Locals still point with a flat palm toward where the old pier used to be. You can tell the newcomers because they look for it with their eyes instead of their chin. A storm took it years ago and the arguments since have been about how much memory should cost. Every few months somebody proposes a fund-raiser, somebody else posts a spreadsheet, and the thread dies when the price tag clears the last screen of a phone.
I walk the shoreline and practice subtraction. If you erase the pier, you see the channels. If you erase the boards on windows, you see the view. Erase the view and you remember why the boards exist. That’s the rhythm here: build, lose, argue, build smaller. I don’t fault it. It is a kind of honesty. The bay keeps the receipts and the calendar both.
In the bait shop there’s a framed photo of kids leaning too far over the old rail, a memory preserved in someone else’s caution. The owner says people still ask where to buy a day pass for a structure that hasn’t existed in years. At town meetings, renderings get passed around like hymnal pages—sunset orange, families walking in silhouettes. Then someone reads a number with six digits and the room goes quiet enough to hear the refrigerator kick on. It isn’t that people don’t care; they do. They just know what water and time do to wood, and what taxes do to patience.
A boy throws bread at gulls and a man who looks like his grandfather tells him to stop feeding beggars. The birds rise and fall with the same plan they had before the scolding. We are all repeating ourselves. The trick is to notice which lines are habits and which are warnings. The missing pier says both things at once: come back, be ready.