Walking the Beach #27 (Apr 07)

 We are expecting a northeaster this weekend and today looks like the beginning phase. The sky is covered with a solid but thin gray overcast. A commercial jetliner passes over the river downstream as we reach the beach where the tide is almost at its high mark. The air is pretty still, but a small breeze can be felt when we come back. No oyster boats at all this morning though the water is very calm.

We don’t go far. It’s Saturday and folks with dogs are out on the beach by the fancy pier. All but a couple roofing panels are in place on the pier’s second boat lift and several men are working around it. I hope the northeaster doesn’t cause any damage, there. We are suppose to get up two two inches of rain and winds in the thirty to forty mph range; that’s if it actually arrives. One prediction is for the center of what looks like a small hurricane, the northeaster, will pass directly over us. However, the weather changes constantly around us and we may get nothing at all. The rain would be useful, of course. We should have had about six inches for the year and have only had a couple so far. It was like this last year and we ended up with more than normal by December. Of course we did have eighteen inches in about one day of October which certainly made up local shortages in a most undesirable way.

Anyway, Izzy and I just go a short ways, then turn around towards our alternate path. On the way one short stretch of sand directly against the riverbank catches my eye because of many little grooves in the sand. It looks like hundreds of earthworms have crawled about over a twenty foot stretch along the bank and a couple feet wide. No evidence of what made the marks or where they went; no worm holes. Another mystery.

I see more of the bare foot prints on the short beach we covered, the same area where they were found yesterday. I just didn’t see all of them, probably, though several look like they could have been made more recently than others.

We head up the access road and back again. It starts to sprinkle on us about half way up, but not enough to be unpleasant and rather than intensifying, as expected, the sprinkle stops after a couple hours.

The pine trees along the way are releasing pollen now. A slight shake of a branch or tap on pine cone bud produces a shower of yellow powder. The northeaster will be beneficial for the allergy sufferers, if it materializes, by releasing that pollen and wetting the results down to remove it from the air.

The tent caterpillars have produced tents as large as a foot across. There are a good fifteen sites with them along our route. I can reach the tents in about ten of these and demolish them with a stick. They don’t seem to reform once disturbed like that and I disturb thousands. Later, inside the house, I feel something tickling my neck and brush it off to find a small tent caterpillar. A couple large ones were apparent on one pants leg, too, when I returned home.

It’s cool and the light breeze picks up a little by the time we make it back and start stowing anything that will be blown about by big winds.—-