Remembering July

July 14, 2010 Fox Island Thoroughfare, 7:15 am, tide -1.57 feet

I was out at the Dumplings this morning at the turn of the tide.  The moment hung there in the raking light, neither coming nor going.  The mudflats hissed gently and ducks gaggled on the exposed rocks.  The wind tried to fill in from the bay but the tide said, "let's wait a bit."  The day was on hold; the water was flat as steel and the seaweed silently draped. Everything waited. I walked around the tiny island almost holding my breath.  When I returned to where I had begun, my little boat was exactly as I had left it on the muddy shore, half in the water and half on the beach.

I rowed back to the dock and by the time I got there the day had begun.  A whaler buzzed, the wind had filled in and the ferry went by.

These are some tumbled seamarbles.  The collection pic was sent by avid beach wanderers Kim and Dave who are lucky enough to live in Hawaii near the beach.  Kim's theory on the marbles is: "The elementary school is on the other side of the highway, then nothing but beach on the beach side. There are a few underground drains that flow into the ocean by the school. So, we think, based on the kind of marbles they are, that they are from way back in the day...kids playing marbles on the playground. I only find them certain times when the sand is all washed away and the rock piles are what's left. This past year, it was only one time that those rocks were exposed."  

What wonderful anthropological wrack combing.

A New Book

I received two advanced copies of my new book yesterday afternoon. I happened to be home when the FedEx guy knocked at the door. I opened the yellow manila envelope and there was the book, a foreign object to me, the author who had slaved over each image, cut out cardboard to determine trim size and worked and reworked every aspect of the text, photographs and design of the book.

The book, a real book, is an amazing thing and until you hold it in your hands, you cannot really approximate what it will be like. It is a great and surprising moment.

My book, Beach: A Book of Treasure, is 7” high and 11” wide. Despite all my Indesign and Photoshop and pdf files, with their ever present rulers, I can only truly feel these dimensions now with the book in hand. The added length of the page (from my previous books) gives a delightful heft to the 144 pages as you flip through from front to back. The blue case color and the soft beige endpapers are cheery and soothing--something we could not be totally sure of despite the back and forths and changing and choosing of color chip--until the book is in hand.

So now the book and I are getting to know each other all over again (I feel like a Sesame Street character) but its true.

The best endorsement of the book to me so far is that Andrew (age 12) came home tired and hungry yesterday evening, but on seeing the book sitting on the entry table had to go through the entire thing, clearly captivated, before even coming to the dinner table. He then went through the entire book again after dinner. His favorite page is a spread late in the book of a mass of grey-ribbed scallops with a single, small, white clam shell for contrast.

What more could I want from a book?

Someone else is thinking about all those lost traps

Finally, someone is thinking about all the derelict traps left on the sea floor. (NYTimes Nov 27) I wrote about these for Beach: a Book of Treasure in relation to all the buoys found on the beach: they all were attached to something that is now lost, left on the ocean bottom to corrode. Thinking of all these lost traps reminds me of how I feel when I see a map of all the space-junk out in orbit around our earth. "It would be interesting to drain the ocean and see what's down there," said Holly Bamford, head of the Marine Debris Program at NOAA.

Inukshuk from Nova Scotia by Josette d'Entremont

Josette d'Entremont sent this image of an "Inukshuk" from Nova Scotia. This one is from near Cape Fouchu Lighthouse, Yarmouth, NS. She is a true lover of the beach, claims she has every stone and shell represented in my two books, Beach Stones and Seashells and gains sustenance from beachcombing the way we all gain sustenance from bok choy. I understand so completely.

She writes:

I am a native of a small Acadian fishing village called 'Pubnico' (means "cleared land for farming"), which is located at the SW part of Nova Scotia, Canada on the Lighthouse Route. I live in Halifax (capital of NS) and am an amature photographer, historian, geologist and lover of the seashore (a beachcomber all my life!) and a preservationist for lighthouses. Our Nova Scotia shores have billions of years-old fossils, stones and shells.

"INUKSHUK" means "likeliness of a person" in the Inuit language. It is the symbol of the Human Spirit. For centuries, stone figures, built in the shape of men by the Inuits, have guided lonely travelers in North America and the Artic along the right paths to food, water and shelter. 'Inukshuks' represents strength, leadership and motivation. Some people even say that it represents "I was here". I love making these stone figures as I walk the shoreline, it's fun, inventive --you can build them in any shape or form, using whatever rocks you find) and very meaningful. I also cannot stroll along the beach without picking up a shell, waiting to be admired and wondering what stories it could tell me; where it came from, what did it see?

There is so much to see by the sea!

Thank you, Josette