Thoughts about beaches
Nauset Beach on Cape Cod, with eroding bluffs.
Popham Beach, Maine, on an evening in July.
Photo by Dirk Ingo Franke
View of Nantasket Beach, in Hull, Mass., in 1879, when it was a very popular resort for Bostonians.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com
“Objects on the beach, whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they really are.’’
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) in Cape Cod, published in 1865.
Sandy beaches, with dunes or bluffs behind, stony beaches and these days even disappearing beaches, draw us. I’ve lived near most major varieties.
Beaches invite long walks, and offer a wide-open view to the horizon, which we need in our all-too-indoors world. And they’re the best places for kite flying because they’re usually breezy; too bad that you don’t see as much kite flying these days. I mention in passing beaches as venues for sex. Bad manners.
They also offer surprises: The waves constantly bring in different things to look at – some beautiful, some hideous – maybe, if you’re unlucky, even a human body. Every day walking on a beach brings different revelations, especially when it’s stormy. You’ll find such treasures as colorful sea glass -- physically and chemically weathered glass found on salt-water beaches. There used to be a lot more before plastic (made from petrochemicals) took over much of the container business. Plastic bottles, etc., turn into microplastics that present a range of environmental woes.
Then there are skate-egg cases. But there are fewer interesting shells these days and, it seems, less driftwood. And far fewer horseshoe crab shells, in part because they’re being fished out for their blood for use in medical applications. You probably know that they aren’t real crabs, by the way, but, rather, related to spiders and scorpions. Creepy?
Then there are various kinds of seaweed, some of which are edible, and useful for other purposes, too, though they draw insects, some biting, to the beach, and can have a rank smell.
High summer on beaches thronged with people can be problematic. Best to go before Memorial Day and/or after Labor Day. Then you can hear the birds and the wind more than the yelps of vacationers; you’re more likely to avoid the screech of transitorily popular music, or cutting your feet on a beer can, and, if you’re casting for fish, less likely to catch someone in the eye.
I’ve been thinking a bit more about beaches these days because the last close relatives I’ve had on Cape Cod are selling their house in a village where we’ve had ancestors (many of them Quakers) since the 17th Century. There’s a beautiful sandy beach close by (though it’s eroding at an accelerating rate because of seas elevated by global-warming) that brought us many fine memories. The clean water is warm from late June to late September – in the 70s (F) – and there were/are graceful sand dunes we used to roll down as kids.
My paternal and laconic grandfather, who lived in West Falmouth after retirement, used to call the entire Cape “The Beach.’’
Hydrangeas bloom for several weeks.
— Photo by EoinMahon
Summer bloom bursts
How nice now to enjoy such spectacular blossoming of hydrangeas as distraction from so much grim news. Of course, most news in the media is grim: “If it bleeds it leads’’. Gotta turn it off now and then.
The mild and wet winter is being given much of the credit for the particularly vivid colors of these acid-and-coastal-loving bushes this summer, which can make walking around so cheery and make you forget that the most colorful time of the year is late spring and October, not mid-summer. There’s a great Robert Frost poem called “The Oven Bird,’’ that deals with this.
Now a lot of the blooms, which come in a range of colors, are fading.