Duxbury Beach revisited, August 2022

It's been several years since I last recorded at Duxbury Beach, and those recordings ended up as central elements in two compositions: "Trompettes Marines," side A of my 2013 LP on Sedimental, Figures Without Ground; and "Duxbury," a track on the 10" vinyl compilation record that makes up part of Flint Magazine 1 & 2.

Duxbury Beach is a short drive from my parents' house in Marshfield, MA. You can only go over the bridge to the beach with the right kind of sticker on your car; one of several reasons we Marshfield kids used to call it "Deluxebury." Powder Point Bridge was one of the first things that stirred my interest in the environment when I was an adolescent: namely, the massive number of rainforest timbers used to build it led me to join the Rainforest Action Network for a few years. Duxbury Beach is also home to Piping Plovers, a protected species which inspires no end of controversy when stretches of beach are closed to allow the birds to breed, or when foxes are culled to reduce pressure on the plover population. Meanwhile, the birds and foxes just do what they need to do, as humans continue to do as we've always done: fight each other over what supposedly belongs to whom, a temporary condition we keep mistaking for eternal.