Do you want to watch a sunrise?
It’s been ages since I woke up to watch the sun rise. We did it once or twice during visits to Hilton Head in my childhood. We packed up breakfast, drove to Sea Pines Beach, and spread a big blanket on the sand to watch the show. It was a crap shoot as to whether the effort would be worth it, but it was an adventure. It was also very early. In June and July, that meant a 5:30 a.m.-ish wake-up call, and once my sister and I were teenagers, that just wasn’t our thing.
These days, as the parent of a toddler, getting up early is par for the course — and vacations are no exception. In late April, the sun was a bit of a later riser than it was on those childhood trips to Hilton Head in the middle of the summer. And we were staying in an east-facing villa on Myrtle Beach, so I could simply set an alarm for 6:15 a.m., roll out of bed, pull on a sweater, pour some coffee, and take my balcony seat for the day’s show.
The air was dry and chilly, so I wrapped myself in a beach towel for warmth. After a quick look around, I saw my idea was far from original. People were already sitting on the balconies above, below, and beside me, phones in hand, ready to catch the sun on camera. Others dotted the beach in groups of twos and threes, milling around, waiting.
The horizon had lightened by the time I sat down. The water was a rippled slate gray underneath a skinny, dark indigo line that stretched between sea and sky. Above, the rich blue dissolved into radiant orange, which lightened into a tissue of peach, which gently faded through pastel blue into indigo again. The image was so dazzling, it took several minutes for me to actually notice the rhythmic crashes of the waves.
A few minutes later, at a point just left of center on the horizon, a small blot of hot pink appeared. It wedged a V that split the indigo line, then the orange, then the peach like an oncoming car headlight on a darkened road. As the V grew wider and brighter, I found myself whispering “c’mon, c’mon,” as if the sun needed my urging to emerge.
From the bottom of the V popped a slice of sun — a blazing light that hurt to look at. Up the sun rose, into a glowing orange speck, then a semicircle, then a three-quarters circle. It dragged itself up quickly from the slate gray of the ocean until, finally, it broke its bonds and floated into the sky alone. I had to resist the urge to clap my hands before using them to cover my eyes, which needed to recover from the brightness I’d forced them open to see.
As the sun crept higher, the vibrancy of the blues and oranges and pinks began to fade. The people on the beach began scattering across the sand. My neighbors in the surrounding balconies disappeared into their rooms.
I stayed outside a few minutes longer, trying to commit everything I’d watched over the past 20 minutes to memory. Then the breeze picked up and my beach towel flapped and I remembered that it was, in fact, pretty cold on that balcony. I looked out over the water one more time, closing my eyes to sear in the image. Then I stood up, grabbed my coffee mug, and ducked inside the sliding door.
Epilogue: We had a supermoon that night, and it was pretty spectacular, too.
