Beach sand sifted off her feet and sugared the floor of the SUV. No problem, she thought, I will drive it down to Rita's tomorrow and have it detailed.
The thought triggered a traffic-jam of conflicting priorities in her mind. Tomorrow is Monday and that means a busy morning running the kids to school, then across town for yoga at the Y, race back home to get ready for the the monthly Ladies Luncheon, then down to the architect's in Mooresville to drop off the plans for the addition, back up the interstate to pick up the kids... There was something missing. Oh! The HOA Board meeting!
No, there was no time for detailing the SUV tomorrow.
The cold air blowing on her felt great. She was tired and sweaty.
It was a good sweat. The tiredness was earned.
She couldn't believe how successful the day had been. "What an incredible turnout! We expected a couple hundred and look! Just look! Thousands!" Swiveling in her seat, she looked at the sea of cars around them.
As she had commanded, he looked around. "There is a lot of traffic. It will take hours to get out of here."
His comment was just a dull noise in the electric buzzing going on inside her head. "It's amazing! I knew it," she slapped her hand on the dashboard for emphasis, "people are concerned about the environment! Look at all of them!"
Like her, he was tired and sweaty, "Do we have any water left?"
"No," her response sounded happy, as if having no water was an accomplishment, "Two hundred and forty bottles of water! They were gone before noon. All these people coming out, showing their support..."
She was wired. Her words gushing at him, around him, filling the cavernous interior of the SUV like rushing floodwaters. It would take hours for her excitement to ebb. During this time he only needed to bob his head, up and down, like a crab-trap float ball on the tide.
"...water. Next time we need more water! Ohhhh!" her hands paddled the air trying to propel the words from her mouth at the same rate they were occurring in her head, "We can have the water bottles printed with the Line In The Sand logo! And our website address! That way everyone can..."
He looked up ahead, slipped the SUV into park and pulled his foot off the brake. It was going to be a while before they moved. He was thirsty but there was nothing that could be done about that until they could navigate through this tangle of societal flotsam. Judging from the log-jam of traffic on the road and the steady in-flow of people from the beach, it would be hours before they moved even a few inches.
She kept gushing on and on about water, about buying more bottles next time, about printing labels. All of her talk was just making him more thirsty.
He watched the waves of people looking for anyone with a cooler that didn't look empty. He would offer them anything for something cold to drink.
A young couple walked alongside the SUV. As they passed in front the young man took the last sip of water from a bottle and absently dropped it on the ground. The couple kept walking.
He quickly sat forward and started to reach for the horn but stopped himself as he took a closer look around. The ground was littered with plastic bottles, food wrappers, cigarette butts. Jetsam, he thought, that's what it is, just another piece of jetsam.
He relaxed and sat back against the seat.
Beside him, she was still spewing. "...printing! Thousands more pamphlets next time! People need to know how to contact us! We were out of pamphlets by 10am! What do you think? two-thousand? Does this look like two-thousand people? More? Five? Five-thousand? You're better at this than I am! What do you think?Five?"
He set his head a bobbing.
"Five-thousand? More? There will be more people next time! Maybe six..."
A nearby trash can overflowed its contents onto the sand. People stepped over it and on it as they coursed to their cars. He watched as one of her pamphlets, crumpled into a ball, tumbled across the sand.
"I told you this was important. That people cared! There is no way they will allow drilling in the Gulf in the future..."
Over the years he had gotten pretty good at looking concerned without really paying attention to what she was saying. It was mostly a matter of peripherially hearing how she said things, not what she said. Some of her words crashed into his consciousness: "...oil companies..", "...obscene...", "... opportunities...", others flowed past him unnoticed.
The nice part about her was that she always asked questions anticipating a positive response. Any change in cadence or inflection and it was time for him to give an affirmative nod or a simple "Mmmm" or "Uh-huh."
Five minutes and they had not moved an inch. His earlier comment was true: it was going to take hours to get out of here. At least they were sitting comfortably, out of the sun, in air conditioning...
Bing! Bing! Bing! He reached for his cell phone. No, that wasn't the phone.
Bing! Bing! Bing! He looked around for whatever was demanding his attention and there on the instrument panel, the low-fuel icon, a bright orange gas-pump, winking on and off.
They were almost out of gas.
"...did it! We really did it! We drew a line in the sand that they can't ignore!!"
He took a good look around and realized that the line that had been drawn was not in the sand. It was in the surf.
It is amazing how parallel our blogs are today. Please read mine when you have time. I too have drawn a line.
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