beach through Castle Hill, a property of the same non-profit organization that manages Crane beach natural reservation. Castle Hill parking lot does not close at sunset, and you can still reach the northern sector of the beach with a 15-20 minutes hike. The northern sector of the beach is the one frequented by the local people from the nearby Hamilton, a typical New England little town, not too far from Salem, of witches fame.

I had previously been in that part of the beach only once, and I didn’t remember the driftwood structure depicted in the posted photo. At first it looks like the remains of a boat, or some kind of artistic installation. But is only by looking at the structure from afar, against the blue horizon painted between the sunset western sky and the ocean, that its true nature is revealed. The dragons have long been gone, and their memories lost in the mist of time, but their remains sometime still emerge from the cold waters of this nordic ocean, to remind us of the eras when magic was still a powerful force shaping the earth and the sea of this world.