On a Sunday morning in late November, I get in the car and drive to the edge of Lake Erie.

Not to the beach, where we spent sun baked summer afternoons spurning responsibility, but that parking lot where the rocky shoreline shows like a warning sign through a rusted chain link fence, where sometimes on clear days we bring takeout from the dive on the main drag.

Howling winds tear up the water. Seagulls circle and squawk. A lady with a tiny dog on a leash struggles to tame her wild, whipping hair. All these living creatures are scurrying to safety, but I sit idling, hesitating, stuck. Struck, maybe.

The voice on the radio says a storm is coming, but a van load of people shows up. They spring out of the Volkswagen and gather their wetsuits and surfboards. I don’t talk to them, don’t even get out the car, but I imagine them saying things like We don’t need no ocean, man, we don’t need the sun. I watch, fascinated, as they bypass the fence, and run down to a stretch of gravelly sand. They wade out to knee deep water, throw themselves belly down on bright boards, a shock of color in the granite waves, and front crawl into treacherous, frothing crests.

A slanting rain begins to pelt my windshield and I think about how sometimes the best thing any of us can hope for is to be in exactly the wrong place at the right time.

Sara Dobbie is a writer from Southern Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Menacing Hedge, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Look for stories forthcoming from Emerge Literary Journal, Drunk Monkeys, and Fiction Kitchen Berlin. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie.