Brothers at the beach,
Their cares are out of reach.
They shovel sand,
Walk hand in hand,
Exploring crabs,
And keeping tabs
On anything that crawls.
Brothers on the stones,
They lick their ice cream cones.
Flavours blue
And peachy too,
In chilly air,
They don’t despair,
Each lick a treat to savour.
On the beach, I found some things that have been lying around for a long, long time.
This tree, for example, has been clinging to life for decades, possibly waiting to change into a lizard and join its friend farther up the beach. Something happened to the tree, perhaps as it fell over with its roots still in the ground. Maybe at that time it was much smaller and the huge boulder injured it, or prevented it from growing straight.
This may have been when the gnarly knot that we call a burl was formed. These twisted lumps have an interesting grain, and markings that make them special. Artists love to take burls to their woodworking shops to make clocks and coffee tables out of the slices they can cut from the burl.
Just look at the size of this burl. I’m sure the rock had something to do with its formation over many years.
Under this tree, the sandy soil contains countless clamshells. The shells are not in all parts of the higher beach, making me wonder why they are all together in one place.
One guess is that it might have been a midden – a place where early peoples camped and ate clams, leaving the shells in their “dining room.”
I found a similar midden in Baja California, where the native people from decades gone by brought their shellfish from the beach to a small cave where they ate the seafood and left the shells behind.
Here is another example of the parts of the beach with and without shells, higher up on the bank.
There could be other possible explanations, but for now, I like to think it was a midden – the lunch table where no one cleared away the dishes.
This part of the beach is very much to Emma’s liking. Sand is easier to run on than rocks.
Farther along, some giant hurled a handful of rocks onto the beach, to the north …
and to the south.
A closer look at some of them make me suspect that over thousands (maybe millions?) of years, some clumps of sand hardened into rocks like the one below. It’s a temporary resting place for the baby rock on its back, or maybe it’s on his face….
Do you see the face in this rock? A big slash for a mouth above the chin; a smooshed up nose; two puffy eyes; a scar that goes from his left eye to the right corner of his mouth; and a wart on his left cheek.
Yes, the maple leaf tells us we are in Canada. I’ll let you speculate what it means that the leaf is upside down just now. ( I didn’t touch it! That’s just the way it is.)
I must learn to be more like the old barnacles on the rock by the end of the maple leaf stem, and hang in there. Time marches on and things change. The tide comes in and the tide goes out. Maybe the next tide will flip the leaf over.
Vancouver Island is surrounded by many other smaller islands. It’s an easy boat ride to go for an overnight picnic on one of them. With our troller and the sporty boat of our friends, we did just that. Here we are snuggled up together.
The aluminum skiff is handy for ferrying us to shore for some exploring and picture taking.
So many plants and shells are different from those on most beaches of Vancouver Island.
Our friends’ dog may have been a bit nervous at first, but he proved to have sailor’s blood running in his veins. He had a great time and was as good as gold.
Dogs and people all got along fabulously and had a good time.
More on this outing next time.
*** Again – a reminder that all my novels are half price until the end of July. The Wind Weeps remains FREE. See my webpage for more info: www.anneli-purchase.com
The wild winds weep
And the night is a-cold
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs unfold.
I wish I could claim this poem as my own creation, but I can’t. It is from a poem called “Mad Song,” by William Blake.
I was quite taken by this poem when I wrote my first novel of a coastal drama in which the wild weather played a significant role. That is why I used “The Wind Weeps” as my title.
I’m not trying to persuade you to click on the book cover image at the side for the free download of that book, but if you do, remember book two, “Reckoning Tide.”
It’s just that today the weather is so wild. The wind is crying out there, whipping up the waves, just as it is in parts of my book.
Driving past Point Holmes on my way home from shopping, I stopped to take a few pictures. I had to hang onto the car door tightly so it wouldn’t rip off. A torn rotator cuff on a person is painful, but on a car door it would be expensive – so, also painful in a way.
It takes a good stiff wind to give these waves foaming, frothy tops. In the photo below you can see a smooth line near the bottom of the picture. That is the paved boat launch ramp. No one is using it today for obvious reasons. No way I’d want to be tossing around in a small boat out there.
Even the little songbirds were looking for shelter. They swarmed in small clouds to and from the beach. Some flew in to land on the rocks and logs, but my photo doesn’t show the tiny birds well. I enlarged the photo to have a look (as you may be able to do by clicking on it), and I counted at least twelve small birds. It’s a tough time for them.
Those mountains in the distance should be clear and sharp. It is only around noon, but the sky is dark and full of raindrops flying sideways so the far shore is fuzzy and the mountains just a haze.
It’s too stormy out there for me. I think Emma has the right idea.
wordsfromanneli 