Colby boardwalk

Colby boardwalk is a narrow commercial corridor where Colby’s neighborhood gives way to its business district. Lined with small shops and stretching toward the beach, it is both a place to work and gather and a route through which Auden observes the town’s recurring patterns of movement and social life.

Setting and Commercial Layout

The boardwalk’s businesses include a smoothie shop, a beach-goods store selling inexpensive towels and shell clocks, and a pizzeria. About halfway along stands Clementine’s, marked by a bright orange awning. A notice on its front door announces the birth of Thisbe Caroline West on June 1, with her weight recorded as 6 pounds, 15 ounces. Inside are racks of T-shirts and jeans and a section for makeup and body lotion; a girl in a pink dress stands behind the register.

Farther along, the Last Chance Café advertises its onion rings, and a bike shop stands just before it. The sequence of storefronts makes the boardwalk legible as a modest business district: shops give way to food, while the bike shop and its gathering place bring the street’s local social life into view.

A Corridor of Movement

The boardwalk changes with the hour. On one late-afternoon walk, Auden pushes Thisbe in a stroller until the baby falls asleep beneath her blanket. They reach the business district to find the boardwalk deserted; in the brisk breeze, the ocean and the stroller wheels provide the only sounds. They continue as far as the Last Chance Café before seeing anyone.

Returning past Clementine’s, Auden notices a cyclist where the boardwalk opens onto the beach. He balances on the front wheel, hops forward, spins the handlebars, pedals backward in zigzags, and then banks off a nearby bench. The open space accommodates both a route to the shore and improvised riding. The cyclist’s fluid motion catches Auden’s attention before she recognizes him as the young man she had encountered earlier that day.

Work and Everyday Social Geography

Clementine’s also anchors Auden’s working routine. She usually leaves around five, takes a sandwich there, and works until closing. Afterward, she walks the boardwalk for about an hour before retrieving her car and driving elsewhere. The strip is therefore not just a destination for shopping: it structures the repeated passage from work into the long nighttime hours that follow.

Its gathering places reveal a daily division of social space. Around the shift change at Clementine’s, the girls linger near the register, gossiping and looking through fashion magazines, often staying even after their shifts have ended. The boys gather on the benches outside the bike shop to talk and read bike magazines. Auden sees these groups hanging around day after day, making the boardwalk a setting for local sociability as much as commerce.

Narrative Significance

The boardwalk brings together the novel’s contrasting tempos: the steady repetition of work and familiar gatherings, the quiet of Auden’s solitary walks, and the sudden, absorbing motion of the cyclist. Its orange awning, storefronts, benches, and opening onto the beach serve as practical landmarks in Auden’s experience of Colby. As she moves through the same stretch at different times, the boardwalk becomes a route by which the town’s routines—and the possibilities that interrupt them—come into view.