Category Archives: hike

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the wrong stairs

My title sounds like an Edward Gorey book. I adore Edward Gorey’s books.

These are the wrong stairs. Don’t go down them.

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The stairs are on North Beach. The cliffs are sand and clay. Sections collapse.

People have stopped building stairs down to the beach for the most part. They don’t last.

I longed for a house on the bluff or the beach. But I don’t anymore. I think about collapse. When we have an earthquake, sections of the bluff will collapse. I walk the beach anyhow. I don’t feel protected, I don’t feel safe, I don’t feel lucky. I feel…. mortal.

 

 

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You cannot be in love with every beautiful thing you see

Here is the prompt: a node on everything2.com.

 

You cannot be in love with every beautiful thing you see

 

I cannot be in love with every beautiful thing I see

why?

what is beauty?
what is beauty to you?
what is beauty to me?

I like the trees
I like the ocean
I like the dunes
I like the grass

They don’t lie to me

They don’t wear masks

If they gossip, I don’t understand
so it doesn’t matter

When birds sing
I sing back
I don’t know what they are saying
but I try

They sing back to me

My cat is here
talking to me
meow, mew
I can tell when she has a toy
or a mouse
(or a bat)
by her voice

The dunes will fall
in an earthquake

I may be buried
if I am on the beach

like lava eating houses
lava burying people alive
suffocating

though on the beach
I’d be crushed
it’s not like snow
our dunes come down with trees
when they come down

yet I walk the beach anyhow
go about my life

in love with every beautiful thing I see

 

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beach tower

Sections of the dunes collapse. I stopped climbing them when I was sitting above my children and I was hit from behind by a collapse and pushed 5 feet forward. There was no warning, just sound and hit. I was not buried, but I realized how I could have been. I took my kids down off the dune.

There are sections of stairs left where the bottom sections have been washed away. Some days as it warms up, you hear sand sliding down, tiny trickles. I have a friend who saw a huge section collapse, all the way out to the water, with trees. He and another walker missed being buried by five minutes.

We walk the beach anyhow. This will collapse eventually but was standing on Saturday.

 

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beach gold

Walking the beach Saturday at the -3.0 tide, the first bird we saw on the beach was… a pair of goldfinches. Only one in this picture. But there were two down enjoying the sun and the water and the seaweed. I don’t think of goldfinches as shore birds, but they didn’t seem to care what I thought….

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