The sandbar was not there yesterday and would not be there by evening. rswfire stood on it anyway, phone raised, wind coming off the Pacific in the flat sustained way it does at the river mouth, and recorded a group of seals that had chosen the same temporary ground he was standing on. The water surrounding them was ocean, not river — a distinction that would matter within the next few minutes of conversation. The surf was close enough to be a constant presence in the audio. The ground beneath him was a surface generated by tide, and he knew it.
He was not alone. Someone else was there, talking with him throughout, and the recording carries the texture of two people working out what they were seeing in real time rather than one person delivering an observation. rswfire mentioned his camera almost in passing — okay, not dirty, fun to take video with — and then named the actual reason he had stopped moving: that's why I stopped. Taking video was the act. The stop was the decision.
What he described watching had structure. The seals had scanned the humans, made an assessment, and then returned to the sand — most of them. One did not. The other observer had a word for that one; rswfire offered sentinel, then scout, then let go of the naming entirely — whatever — because the label mattered less than the behavior. He had noticed the timing: that seal went into the water as soon as the humans got close, went under, could surface anywhere. Then the young ones followed. He read a communication in the sequence — let's be safe — and then read the reversal too, the return to the beach, the partial nature of it. Not all of them had gone in. He named that as guard coming down a little.
Between beats of tracking, something else surfaced: I mean, I may never see this again. Stated plainly, in the middle of the observation, not as a conclusion drawn at the end. The configuration was not assumed to be repeatable.
Then a correction. The other observer asked if this was the Siltcoos River. It was not. rswfire said it twice — nope, this is just a sandbar — and pointed: the river was over there. This was sand, this was ocean water on all sides, and the seals had decided the sand was where they would be safe. He went further and mapped the future of the ground: this will be over, this will be up here, and you won't even be able to see all this. The place he was standing had an expiration built into it, and he described it without weight, the way a person describes weather.
The other observer's confusion had a logic to it, and rswfire acknowledged it directly — seals do like to mix with rivers, they usually hang out at the Siltcoos. That was what made this different. For some reason, I've never seen them like this. And then he built the inference out of what he had been told and what he could see: too many people down there, and pelicans down there, and so the pod had moved here. They felt safer.
The recording trails off mid-thought, into the possibility that this was the same pod he had seen before, and the word amazing. The tide was still coming. The sandbar was still, for the moment, ground.