Mirages
Mirages Edward J. Curtin, Jr. I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy. The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau – the sand is rapidly drinking up the last wave that wets it. I am looking far out to the horizon where the sun shimmers on what seems to be the world’s watery edge, creating a strange mirage that I wonder at but find hard to describe. Earlier, I was rereading Thoreau’s Cape Cod in which he mentioned this phenomenon 150 years ago, not just the mirages across the water but those here along the great stretches of sand. Now I am confused and my mind wanders to other mirages that make me shake my head in wonderment. It is hard to grasp what one is seeing these days. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a presidential aspirant, folded his c...