In like a lamb and out like a rather indifferent lion: the beach in winter

After a completely relaxing and restorative weekend with one last day stretching out before us to savor, Rodney and I packed up the backpack and two of the dogs for a walk on the beach. It was a perfect day for late winter. The wind was out of the southwest, the temperatures in the mid-60s and an afternoon low tide. This is what it looked like when we got there. For those of us who love walking in our beloved Guana it was a perfect prescription for late winter/early spring: not too cold, bright blue skies and just the right music of the spheres resulting a lower-than-average low tide.

The sun was warm on our faces, so warm I'll probably go to work tomorrow with a tell-tale pink look, despite the sunscreen. And it was a lovely walk, the dogs setting their own pace part of the time; me, looking for shark teeth and other bits of fossils, setting the pace at other times. Rodney sets his own pace, walking with his metal detector. The dogs are generally pretty indulgent about the pace, slowing down to human speed when they'd rather be allowed to race after pelicans or accelerate toward lunch when we get close enough. But they do know when it's time for lunch and they're pretty definite about their preference to have it. (This spot is at the beach monument of which I've written before.)I don't know what sensory everyday canine miracle enables dogs to know things like "we are now within 15 feet of that place we eat lunch when we come to this part of the beach" (is it smell? is it memory? is it one of them saying to the other, "Dude, this is place we ate lunch last time...remember how we made those sad faces and got them to feed us half the sandwich?") but certainly there is such a miracle. I have thoughts about this, but they are a tale for another day, my dears, so let me shut up and wander on.

The monument's flag indicated a brisk and steady wind from the south-southwest. Or at least it did at lunchtime. The face of the beach changes with every tide, and if you go often to the same spot you see this with every visit. Those who are lucky enough to live at the beach and wise enough to pay attention are able to seee the changes in real time. Most of the time, for us, the observation of the changes - the shifting sand that reveals fossilized riches in one fall and obscures them again with 18 inches of sugary power with the rising of another - usually happens from one weekend to the next. The high-tide line changes, the bluffs shift, sometimes by 3 or 4 feet, the color of the water is never the same. Today, though, the change was visible within a few short hours as the wind changed and the clouds began to build.

Within a couple of hours, the changes ceased to be subtle. The warmth of that southerly touch to the wind disappeared when the wind shifted to come straight from the west. The clouds thickened and began to darken in color and the temperature dropped enough to make me glad I'd worn a sweater. The water began to reflect the shadows of the clouds, and I started to think about the hat and scarf I'd tucked into the backpack. And Meg, whose fur is fine and smooth, without much of the undercoat some dogs have, began to cry every now and then: I want to go home. And this is what the beach looked like when we left. As we drove home, Rodney checked the weather. The forecast is for bright, shiny beautiful blue days, those days I often tell you about, those days which in northeastern Florida seem to occur between October and April. They are days of almost indescribable clarity and sharpness in the very air. Such days can come with a price exacted by the thermometer. They are often no warmer than the 40s or 50s under the brilliant blue sky but freezing nights that can cost some of us plants and fruit trees, and others their crops for the season. But for this evening, we're counting our blessings, happy that a perfect weekend finished with a perfect day, and that we're able to share it with you.
Coming this week: a soup recipe of some kind. I started with a potato and leek soup I learned from Julia Child and have taken it to all kinds of interesting places. It's so much easier than I thought it would be. You probably already have the most divine cold weather soup recipe in the world and if you want to share it, I'd love to put it here and of course give credit where credit is due.

Tonight's captions and credits follow.
Second photo, left to right: Rodney, Tyson (digging up something almost-certainly smelly), and Meg
Copy editing: Dylan
A generous willingness not to be annoyed that he had to stay home: Calvin

Peace be with you, from the beach

With good reason, there was nary a surfer to be seen at the beach today, but as the day unfurled and the barometric pressure rose, the sky just got bluer and bluer and the sea more calm and smooth all the time, and it would have been a perfect day to see whales, but we did not. The sun grew stronger behind the fast-moving clouds, laying shadows on the surface of the water that looked like deep green and steely blue stripes on canvas, which I tried to photograph to no avail. If I could ask for my gift, as the animals did in the T.H. White story I told you the other day, I would ask for the ability to paint the effect of light on the world, like Edward Hopper. Alas, such is not my gift as you know, so we shall have to make do with the photo I have. You can let its sun kiss your face and the color of its sky lighten your heart.

What I did see was an amazingly big object in the surf. It looked like a long bone, black as obsidian and gleaming in the water. Despite an incoming tide, I went in after it, got wet nearly to the waist, and retreived this amazing thing. You can see that it has a curved shape to it, like a rib bone, and you get a sense of how long it is by comparison to my foot. I wouldn't hazard a guess as to what kind of animal it may have come from, as there was an ancient time in which the peninsula of Florida was far wider than it is now, and another time when it was far more narrow, meaning that hundreds of square miles that are now above the water line once belonged to the ocean, and vice versa. The bone fragment is a beautiful thing and creates a sense of connection for me between our humble selves and those of our sister and brother vertebrates who dwelt in the backyard of Mother Ocean long before we did. That sounds serious and respectful, but you would have laughed your head off to see an old fat lady, running into the surf on a chilly day in 30 mile an hour wind gusts, chasing a bone the size of her own forearm. Remember that scene in Bringing Up Baby where Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are chasing George around the yard, looking for the all-important bone they think he's buried? Rodney kept calling me Mister Bone, but I think he was proud of my perseverance.

There was also a dead sea turtle. It was about 2 feet long from the top of the shell to the back, and perhaps 18 inches wide. Considering the size of the baby turtles that emerge from eggs along this same stretch of beach, which are smaller than the palm of my hand, I would guess this that this was a turtle of some mighty years: perhaps 50 or more. Its back was covered with barnacles. Rodney knows the person who coordinates the sea turtle preservation program for St. Johns County. This being St. Augustine, he used to work with the woman's husband and had their phone number in his phone, so I called. If the turtle had been tagged, the nice husband told me, there would have been a large white X painted on the shell, but there was no such mark. I wondered if this turtle could have started its life before we ever gave their species a thought for preservation, and he said, Yes, that was certainly possible. He was grateful we'd called, and he would let the folks at Guana know so they could collect the body and one hopes, learn whatever it might have to teach them.

And so goes the circle of life at the beautiful beach of Guana. I won't include a recipe tonight but I am making a southwestern chicken and corn chowder. I promise to tell you how to make it, just in case you don't already know. If you already have a perfectly marvelous chowder recipe of your own, let me know. Nothing is nicer on cold February nights, when the sky is clear, the stars are beginning to peep out and the hope of spring is furled tightly as a budding tree, invisible still, but certain as sunrise.

'Tis the season

No, not that season. It's winter, and for another few weeks the camellias will continue to bloom and it will continue to be whale watching season in northern Florida. I mentioned it briefly in a previous blog entry, but it's worthy of a further note, and more detail.

About this time last year, Rodney was working at one of the county's beach access points in the northeast part of our county when he saw what he thought was a car or something equally unlikely rising out of the Atlantic. And then he realized the sound he could hear was air: she was close enough that people on the beach could hear the sound of her blow hole. He thought she might have been a hundred yards off the beach, and she might have been 30 feet long, maybe more. And this is a man who's worked for a living, a man who knows how to fix things and put things together, one of the smartest men I've ever known, a man whose estimates are trustworthy. 30 feet. Imagine that.

Because we spend so much time at our beloved Guana Tolomato Reserve, a state park, and because it has signs posted like the one I've pictured for you, he remembered that there was a number he ought to call, so he did. To his surprise, he got a call later that night. "We've found your whale," the woman on the phone said, "and her name is Arpeggio. She's traveling with a calf, and this is the fourth year we've seen her..." So imagine THAT: out of an entire population consisting of less than 400 individual animals, the most endangered whale species in the world, Rodney had seen a veteran mother, and a new baby. When the whale calving season ended, and all the North Atlantic Right Whales had moved back up to their regular range far to our north, Rodney got a certificate in the mail. He had been one of only a hundred or so people to see and report a whale that year.

The world turned round and round and a year later my friend Louise was at the beach, less than 10 miles from Rodney's spot last year, and called her husband to say she could see 4 whales. She had her binoculars, but they were too far off the beach for her to take pictures of them, and in any case I think she wanted to watch them more than take pictures. It happens that her husband and I are work colleagues, and he mentioned she'd called to say what she'd seen. "Well, have her call," I said, and pulled out the very picture I've given you here to hand over the number. There were a couple of rough patches, work and communication being what they are, but the long and short of it is that Louise did call, and did get her observations to the right people. A short while later, driving toward town, she was able to see the plane circling over the ocean, looking for the whales she'd spotted. And that evening, she got a call: the plane had spotted not only the 4 whales Louise had seen, but 5 more: a total of 9 whales. And when you think about that, those whales represent nearly 5% of the whole living population of these marvelous creatures. It is nearly indescribable, so miraculous does it seem. I have lived on this coast the most part of my life now, and have never seen one, for they could glide by in the night or be under the water when you happen to look, or have wandered far enough from the breaking surf that you could miss them, easily. But they are out there, my loves. They are.

Bringing home the beach

When the thermometer doesn't even touch 40 degrees, and a determined 20 mile an hour wind underscores the point, Rodney and I stay home from the beach. Which we hate, it being Saturday. Still, here's a reminder of what waits there for us. And of course it's always fun to look at the fossils we've gathered in the couple of years since we started, well, gathering. We're not sophisticated enough to think of ourselves as collectors. The truth is we didn't realized we'd been assembling bits of ancient history until a couple of years ago, though Rodney has found and kept boxes and bags and film cannisters full of sharks' teeth since he was a small boy. I hate to tell you how many of those film cannisters I threw away. Live and learn.

Completely by accident, this is how we learned: I was visiting my friend Suzanne's office and noticed a postcard pinned to her bulletin board, the kind of postcard you might get from a friend while they vacationed in Florida. It showed an assortment of sharks' teeth, from the very smallest to giant megalodon, even including an intact set of fossilized teeth an in enormous jaw, top and bottom. I said something like, "That's a nice postcard", adding offhandedly, "Rodney's got a jillion of those, I never seem able to see them, may I borrow your stapler," or words to that effect. She widened her eyes and a certain light touched her beautiful face. She said, "You do know they're all fossils, right? That they're all millions of years old?" I had no idea. But I can tell you this: I suddenly looked at the beach in a whole new way. And then something else happened to change my perspective: while walking down a white, sandy expanse of beach, I spotted a large black object about the size of the palm of my hand, scored with regular lines, rather like a piece of turtle shell. But it was clearly fossilized, both sides as glossy and shiny as something coal but so impervious to pressure it might almost have been coal, on its way to becoming a diamond.

Walking on the beach was now full of new possibilities. The long quiet walk, reflecting, meditating, simply being, was one option. Taking the dogs along for fast-paced, wildly enthusiastic walks was an option. And now, with the bright sun and a glisten lent by the water, it was more and more possible for me to see the ancient teeth. Turned by the magic of Mother Earth into pieces resembling jewels far more than remnants of prosaic things like teeth or bones, my fascination began to grow.



And though my fascination far outstripped my knowledge, the loose confederation of beach people again surprised me. "That Lady With the Little Blonde Daughter", it turned out, was called Allie, was also a collector, knew a great deal, and was at once humble about and generous with her knowledge. "Whale bone," she said. "And that's a drum fish tooth, oh, and that looks like verterbrae." She referred us to a good field guide, told us about a gem show she'd attended the previous winter where she learned LOTS.

One of the things I showed her was the multi-colored shark tooth shown in the middle on the left, also pictured (in that last photo) next to my foot so you can see the size. The group shot was taken by Rodney today as we looked over some of what's becoming our collection, yearning for one of those walks we've come to love. Perhaps tomorrow. I do have that pink scarf and hat Lis crocheted, and 9 or 10 jackets I could wear. The concentration called for by his metal detector often serves as an excellent medication for Rodney, although that, my dears, is a tale for another blog.

Stay warm, dears. It's a fine evening to have the oven turned on. If you feel like a rich dinner, homemade macaroni and cheese gives you a fine excuse to set the oven about about 325 and leave it on for an hour or more. I use some kind of pasta like penne or curly shells, a place for the cheese to hide itself and warm your mouth. Cook about 3/4 of a pound of it to the stage before al dente, when it's still really too crunchy to be ready to eat. Layer it in a 9" x 12" baking dish with whatever cheese you like. Sharp cheddar is good, if your people like it. A layer of pasta, a layer of cheese and repeat. Salt and pepper as you go. You can even use a reduced-fat cheese, if you like. Beat together about 4 eggs, depending on their size, and add milk (here again, skim milk helps reduce the fat, but you can use what you have) til you have about 2-1/2 cups of liquid; pour this evenly over the macaroni. Bake until all the liquid is taken up and the top is lightly browned. It's lovely with a romaine and Granny Smith apple salad. And you can leave the oven door open so that last warm breath fills your kitchen.