Pam Clements

Egret

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

There’s a breeze coming off the water, here at First Encounter Beach. I’ve fled to the Northeast for a vacation on our long summer break. The rest of the summer I’ll spend at my parents’ house in Buffalo.

The tide is low, so the salt grass tufts are fully exposed. The tide on Cape Cod’s bay beaches is famously vast, as it inches forward, then retreats across shallow flats and bars, at least a mile out into the bay. A turn of the head to each side offers a scene of low dunes with houses perched atop and a rank of wooden stairways sloping down to the beach. You can see the entire swerve of the Cape swinging down toward Boston, swooping up to Provincetown, making you feel like you are sitting on the rim of a shallow bowl. This time of year, early June, before school’s out, the beach is nearly deserted in the morning. That stiff wind, cool enough for a sweatshirt, has helped keep crowds away. The beach is anything but deserted, however. Just a bit down the beach, just over a salt grass hillock, is a flash of white. A migrating egret is looking for breakfast in the tide pools.

That reminds me of my solitary walks in South Carolina, where the egrets spend their winters. They cover a lot of territory, those white birds, both the common Whit Egret and the imposing Great Egret. They travel thousands of miles each year to breed in the north, then winter in warmer waters. The wind keeps picking up. In Charleston, there rarely seems to be a strong wind, and never a “brisk” one. Only tropical storms, or a hurricane, ever moves that heavy, humid air. Dry sand occasionally does blow across itself on the beach, reminding me of snow skittering across highway lanes. This image melts my two Atlantic shores into one.

It is also true that, like the egrets, I am a part of both slices of the seaboard. Have migrated only once, myself, first to Charleston, and the second time, back to New York State, where I have stayed. A confirmed Northerner, I have however come to admit that five years in the deep South changed me. Permanently, not simply as a strange interlude. The stay changed me profoundly; I am forever a hybrid – not as deeply as an immigrant, but no longer able to think like, or be, a pure Northerner. Unlike the egrets that remain their elegant selves no matter where they are, classic in the simplicity of their lives, I did not remain unchanged by my migration.

I used to think that my response to five years of living in the south was mainly to discover my innate northernness, or to be more specific, my northeasternness, just as traveling in Europe made me acutely aware of being an American, for good or ill. The beaches of Charleston made me long for New England. Bird life in the South Carolina marshes was exotic, different from what I knew – black-faced ibises, ruddy turnstones with their oyster-cracking beaks, black skimmers with their heavy orange bills, and pelicans – oh my, pelicans! I did not notice the egrets, sanderlings, and other birds at home in both worlds.

But lately, I realize that maybe I am a little bit like an egret, a large white wading bird touched by living in both worlds, one more than the other, and by choice. I will always be drawn to Charleston. I do not regret my time there, although I was often unhappy.

The shore breeze off First Encounter Beach has picked up. This is where the Mayflower pilgrims supposedly met their first North Americans; this is where cultural contact was first made, beginning the whole grand, tragic history of America. Sand is blowing in my face, uncomfortable. Even the egret has given up. And, feeling at home, I too am going home.

🙢🙗🙠

Pam Clements lives in Albany, New York, having retired from teaching medieval literature at Siena College. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in several literary magazines, including Kalliope, the Plenitudes, The Palo Alto Review, The Baltimore Review, and others. She has published one volume of poetry, Earth Science, and has recently completed a memoir about the five years she spent teaching in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1980s.