August 2021 – Beesquared

I gazed at the horizon on Saturday for the first time all summer. It was aboard the ferry to Manhattan from Rockaway Beach. My mother and I had taken the ferry to the beach in the late afternoon.

I sat portside, atop a box filled with preservers, in the forward section of the upper deck. A guy with a surfboard in a bag at his side sipped from a 16-ounce can of Coors. A young woman across from me read a paperback. She looked up occasionally to photograph the bay with her phone. Some people wore hoodies to ward off the late-afternoon chill.

A steel-gray sky blanketed the horizon. As we made our way north, a sailboat bobbed passed us heading east.

The ferry slipped past the tip of the peninsula and the horizon emerged. Because of the clouds I could barely make out New Jersey on the mainland. It was like staring into a Rothko field of bands of blue. A boat headed north provided a pinpoint of white.

“Inlanders,” wrote Melville in “Moby Dick,” “must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling.” For a few hours on Saturday, I was on the water and loved it.

I had nearly given up this blog.

Not because I didn’t have more to write, but because I ran into a glitch with the site itself. Whenever I clicked on links from the archive, I received a message that read “Oops! That page can’t be found.”

For the better part of a year, my attempt at a fix was to call tech support at the company that hosts the site. Tech support didn’t have a fix.

In time, I stopped posting. It seemed I always had something better to work on. But that didn’t feel right either.

Then I searched Google. That seems like an obvious go-to; I think it took me as long as it did because I imagined the problem lay with hosting. Thanks to Google, I learned the problem lay with WordPress.

WordPress users suggested a change to a setting on the back end of the site. That didn’t solve my problem, but it got me to play around with a few other settings. I tweaked one. Not it. Then another. Nope. I changed a third setting. Voila. The archived posts appeared.

I feel so pleased to have fixed the problem that I’m posting this.