A lake, a road, and a bunch of eucalyptus: the trees in Navia stretch out like upright matches. Against the evening sun, their trunks looked like jail bars cutting across the firmament. I simply had to take a picture.
It’s not like we weren’t going to stop the car anyway. After driving through a mismatched Gijón, and dropping our stuff off in an unimpressive Navia, the Asturian village’s beach was the first pleasing sight my family and I had come across all day. To our right, wild waves crashed against the edge of a downhill dune. To our left, a lake and eucalyptus. A beach bar by the parking lot played something that could have been Pimpinela but, aside from a few surfers and afternoon hikers, we were completely alone.
Barely a second after my mom had parked our car, I grabbed my sister’s hand and rushed off with her into the makeshift woods. The needle-trunked trees weaved their way through the gold-lit sky, the sun’s reflection shimmering on the lake behind them. I took a picture (or a thousand) but it wasn’t long before my aunt was there, calling us over to come see the beach.
It was on that short walk from left to right that I saw it: where the woods ended and the beach began, there was mist. A billion bits of microscopic seawater propelled forward by the force of the Cantabric sea, a watercloud in the distance, twisting its way around the last remaining trees, salty droplets backlit by the sun to form a heavenly halo. It was calling to me.
I told my sister to join my aunt, and waved at the both of them to signal I’d be back soon. The mist was barely a ten-minute walk away, and I felt like there had never been so much beauty so easily within my reach, each step taking me closer to it, past tree stumps and patches of grass sprouting from the ever sandier ground.
I’ll spare you the walk, though. I never reached the mist. Or I did, but it was nothing special. Standing there, by the trees I’d expected to join inside a gold-pink cloud, there was no halo, no beauty, nothing but grass and dust.
As I made my way back to my family I almost tripped over a fallen branch. In the distance, I saw my sister stifle a laugh as I dragged myself towards her in my sand-filled shoes. But behind me I knew the mist had reappeared. I could sense it looming over my head, gorgeous as ever, water vapour reflecting the last rays of a sun that was now sinking behind the horizon, a million reds and pinks and yellows against a backdrop of pale, summer blues. For a second, I considered turning back. Then I shook my head at no one in particular.
Fuck the mist, I thought. Fool me once.
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