Cars Along Coastal Roads

By mid-morning there is barely an empty stretch of road left near the sea.

Cars line the coastal streets nose to tail, tucked into sandy verges, balanced beneath leaning pines, squeezed beside stone walls that have stood long before summer arrived.

They come in every colour: faded blue, bright red, chalk white, silver dulled by salt air. Seen from a distance they look less like vehicles and more like something the tide has left behind.

The roads themselves seem too small for the season. They curve around coves and beaches as they always have, never designed for the thousands who now follow them toward the water. Yet every day the cars appear again, gathering quietly along the edges of the landscape.

They remind me of shells scattered along the shoreline.

Each one contains evidence of a journey. Each one carries traces of somewhere else. Some have travelled only a few kilometres. Others have crossed countries.

Families unfold themselves from them carrying umbrellas and coolers. Grandparents emerge carefully. Children burst out before the engines have fully stopped, already running toward the sea.

By evening the roads look different again. The cars sit dusted with salt, sand gathered in footwells, damp towels hanging from windows. They seem quieter now, as though exhausted by the same day that has tired everyone else.

The sea, meanwhile, remains entirely uninterested in their arrival. Waves continue breaking against the shore exactly as they had before the first car appeared and exactly as they will after the last one leaves.

Yet each summer morning they return, arranging themselves along the coastline in bright irregular rows. Colourful shells washed ashore by a different tide.