Vox Meditantis

Beach or mountains? Which do you prefer? Why?

Saturday, 22nd November 2025

The wind had teeth this afternoon – not malicious, just honest about November – and the stretch of shoreline beyond the harbour proved it. This is the ungroomed bit where the town stops pretending, where crab pots pile in small cairns of rust and practicality, and the gulls conduct their usual operatic grievances over territory that belongs, in truth, to the tide. I walked it twice, collar up, hands deep in pockets, thinking about altitude.

There haven’t been many mountains in my life. A conference near the Appalachians once – I remember the morning fog sitting in valleys like something poured, and the way distance looked layered rather than flat. A residency weekend in Vermont, where the silence felt deliberate, almost stern, and I’d lain awake wondering if peace was supposed to feel quite that uncompromising. Both times I’d been glad to return to the harbour, where the constancy is water rather than stone, and the view changes twice a day on schedule.

But the question – beach or mountains – isn’t really about topography. It’s about what kind of steadiness we’re drawn to, and why.

What the Harbour Has Taught

The tides here are a form of reassurance. Not because they’re gentle – they’re not, particularly – but because they’re legible. High at 6:17 this morning, low at half-twelve, the next arrival already noted in tomorrow’s paper like an appointment you can trust won’t be cancelled. For thirty years I’ve checked those numbers before choosing my walking route, adjusting for wind and weather, learning the small pragmatism of living beside something larger than oneself that nevertheless operates by rules.

Repetition, it turns out, is a kind of courage. The same harbour walk, the same consulting-room chairs, the same ritual of making tea whilst the kettle does its patient work. I used to think courage was mountainous – dramatic ascents, summit moments, the view from some hard-won peak that justified the climb. What the shoreline has taught me is that courage more often looks like returning. Showing up again after the tide has rearranged everything, after storms have redistributed the familiar landmarks, after you’ve left and come back and found both the leaving and the returning necessary.

Community, too, is tidal. Marcus at the café, Tom with his two-finger salute across Harbour Street, Jenny’s conspiratorial grin over library business, Maggie at the Historical Society surrounded by the town’s careful memory. They ebb and return, ebb and return. Some days the shoreline feels crowded with familiar faces; others, I walk alone and am grateful for the solitude. Neither state is permanent. That, perhaps, is the essential lesson – flux is not failure, and needing space doesn’t mean you’ve lost your place.

The Mountain Cabin Version

There’s another Catherine, though – one I imagine when the town feels too close, when every errand becomes a series of small accountings. She lives somewhere with altitude. Vermont, perhaps, or the foothills near Québec where stone breaks through soil and the trees know how to bend without breaking. Fewer neighbours. More silence. No one expecting her at the Historical Society, no obligation to produce risotto on cue, no gentle surveillance masquerading as civic care.

In this version, she wakes to mountains that don’t move, brews coffee in a kitchen where no one will drop by unannounced, and spends her days in the sort of productive solitude that looks, from a distance, like wisdom. She reads more. Writes, perhaps. Definitely doesn’t attend committee meetings about riverfront development or worry whether she’s been seen at church often enough to remain in good standing with Father Walsh.

It’s a seductive fiction.

The problem, of course, is that I’d simply export my over-functioning to a steeper view. Within a month I’d be volunteering at whatever passed for a local historical society, offering pro bono counselling to the nearest town, organising a lecture series on rural mental health, and wondering why the peace I’d climbed toward still felt just out of reach. You can’t outrun your own psychology by changing the postcode. Mountains don’t cure what attention might.

A Brief Taste of Altitude

The Québec trip I keep postponing – twice now, most recently to accommodate the museum’s sanctuary hours – offers a middle path. The hills rising above the St Lawrence, stone architecture that remembers older negotiations between people and landscape, a language that isn’t quite mine and therefore permits a useful anonymity. Altitude without abandoning the river entirely.

I’ve told myself I’m going in December, booked and rebooked the modest hotel with its promised view. Part of me suspects I’m drawn less to Québec itself than to the version of myself who would go alone, without itinerary or apology, and discover whether solitude at elevation feels different from solitude at sea level. Whether the silence is companionable or merely empty. Whether I’d rest or simply worry in French.

The fantasy isn’t really about geography – it’s about permission. Mountains suggest escape; the shore suggests staying put. One feels like courage; the other feels like surrender. But I’m old enough now to know that staying – genuinely staying, not just remaining – can be the braver choice.

Learning to Live with Flux

So if the question is beach or mountains, the answer is beach. Or rather, harbour. Not because it’s perfect – it isn’t – but because I’m finally learning to live with flux rather than fantasise about escape.

The tide goes out; the tide returns. People arrive and leave and sometimes come back. The shoreline I walked this afternoon will be underwater tonight and reappear tomorrow wearing different seaweed like a change of costume. Nothing here is permanent except the impermanence itself, and there’s an odd comfort in that once you stop trying to nail everything down.

Mountains offer the consolation of constancy – the same peak, the same view, the solid ground that doesn’t rearrange itself twice daily. But constancy isn’t the same as safety, and stillness isn’t the same as peace. What the harbour teaches, year after patient year, is that steadiness can accommodate motion. That you can be both rooted and responsive. That home is not a fixed point but a returning.

I’ll make my Québec pilgrimage eventually, and perhaps the St Lawrence will teach me something the Delaware hasn’t. Perhaps altitude will offer a perspective the shoreline can’t. But I suspect I’ll come home confirmed in what I already half-know – that the work isn’t to find the perfect landscape but to attend, finally, to wherever I am.

The gulls have settled now, their arguments resolved or merely postponed. The light is doing that November thing where it seems to withdraw not gradually but all at once, as if it’s remembered an appointment elsewhere. Tomorrow the tide will return at 7:03, the harbour will adjust its furniture accordingly, and I’ll likely walk this same stretch again because repetition, it turns out, is how we learn to stay.

Beach, then. Not because it’s easier, but because it’s teaching me what I most need to learn – that flux is liveable, that community returns even after it ebbs, that the courage to stay might matter more than the courage to climb.

I’ll report back on what the St Lawrence teaches me when December comes. Consider it a promise, or perhaps just another tide to trust.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.