Colby beach

Colby beach is a shifting coastal setting where Auden’s first summer in Colby brings her into contact with the town’s nighttime life and, later, with the possibility of companionship. The beach is not simply a view beyond her father’s house: paths, dunes, boardwalk, and open sand carry her from domestic unease into unfamiliar gatherings, solitary walks, and a moment of unforced company with Maggie.

Setting and Access

From the house Auden shares with her father, Robert, Heidi, and the baby Thisbe, the ocean is close enough to be heard as soon as she turns off her car engine. Looking around the side of the house, she sees beach grass and a broad stretch of blue reaching the horizon. The view offers an immediate sense of openness, but it does not erase her doubts about spending a full summer with a family life she barely knows. The beach’s proximity makes the coast part of the everyday landscape; its meaning for Auden depends on what she chooses to do with that nearness.

The beach is reached not only from the house but by paths that branch away from town. One evening, Auden sets out for air after unpacking, attempting to study, and listening to Thisbe cry. She initially walks away from the boardwalk, then finds that the sidewalk ends at a cul-de-sac crowded with parked cars. A path and distant light lead her through beach grass and over dunes. The route is uncertain enough to give her pause, but she follows it, and the landscape opens suddenly onto a broad expanse of sand.

The geography also bears signs of change. The gathering place appears to have once been part of a larger beach; erosion, a storm, or both have left a peninsula-like stretch of sand. The shoreline is therefore not a static backdrop. Its altered shape determines where people assemble and gives the beach its particular arrangement of dunes, firepit, and open ground.

Gathering Place and Nightlife

At the peninsula, a crowd has made a gathering place out of the coast. Some people sit on driftwood arranged as makeshift benches; others stand around a firepit with a substantial blaze. A large truck sits nearby with a keg in its bed. Among those present is the tall, thin young man Auden has noticed at the bike shop, while another young man in a red windbreaker talks animatedly with two girls. The beach brings together people and activity that Auden has not yet encountered in her family home or daytime errands.

The gathering is not calm or carefully bounded. A short, stocky rider comes fast down the path, and Auden has to jump aside as he rounds a dune and shoots onto flatter sand. Two more riders follow, laughing and talking as they speed past. The bikes make the landscape a route for movement as well as a place to stand or sit: the path feeds into the beach, and the riders carry their momentum across the sand. For Auden, arriving at the gathering means entering a scene already in motion, where she must react quickly to people and activity she does not yet understand.

The beach also holds a quieter kind of motion. On an early-morning walk with Thisbe in a stroller, Auden discovers that pushing the stroller can settle the baby: after a few turns of the wheels, the crying gives way to silence. By the time they reach the business district, Thisbe is asleep beneath her blanket. They continue along the deserted boardwalk toward Last Chance Café, with the ocean and the stroller wheels the only sounds Auden notices. The walk connects the beach’s physical openness to a practical discovery about caring for Thisbe, rather than to spectacle or social excitement.

Solitude, Observation, and Company

On the return walk, near the orange awning of Clementine’s, Auden sees a cyclist moving through a space where the boardwalk opens onto the beach. He lifts the front wheel, hops forward, turns the handlebars, pedals backward in zigzags, then accelerates and banks off a nearby bench. Auden watches the sequence closely; its fluidity holds her attention until she recognizes the rider as the young man she bumped into on the path earlier that night. The same coastal passage that brought her into an unruly gathering becomes, in daylight’s aftermath, a place to observe an individual’s practiced movement. The beach and boardwalk link chance encounters across distinct moments without making them identical.

Another evening, Auden remains on the sand after a phone call with her mother leaves her feeling that her mother’s attention is difficult to secure and easy to lose. She watches families, children running ahead of the waves, couples holding hands, groups of girls and boys, and surfers on distant breakers as darkness approaches. Eventually the sand empties; lights come on in the houses behind her and on the pier. The contrast between the beach crowded with people and the same shore emptied by night makes her isolation tangible. Morning still seems far away, and the open coast cannot itself answer that loneliness.

Maggie finds Auden there. When Auden admits that she is not fine, Maggie does not try to draw her into a hug or console her with sugary reassurance. She drops her bag onto the sand and sits beside her, offering company without demanding a particular response. The beach becomes a setting for a small but consequential change: Auden, who has struggled to avoid being placed among people her mother disapproves of, recognizes that she is glad not to be alone. The scene’s importance lies in this modest shift, and in the shore’s capacity to hold both solitude and an unforced beginning of connection.