Pier Pressure

Living by the sea is a breath of fresh salt air. But it’s not always rainbows and cuttlefish. There are unwelcome guests like jet skiers, ski jetters and proponents of strange seafaring conveyances, pushing the limits of riparian strictures, flaunting tide lines with sheer panache and clear puddles. What’s your dock in theory is each sea dog’s this side of Cape Horn in practice. You may have a private cove, having years ago signed on the dotted line of several legal documents, believing it gave you total control over your immediate domain. 

Well, it doesn’t. You may live for years under the delusion that your cozy lagoon is yours and yours alone. That it’s a place to set up shop with a cold drink and a hot periodical, wasting away in the high summer sun. And you can keep reliving the same afternoon forever. Sorry, but that’s not the case. Unless your pier is made of some composite carbon fiber material, mined from a distant galaxy, your problems are the same as every sap staring into the Hudson River’s overwhelming decay. 

The piers you used to construct your personal dock are rotting from pressure created by shipworms. These little mollusks bide their time, waiting for the right moment to sink your dreams, torpedoing any hope you might have had at a sunny retirement. Are you going to evict them given everything we now know about bivalve cognition?

 

You can’t own the water. It’s one of the great things about it. We all rent from the same sealord, Poseidon. He’s the one who allows the boat traffic, the weekend paddlers, the swimmers and the yachters. It’s why before every beach day there are no throat-clearing “sea acknowledgements.” It was his long before it was anyone else’s and not much has changed in the interim. The briny deity is often angling for us to get into the water, tugging at our own sense of nautical obligation. 

But when the piers go, the shore comes next and pretty soon, you’ve got Costner and crew sailing around on driftwood catamarans seeking out cleaner waters. 

Take a dip, the water’s fine – for now.