quote of the day: “I spoke with strong feeling, and I’ll tell you why. A few months before, while celebrating Boat Race night, I had fallen into the clutches of the Law for trying to separate a policeman from his helmet” (from The Code of the Woosters.)
It’s always amusing when scenes from fiction that are meant to be comically absurd seem entirely within the bounds of one’s lived experience. P G Wodehouse offers up plenty of examples, but so do films like The Hangover. Anyway, on to business..
There are several enduring mysteries of The Beach:
- In the years between 1952 and 2010, was anyone conceived in the old cabin. If so, how? It seemed always to have at least 10 and often upwards of 15 people crammed into its two bedrooms + sitting room. Bravo.
- On the walk to Sundin (which one might call the traditional morning constitutional of The Beach) there is a set of pilings driven into the beach in a rectangular formation. Though much battered, they appear to have been intended as a sea wall or (more likely) a foundation. What was their purpose? When were they built? Were they ever used? I’ll put a picture up at some point. Opinions welcome.
- Do winter storms bring sand or take sand away? The amount of sand vs rocks on the beach varies significantly (including both extremes) from year to year.
- How, in the 15 months that we’ve owned the new house, have I managed to spend 22 days here, when I live
4,7634,747 (correction thanks to Latitude history dashboard) miles away? Win! - Why do pancakes and bacon (see photo below) taste so much better here than anywhere else. Is it the altitude? The humidity? The wind? Beach magic?
In any case, I’m happy to say that I have a tentative answer to Mystery #3, at least. As I mentioned before, we had a giant storm here earlier this week. Today on my walk to Sundin I noticed that there was substantially more sand (and very small rocks) than when I arrived last Friday. And it was heaped over the rocks in such a way that it was clear it had been deposited rather than uncovered. I’ll take my phone tomorrow to snap a picture. So my current theory is that sand is deposited by storms and then slowly washed away by the tide, and that the more storms we have in a winter, the more sand there will be the following summer. Sand, by the way, makes the walk to Sundin a lot easier and less likely to turn one’s ankle.
OK. The sun is out (which it’s not supposed to be tomorrow), so I’m going to go enjoy one last day of summer/September before digging in for a long, dark, rainy winter.
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