Grab sample

Low tide, mid-afternoon, and the flat grey light Auckland can produce for a fortnight without apparently varying.  Cold enough that I kept my hands in my pockets on the way down and regretted it at the water’s edge.

I brought a jar.  There is no way to crouch at the edge of the water filling a jam jar without feeling faintly ridiculous, and a man walking a dog gave me the look that acknowledgement deserves.  The water went in cloudy with disturbed sediment and then settled on the walk back into something that looked like very weak tea with a suggestion of green in it.

That is the whole of what it looks like.  Slightly turbid, slightly green, a few specks of grit at the bottom.  If you handed it to someone with no context they would describe it as dirty water and they would not be wrong.

A drop of it under glass is a different proposition entirely.

Things moving with purpose.  Things moving without any apparent purpose at all, which is somehow more interesting.  And then the ones that hold still: shapes with an architecture to them, rows and radials and edges that are clearly not accidental, sitting there among the debris looking like they have been manufactured.  Some are broken.  Most of what you see is broken, actually, which is a detail I want to come back to another time.

There is a term for what I did today.  A grab sample is one container, one place, one moment.  It tells you nothing about what was there yesterday, or what will be there in a fortnight, or what is happening thirty metres out.  In a study design that is a weakness you have to write into the limitations section, and I have written it into a few.

On a cold afternoon in the middle of August it seemed like the entire point.

The jar is on the bench.  I will tip it out tomorrow.