Debussy and the air talks with the water...

A viking longboat makes way into our bay

There are calm sea days where the seascape looks like that "Joy of Painting" show on PBS - all magic white and wet on wet technique.  When Irene and Sandy (hurricanes) passed by, this scene was frantic with tide and waves.

Some folks who are out to sea for a living report that at certain times, when the wind is driving and the waves literally explode, the air fills with water so much so that birds literally drown. Our little bay is pretty sheltered and for the wave top level to be 8 feet higher than this high tide was some pumpkins.

A long while back I spent a lot of time in Europe and actually spent a day on the Northwest coast of France in a little town in the Bretagne region.  I was studying a work by Debussy, the French composer, an opera really that was presumed lost, so was digging around the public records in the village where he spent some summers at the shore. The north part of the Provence is on the English Channel and is a wild and woolly place to say the least.  Storms - big complex storms - race across the North Atlantic and big waves that we can hardly imagine scare you half to death even from afar.  On days when the wind is at 60 and the waves are 30 feet it isn't hard to imagine the air/water mix and coupled with rain and low, foggy clouds - the effect is complete. 

Back to Debussy, he wrote a piece about the "discussion" between the winds and the water - from a musical point of view of course. I can well imagine him observing the channel waters during a long hard blow, waves reaching up, wind pushing them along, urging them almost, to give up their mist and join in a conversation 'just up there' that we can only admire.