Naomi Riddle

The idea of a bay can be deceiving. Diamond Bay has no gentle arc of a sandbar, no flat body of water that mirrors the blue of the sky. This bay has a precipice. It is a razor sharp cut out in the cliff, a severe point at which the waves meet the coast. It has an edge.

I drove to Diamond Day in the days and weeks after my father passed away. I wanted to see ocean, I wanted the wind to graze against the skin on my face and I wanted my lips to go blue with the cold. But what I wanted most of all was to see the thin clear line of a horizon.

And so I find myself returning to Diamond Bay again and again. I listen to the rush of the waves against the rock, wearing away at the sediment. I listen for the rhythms in the swell, an upsurge of water followed by a falling away, a sound that on a calm day is just like the soft inhalation and exhalation of breath.