Making shift with things as they are

As I noted here a few days ago, the beach can change almost in the twinkling of an eye.

It's one of those days that the God and Goddess of Perfect Days put on display in their portfolio. Twenty-eight degrees, a sky as blue as it can get, comfortable breeze from the NNE. My three mates the Sooty oyster-catchers greeted me at the rocks at the north end with my first name, as they do with their oddly Mediterranean accent: "Peep! Peep!". Just a handful of people on this perfect Saturday are revelling with me in the 1,285 paces that make up the length of Sandy.

Around the north rocks a few days ago was a vast pile of kelp, about knee deep or more in places. Today, not a skerrick. The rocks and surrounding sand have been scoured clean. Just as they brought it in by the truckload, the wind and the waves have taken the kelp out to sea, tons of the stuff, and just a scattered line of crunchy, sun-parched seaweed runs along the high-water mark of the sand.

Where a few weeks ago were hundreds of thousands of Soldier crab castings in glorious patterns -- sunbursts, snail trails, flowers and kaleidoscopic drawings -- now there is flat, shining sand (for the tide is just an hour off low), and thousands upon thousands of pebbles, with the occasional seashell. So many colours! Pebbles of almost every hue known to Nature, with here and there a flash of jasper red, pure quartz white, and slates that, when wet, are almost as blue as the sky.

I hope you will click the thumbnail for a photo I took a few weeks ago, of pebbles and Soldier crab castings at the south end. I think they always look their best when there isn't a wide, deep car tyre track running over them, don't you agree? With luck, we can keep these treasures as long as human beings walk the planet. It'll take incredible effort, but I think the photo shows what worth the effort will be for our great-grandchildren.

If this is what we have to do, make an effort -- if we have to make shift with things as they are and not as we wish they were -- then I hope I am up to that effort. Frankly, it's the last thing I feel like doing. I'd rather just look at crab tracks and pebbles.

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Aldo Leopold: A man ahead of his time

I love this quote by the American conservationist author, Aldo Leopold, from the Foreword of his classic book, A Sand County Almanac, which was one of the inspirations for this blog. I'm going to put it permanently in the sidebar and a cheap paperback version of the book is available on my Amazon account.

Aldo was born in 1887 and died in the year of publication of his masterpiece, 1948. Amazing to think that anyone could write like this nearly 60 years ago:

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live. The whole conflict thus boils down to question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress, our opponents do not.

One must make shift with things as they are.