Grab it When You Can

At 6;00 my clock radio comes on and the local announcer. talking much too fast and swallowing half his syllables, reads the overnight police report, gives the score of the Boston Red Sox game and less than ten words of weather prediction. I do my own prediction by opening my eyes and looking to see if a ray of sun is caressing the armoir at the foot of the bed. If it is, I'm up quickly and soon making coffee so that I can grab an hour's walk on the beach for it may get cloudy and rainy any time.

If all is dull gray I close my eyes and listen to the next half piece of classical music -- they rarely play whole symphonies or concertos or other longer pieces. This is a dumbed down attitude toward classical music always emphasizing how "relaxing" classical music is -- what would Shastikovitch say to that? You can bet they do not play his Leningrad Symphony, I've heard no Prokovief either and precious little Mahler [certainly not whole symphonies] and I doubt Bruchner has made it into their library ever. Grumble, grumble ...
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Today the streak of sun was bright and shiny as that famous new penny and I had a lovely walk on the beach, wishing I had taken my camera as I did one day about a week ago. The tide had been very high but now it was very low. At the high tide line were many conch shells, all more or less broken but all beautiful nevertheless. I would like to have photographed a variety of breakage patterns.

These pictures were from the day I did take the camera. The one above is juniper so loaded with berries you could flavor ten years of gin with them. Their frosty blue is lovely against the deep green. The picture below is from one of the high [all is relative] points where these roses were fragrant in the damp air and abuzz with bees wallowing in their golden centers. The view is across the inlet which a tiny bit further on disgorges into the broad bay that the nearly mile long beach partially embraces. For this I am happy to get up early. The near solitude is a plus, just the sound of breeze working it's way around my ears, the lapping percussion of the tide and the quite slap of my flipflops, oh, and the gulls, of course, although they are fairly quiet at that hour, many breakfasting on crabs that they attack very matter of factly.

Walking Long Beach

My walking place is actually a preserve, not a beach in the sense of lifeguards and lots of parking, beach chairs and sand castle builders. It is a spit of land between a long inlet and the ocean and is about a mile long. Not many people go there. At 7 or 8 in the morning the population is usually less than ten. I have only walked on the ocean side for a few weeks because the dunes and the marshy places on the inlet side have been restricted while shorebirds were nesting and hatching their young. Now only a few little areas remain restricted so this morning for the first time in a month, I walked the inlet side nearly to the end and then crossed over and returned along the ocean.

Above is the board walk which is not very long leading to both sides. And below is a bit of the inlet side which has only occasional small patches of sand, much of it pocked or pimpled with crab holes. Once in a while one can see the little crustaceans lurking at their entryway but rarely are they seen outside. Obviously they are something of a buffet for those same shore birds. The life of a tiny crab is short and probably not happy although I suspect happiness is much too abstract an idea for the few brain cells the beastie might have.

Beginning the day beside both the quiet of grasses and relatively still water and then returning beside the gentle incoming or outgoing tide of the wide inlet, growing warm in an increasingly hot sun, letting water lap at bare feet, gazing at the blues of ocean and sky, the litter of shells strewn at tide line is a peaceful, lovely way to start a day. A few walkers I meet have their Ipods in their ears. If I were going to sit a long while on the beach I might like some classical music but I prefer the wash of waves, the cries of gulls, the calls of sandpipers and plovers and the stillness into which those natural sounds punctuate the morning.

I knew Long Beach from visits over the years and when I thought of coming here to live I immediately imagined I would take such walks. Now that I have a car to drive the two miles or so, it is reality - one might say a dream come true.