… but then you get to the Atlantic coast and quickly realize that in this setting, mixed cloud and sun is gorgeous, exciting! From their second-floor balcony, Les UDs gawk at the sudden opening of the sky to sharp clear sunlight, which studs the gray waves with silver/white and shimmers the sand. Then the curtain falls and the moody blues are back, and your eye goes to the happy people on the boardwalk – people who get that being here now surpasses being here in August. They wear thin sweats in the mild weather, and as they walk some of them consider what it means to have come to the end of another year.
Some of them wear shorts and tee shirts: The 17th Annual Race into the New Year is about to start.
Me? When I got to our apartment last night, I discovered that my phone wouldn’t recharge and my laptop wouldn’t turn on. Mr UD was at the outlets picking up food and an extra blanket, so I fumed alone.
As I fumed, it occurred to me to get the hell out of the apartment and walk. Walk away. Take a humanity bath.
The boardwalk was very dark, and few people walked it. We couldn’t see one another – just bundled up bodies in motion. Yet as each of these solitary specters passed, they wished UD a happy new year. Virtually each one of them! As she trilled happy wishes back, UD‘s fuming went up in smoke.
Mr UD fixed all of her phone and laptop problems when he got back.
UD is sure Abe Ravelstein/Allan Bloom is right about this; he might even be right about this: “All educated people make the same mistake – they think that nature and solitude are good for them. Nature and solitude are poison.” But what the hey. Here’s another picture, now that I’m back in ‘thesda, from my beloved Rehoboth in autumn.
Me, I have a Get Rid of the Goat theory about the seashore off-season.
The thing about the beach off-season is that there’s almost nothing there. It’s as though someone systematically removed everything from the world. Standing on the beach, you certainly sense a world hunched up behind you; but it’s well behind you, and you can’t hear it over the waves.
Where you can still run sleeveless on the boardwalk. It’s that warm.
At the center of this image, water and sand come blasting out of the ocean onto the replenished beach. UD got a tutorial in the whole double-your-beach process this morning from one of the workers – there’s the little GPS boat that scans the ocean floor for sand mountains, and then the bigger boat with one end of the pipe, sucking up the sand and sending it forward. They put shells and stones in dumpsters and then smooth the stuff along the strand. “I work in Florida, South Carolina – I’m not sure we do much good down there, but the weather’s milder here.”
Heading down there to take a morning boardwalk stroll with my friend Di Elkin, who has an apartment next door to ours.