Page 219
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
On the Delaware coast, a nearly empty late-season beach with pole fishermen and no lifeguards becomes charged by the fresh fact of one hundred and fifty-eight rescues.
Oregon enters the Delaware beach as a comparison point, so the coast is already doubled between present place and remembered scale. The middle-class fishermen and the speaker keeping his swimming away from their lines give the shore a social order, but it is one stripped of formal protection. Mentioning one hundred and fifty-eight rescues in the week before arrival makes the emptiness feel ominous instead of serene.
Delaware coast prose: forty miles almost like Oregon, scattered folks, middle-class pole fishermen, and a lifeguard who left the day before after 158 rescues. The place feels 'almost back in the old days when-nobody else was there.'