Well Nature, what a show! Last night I saw your big orange moon rise over the ocean, then today, I woke up at 4 a.m. and it was already really light out. North of the 50th parallel, winter days are short, but summer days start around 3 a.m. I checked my phone to see the exact time the sun rose; only fifteen minutes to wait. I put on my down parka (yes, parka, the kind with the fur around the hood; it was about six degrees Celsius outside) and headed down to the beach to watch the sun come up. It was a race, because even though the sky was clear, there was a very solid looking fog bank advancing from the south. As the sun emerged from behind Point Noir, the fog bank arrived at the same point on the horizon.
I saw the sun for a few seconds, and then it was blocked out as though it was still below the hills. The fog bank had not reached me yet, but I watched as it met the rocks at the other end of the beach where the moon was setting.
I was so excited to witness all of this that I had trouble falling back to sleep. Later, when low tide came around I went to see if I could make it to first bay. It was pretty wavy and there was lots of brownish sea foam everywhere, like you see in the photo at the top of the page. The foam was so thick that the wind would blow little balls off the top of the piles and my dog would chase them as they skipped and rolled merrily across the sand. You can see a little foam ball in the middle of that top photo, it is floating just above the horizon line and it looks like a small brownish cloud.
The sand shifts, especially over the winter, and it is always a surprise to see what the rocks look like in the spring. You would think that rocks don't change, and they mostly don't, but the sand can go up or down by a few meters, and that certainly changes the familiar landmarks of the coastal edge. This year, there was a lot less sand in the gap between the end of the beach and first bay. This also uncovered lots of inorganic material that was hidden under the sand, so I gathered two bags full of mainly styrofoam to take back and put in the garbage. Styrofoam doesn't go away, it just breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces. The shifting sand also uncovered this tunnel. It wasn't there before, or at least it was full of sand, so I decided to climb through it. Made me feel like a little kid again!
They tell us the we should watch sunrises and sunsets, we should gaze at the moon and look up at the stars. We feel better when we do, and it's true. That's all. There is no but.
Truth!!
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