I was walking Hermosa Beach at sunset when I saw him.
He stood where the sand gives way to a shelf of dark rock and tide pools, a rod in his hands and his back to the shore, casting into the surf with the sun going down on the water in front of him — low and orange, dropping fast, the way it does here.
I never saw his face. I want to say that plainly, because it turned out to matter. For as long as I watched him he was only ever a back — a cap, a blue shirt, a small pack between his shoulders, two braced legs — and a line going out over the water, and then going out again.
That is most of what I know about him. That, and the fact that he stayed.
The surf was not gentle. It came in hard against the rock and broke white and loud, and now and then a wave threw up a wall of spray he did not step back from. He only set his feet and cast again. The light was going. The clouds had caught fire the way they do in the last minutes of a Costa Rican day, the water had gone the color of a struck match, and still the line went out. And out. And out.
There was something in the repetition I can only call prayer. Not the kneeling kind — the other kind, the patient kind, the one that is mostly just showing up and doing the small faithful thing again, and then again. He was not pleading with the ocean. He was not bargaining with it. He was casting, and waiting, and casting, and somewhere in that rhythm was a discipline I think most of us have quietly stopped practicing.
Hope gets dressed up too often. We print it on cards and string it across banners and ask it to do work it was never built for — to feel like certainty, to promise the catch, to guarantee that this cast will be the one. But the truer thing, the thing that actually lasts, is far more ordinary than that. It looks like a man on a rock with wet shoulders and a failing light, sending the line out one more time anyway.
Salt Between the Tides
The sea kept time against the stone, Each wave struck hard, then slipped away. He cast a line through winds unknown, And watched the horizon bend to gray.
Read the full poem →I have mostly thought of hope as a feeling — something that arrives, or doesn't; something the day hands you or keeps for itself. But the man on the rocks was not waiting to feel anything. He was working. From where I stood, hope looked less like a mood and more like a motion: the arm drawing back, the line leaving the reel, the willingness to do it once more after the last cast came back with nothing.
We are not patient with hope. We want the line to come back soon, and heavy, and we want it to prove something. We reel in early, half-convinced the water is empty, and we call our leaving realism. But the man did not reel in early. He let the lure sink. He let the long stretch of nothing be part of the work, and he did not take it personally.
Because that is the part you cannot see from the beach — whether the water is giving him anything at all. He might have been having a good evening. He might have stood there for hours with nothing. From where I was, the two looked exactly alike: a man, a rod, the surf, the failing light. And whichever it was, it had not talked him into going home.
That, I think, is the thing. Not the catching. The casting. The willingness to send the line out one more time into water that owes you nothing and has promised you nothing.
Maybe that is all hope ever really asks of us. Not the certainty that the next cast will land. Not the optimism that this time will be different. Only the willingness to come back to the edge of the water and send the line out one more time — and to keep finding that willingness, cast after cast, long after the easy version of it has worn off.
The sun finished going down. Hermosa Beach does not make a long ceremony of it — the color holds, and then it doesn't. I turned to walk back, and the last I saw of him he was still out there, a dark shape against a darker sea, drawing his arm back again.
I don't know if he caught anything. I would like to tell you he did. But I think the truer ending is the one I actually watched: the cast going out over the water, hope with a rod in its hands, refusing to call it a night.
Yours, in ink and embers,
