To The Coast To The Coast

We flew to the coast this past weekend. As we descended through the cloud cover our first glimpse of the ocean was through a rainbow. A good sign…no?

Where I come from the beaches are rocky. Smooth and round up the beach; rough and barnacled near the water. Turn one over and you’re likely to see crabs darting about scrambling for cover.

My favorite part of the beach are the logs. Pushed up high on the beach by the swelling tide they are mostly lost logs from the many booms that pass by. As kids we would beg my dad to push a log or two into the water so we could play on them. Yep…we’d get plenty of splinters, wrinkly fingers and toes, and chattering chins from being in the water far too long.

I read a letter to the editor in the local paper a few years ago. A new resident was complaining, saying that the beaches would be so much better if only ‘the waste wood was cleaned up from the shoreline’. Give him time, I thought, he’ll soon see the beauty that this natural decoration brings as the scent of wet wood fills the air after a storm; the secret hiding places that his kids will create as they build forts; the ever evolving landscape that each revolution of the tide brings.

Some of the pieces are obvious logging left overs and are quite large. Sometimes I wonder how they even float long enough to get here.

On this day we sat in the logs and watched a storm approaching before running inside and hunkering down.