corvi

1.
On Wednesday, July 31 2019, I was riding the usual ferry to work, and looked out the window, and there was a roiling yellow light in the pewter-grey sea, apparently underwater. It was strange and lovely and vanished after about 30 seconds.

My only guess as to what happened is a momentary perfect alignment between the sun behind me, a gap in the clouds, the ferry, and a fancy house with a lot of windows up on the cliffs on Piers Island, reflecting sunlight onto the sea. It's not impossible there were divers doing something underwater, but I don't know what it would have been.

Needless to say, I spent all the rest of the ferry rides this week scrutinizing the water in front of Piers Island, but the accidental sea-light stonehenge did not reoccur.

2.
On September 28, 2018, I was at Fort McCauley park with my mother. It is an old gun emplacement and the various concrete mount points, ramparts, lookouts, and bunkers offer excellent things to stand on and gaze out across the sea. We were walking atop a rough stone breakwater at sunset, when suddenly a gap in the walkway filled with lambent light, like someone had suddenly switched on strings of old-fashioned incandescent holiday lights underground.

We think there was a cave in the seabreak, maybe where the waves had cracked the concrete, which, a bare week after the autumn equinox, lined up with the setting sun and poured light into the ground. For about three minutes, there was a light from the cracked stone, and then it was gone.