Tag Archives: collapse

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cliffs down

I took a wonderful beach walk, 3-4 miles, yesterday.

The annoying thing was that my muscles are still grumpy. I took a nap afterwards and they STILL wanted me to go to sleep at 5 pm. I made it to 6, barely.

That was the pattern I noticed when I was finishing pulmonary rehab. On the exercise days and the day after, I would sleep for twelve hours. I would have a nap and then sleep for another 8-10 hours at night. Muscle repair and ME-CFS, but still, mine is mild. I don’t have to lie in bed 23 hours a day. I am very very happy about that.

That is a tree, dead, in the first picture. Sections of cliff collapse. I always worry that I will see feet sticking out, as in the Wizard of Oz. A friend saw a whole section come down and said if he’d been 30 yards further down the beach, he would have been under it. It is sand and clay. Here is a close up of a small chunk of clay.

Here is a big section that has fallen, trees and all.

And here is a tree only part way down. I am careful on the beach, but I think sections can fall with no warning! And I worry when I see children or adults climbing partway up the cliffs. Not me.

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Sorrow

I used to stop by more

but the people were less and less

the interactions faded to grey

I didn’t feel loved

I used to be ok with that

not feeling loved

not feeling valued

but now I want to be loved

And I am loved, to my surprise

as if a little love

has opened longing

so that I want more love


I want to be loved and feel loved

I send everyone love

even those who have been mean

and the incessant downvoters

and those who have me blocked

or don’t answer or ignore

or leave the catbox when I show up

I send love to you too


but now that I have a small crack

of love in my life, like the sun

shining on a crack in concrete

the seed stirs in sun and water

and grows

written 12/26/17. I wrote this about another writing site. It is falling to bits, like a old building not maintained. It makes me sad, because it is where my sister used to write. She died in 2012 and I still often miss her.

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After the rains

This is East Beach on Marrowstone Island. After the rains, sections of the sand cliff have come down, with trees in the process of dying and the grass still intact in some piles. There are some seriously large chunks of clay that you would not like to be under when it came down.

New section of fallen cliff

We can see where the tide is starting to break the pieces of clay up and wash out the rocks.

Rocks embedded in fallen section.

So is the land encroaching on the sea or the sea encroaching on the land?

For today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt.

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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.

DSCN3377

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 write up on (sorry. the ethics of the site changed, precluding my linking to it).

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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Clay layers

This clay boulder is about 3 feet by 3 feet by one foot. This slide from the cliff is recent enough that the clay has split and the layers are unmarred. It is all too easy to imagine standing there when the cliff comes down. We stepped carefully between the boulders, trying to stay on gravel, because the clay is way too slippery. Clay is aluminum silicates with small particles and a sheetlike structure. It can contain iron, as the brown streaks in here show. The sheetlike structure is very clear.

This is for photrablogger’s Mundane Monday # 97.

 

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Cape hike and clay layers

My friend J is here for the weekend. He used to live here. High tide was around 9 yesterday and he invited me on a long beach hike. From North Beach to Cape George and back. J says that this is 10-12 miles round trip.

We park at North Beach and start the hike. The tide was still going out. The beach curves along bluffs that get quite high. These bluffs are a mix of clay and sand and sections collapse. I was walking along North Beach once when it was raining after a dry spell. I hear little trickles of sand and there are small collapses that I can see…. I turned back.

This is a photo of the bluff after a fairly recent big collapse. The chunks of clay and rock and trees go all the way out to the water line. J. has seen a big collapse when hiking and said it was terrifying.

clay-3

The chunks of clay are a dark grey, a lighter gray and an orange color and there they are in the cliff face. We both wish that we had more geology training.

clay-2

The hike was beautiful. My feet complained at me for the last half mile coming back. J. said that he has invited more than 20 people to go with him over the years, and I am the only one who has. I am glad that I didn’t whine. Today I am limping a bit and sore, but it will get better.

A beautiful hike….

 

 

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Cat Collapse Disorder

Boa cat is 11. We got her and Princess Mittens when my daughter was 7.

Last summer Princess Mittens was killed by a car in front of our house. We were looking for her the day after she went missing. A neighbor said, “There is a cat dead across the street. I’m sorry.” Yes, it was Princess, all stiff. We put her in a box and brought her in the living room. Boa came in, and went stiff legged, arched and fur on end and backed out of the room. She had been crying and looking for Princess and she stopped then.

The next morning we dug a hole and buried Princess in the back yard. Boa joined us and watched. She avoided the living room for 24 hours and then was ok.

Without her companion, she is more social. Princess was the one who would come into the middle of a party and lie down as equidistant from all the people as possible. Boa would rarely venture out in company but now she is social.

In January she started dropping weight. She didn’t look right. By March I worried. I changed her food first, to an all protein, no corn, no GMO one. In May she went to the vet. She is an indoor outdoor cat. I let her out for a while when I am up writing in the hour of stupid early and the hour of insomnia and the hour of convalescence. Both cats would return when I clapped, because that meant I was locking the door and might not open it again until I returned from work. No cat door. We have a family of raccoons and they can get a bit exciting in the house.

The vet said fleas and parasites and maybe we should do a whole bunch of things including antibiotics. I negotiated by phone from Portland. My daughter promised to pat Boa while I was gone. She’s a bit cat allergic, so usually she doesn’t. She said, “Can I wear your clothes if I am going to pat Boa?” Well, good idea. She wore a cat-patting outfit and then promptly changed.

Anyhow, Boa is still thin but better. And so why would she have fleas and parasites and general awfulness after we’ve pretty much managed her the same way for 11 years? Grief, I think. I got terribly ill after my sister died and then after my father died. I think that grief lowered her immune mechanisms and she was just prone to everything. And why did I switch her food? I don’t think that cats normally eat corn or much vegetable filler, and so I wanted her nutrition to be as normally cat like as possible. Also, this spring she caught and ate 7 mice and two birds and she has never done that before. I think she had realized that the cat food I had for her was not ok. Since I switched foods, she has not brought in any catches. She also thinks I’m a bit dense, but you know….

I used to think those people who bought organic for their pets were nuts. But I can change my mind.

But reading about honeybee collapse disorder, it’s not one mechanism: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0006481. It looks like it’s multifactorial. Do GMOs bother honeybees enough that then they are more likely to get parasites and mites and whatever? Or maybe the bees are grieving…..

The picture is from 2005. Boa is the black one and Princess Mittens is the black and white tabby.