Brooke: Seashore

Is this descriptive enough? Does it employ all of the 5 senses? Hopefully! Because that was the assignment. I had fun with it. This is a loose description of what the beaches are like in Arica:

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The sand gave way beneath her feet, pouring over her toes and dusting her ankles. It was a light gray color. Not white. Not a perfect burnt yellow. Gray–like a dry stretch of cement with an uneven peppering of black.

This beach was far from the tropical dream. The coast was wide and flat, with little vegetation and certainly no exotic palm trees or hibiscus bushes lining the sand. Greenish sea foam bubbled up during high tide and left a frothy residue along the shore, dragging with it stray twigs and rocks and little pieces of shell and fishing line.

It didn’t smell like a tropical dream either. No coconut oil, or sunscreen, or sweet papaya juice. It stank. Of salt, and fish and bird droppings. Beachgoers were constantly scanning the sky warily–making sure not to sit below the rowdy flocks of gulls circling above. The air was gritty and thick with salt, too. And breathing in, she could taste the ocean. It filled her mouth, made her tongue curl with its briny punch.

The wind blew in wildly from the west and whipped at the edges of her clothing, wrenched her hair from its ponytail holder. After a few times she stopped fighting it, and let the loose strands fly up and over her face–let the wind create a tangled halo of hair around her head. She felt like Medusa.

In the winter the waves were too big for swimming, the waters too cool. Families brought blankets and sat on them quickly, all at once (before they caught in the wind and blew away).

There was something soothing about it, quiet and serene. The subtle stink of fish, the muted gray sand blending with the muted gray sky. She sat near, but not next to the huddling families and listened. Listened to the waves smacking and the gulls squawking, listened to the soft lullaby of the ocean shore.