Four beaches of summer: Ocean Grove.

The peninsulas glared at each other across ten kilometres of water, two pincers of an angry crab. The ferry strolled from one to the other, passing its sister ship going the other way, and backed into the concrete receiving dock, directed by short engine bursts. Something heavy clanged and cars drove onto land two by two, like animals changing their minds about the ark. We were in the last pair. The car crashed across the grate, and I drove around the curves of Queenscliff, a tired seaside village with Historic Maritime Features, and old people. It was a mid-summer Saturday morning, and the sun was just breaking through that air-brewed mixture of low cloud, mist and seaspray that hangs over the water on mornings like this.

Hours later. Too many cars jammed together in a small seaside town. Had I been determined to stop, it would have been impossible. But the parking space opened up like a clam anticipating a subterranean meal. We went to the overcrowded beach, and I fell asleep in my beach chair in the heaving mass of bikinied fifteen-year-olds, crossing with fluttering eyes the surf-bound path of my teenage foot soldiers intent on roller breaking, shorts worn like army privates. I woke up later, much later. Waves crashed, far away. The sun had raced ahead. It was mid-afternoon. The beach was impossibly packed, a maelstrom of bodies and beach huts over which hung the cloying smell of sunscreen. Two giant shadows, all arms and legs and torsoes, raced out of the surf's impossible light, silhouettes in the sun, and shook salt water on me like golden retrievers. Tall as me now. Fifteen months apart. Teenagers.

Their smaller sister, limbs of curved twig, was gold in the white foam of the breakers. She resembled her much older sister, decades ago, when I had driven her to this same beach and pitched a tent at the old campground and visited the same main street, an arch stretched over the hill at the top of the town, and we had ordered pizza and eaten it on the sand in the dying sun. Now, an eternity later, the same long, low breakers rolled in.

The last ferry took us back to the right pincer and the crab stopped juggling for the day.