By Victor Greto
Downtown Fort Lauderdale at 5:30 a.m. is lonely: nearly empty six-lane streets lined with blurry-eyed streetlights signifying half-lighted strip malls.
But go to the beach before dawn, somewhere between Sunrise and Oakland Park boulevards, stand on the damp sand and stare off toward the water — that’s real despair, primeval and inhuman, from where all our myths of creation were born.
But it’s only prologue to a more happy hour.
Standing on the beach in the dark, creation feels like the breath of a persistent cool breeze, smells like salt and sand, and sounds like painfully shy waves reaching toward you, then retreating, but inching closer.
The palm trees that stand like sentinels on the beach just east of the wall that lines A1A look as though they are staring at the sea, their fronds blown back like women’s hair, their bodies leaning with the wind.
It may seem like a miracle that you feel no humidity during a June morning in South Florida.
It’s perhaps an even greater miracle that you see only a scattering of people: a couple sitting together on the beach and calmly watching the liquid darkness; a woman jogging while holding her shoes in her left hand, a stolen smile directed toward you; two men sticking four fishing poles hard and fast in the sand; yet another walking along the sidewalk behind you, hands in his pockets.
Right now, there seems to be no end to the black sea, and the whitecaps look like they’ve been bleached to more sharply reflect the moon, stars and the streetlamps that line A1A.
Aside from the muffled roar of waves, you know there’s water out there because jeweled ships and boats wink and grow closer with each moment.
If Columbus had asked me to go with him at this hour of the morning, I would have told him no. I know for a fact I’d’ve been swallowed by the darkness, or have fallen off the edge of the horizon into an impossibly darker abyss.
But just after 6, the sun has arrived — or, rather, its rosy fingertips have, pressed confidently against billowy clouds.
You can’t see it, but you know the sun’s there because the sky has perceptibly lightened into a mock twilight. You wish this quarter-light would stay; it feels like it’s your secret.
The sky, however, rapidly turns an aqua-blue, a mirror to the sea, and cracks in the clouds turn into slices of burnt orange.
The sea suddenly shimmers as spears of light hit their marks, and both sky and sea tremble to make love.
It’s no wonder many of the ancients thought the sky and sea made love to create the world, that they thought the sun an offspring of both, a second-generation deity, female first, then a male fresh from the womb, sticky and red.
In one ancient Indian myth, the sun was the golden garment that graced the goddess of the boundless sky.
That makes sense.
It makes as much sense that in ancient Greece the sun became Apollo, the god of reason and enlightenment.
Everything makes sense when you’re making love, whether you’re the sun or the sea, whether you’re swarming with thoughts or overcome with emotion.
But that moment climaxes, too.
Everything begins to sound like South Florida again, and it’s like the sun has betrayed itself by revealing a secret: It is day.
Lights on the boats and the streetlights dim and vanish, both humbled and useless.
Now, sit on the tepid sand and place the palms of your hands gently against your eyes.
Listen: Over the din of waves you can hear the rush of racing cars.