Every morning at breakfast, we watched from our terrace on top of the hill, as planes took off from
the parachute school down below and climbed up into the sky to expel their students high above the breaking waves of Laurosu Beach. So one morning, after breakfast, we came down for a closer look.
There was a crew of Land Rovers lined up along the shore.
There were tell-tale tracks in the sand.
There were no wrecks and nobody drownded…
And the waves rolled in like thunder.
And then suddenly, out of nowhere, a surfer appeared like flotsam on the water.
He was there, then he was gone, and we never saw him again.
As we came level with the Rizzanèse, the beach became a sandbar across the mouth of the river, a lagoon on one side and the sea on the other, freshwater and saltwater punctuated by our footprints.
As we stood there, a plane took off from the riverside runway, over our heads and up and away and over the sea, climbing like a lark ascending until its engines stall and its silent parachutes start to fall.
They float down in a zigzag dance, chasing each other across the sky, echoing the ebb and flow of the water below, surfing the airwaves until the ground rushes up to meet them and they return to earth.
The ripples of the lagoon lap gently on the sand while foaming waves crash onto the seaward shore.
At the top of the beach two men undressed by their car. As they took off their clothes they became children again and ran laughing and singing down to the sea, surfboards ready to catch a new wave.
Other high-energy activities were also available.
