Distracted by the Shiny

Beyond the Littoral

Posted on October 1, 2010 by C. Patrick

Generally, when people say that they love the ocean, they don’t really mean that they love the ocean, or even that they love the beach. With a few exceptions, like those crazed people who sail around the world by themselves or only with a pet gopher or ferret, what they really mean is that they love the littoral.

The littoral is where land and sea come together, be it at the beach, or beneath a cliff, or upon a grassy promontory, or wherever. This is the place where the sea laps, crashes, washes, thunders, boils, and does a hundred other littoral-related verb-y types of actions. The places where and the ways that sea and land meet are vast and varied. There’s a lot of oceanfront property out there, after all.

The littoral, where land meets the sea.

But oceans themselves are varied, too. They each have personalities, quirks, moods. By the end of the calendar year 2010, I will have spent four years of the last decade on those various oceans. I like to think that those oceans and I have gotten to know one another a little bit. Well, rather that I’ve gotten to know them a bit. They don’t really notice us people, y’know.

The Atlantic was my first. I wasn’t on it very long — we were headed for the Caribbean, a very different body of water — but it was educational. My memories of that first meeting go something like this:

Dark, choppy water beneath a sky filled with sunlight-laced storm clouds.

High waves that washed our ship back and forth like the proverbial cork.

Gunmetal depths that I could not see, but rather felt.

Subsequent visits have not changed my perspective. The Atlantic is always moving, always on the verge of being angry, always reflecting storm clouds.

The Caribbean, on the other hand, welcomes the seaborne traveler with blue deeps that are so blue that you cannot believe that the color is real. It’s HD TV color. Fuji film color (anyone remember Fuji film? Film? VHS? Anyone?). Hallucinogenic color. The Caribbean skies are puffy-cloud skies; skies that are affronted whenever there is a storm and that quickly take back possession of the air lanes when the storm passes.

On the other side of the world, the Mediterranean is a sea of pastels and metaphorical rose petals. Even crisp, early-morning light is converted, somehow, to something softer, to the palette of a Renaissance master painter. The waves of the Med are softer, too, softer than nearly any other body of water. When the Mediterranean rolls, it rolls in long, languorous motions like waking up on a Sunday morning with nothing more strenuous to face but to fetch the paper and pour a cup of coffee.

South, in pirate territory off the Horn of Africa, the Indian Ocean is vast and surprisingly quiet. It knows how strong it is and doesn’t need to prove it until it has to. Even when it does, the Indian Ocean doesn’t show off. It isn’t flashy. Instead, she becomes choppy, trying to roll whatever irksome pests are on her back onto some convenient land somewhere.

Up in the Persian Gulf, the water becomes white. The gulf is white, the sky is white, the sun is a white brightness that expands to encompass the whole body of water. But the Gulf is also almost waveless. It stretches out and out and out, just like the deserts that surround it, more an extension of those deserts than a competing entity, even though they are made of seemingly incompatible substances.

Now, further. Ah, the Pacific. Whatever you may have been told, it is definitely not pacific. Whoever named it, named it out of irony. Passionate, is the Pacific, easily taunted by storm and cloud and earthquake into violence. Not as dark as the Atlantic, though; the Pacific puts on a good act until enlivened into giant wave crests and deep, dark troughs.

So the next time you wander along the littoral, wherever it may be, take a look out farther, see what you can see. Maybe you’ll see what you expect.

But maybe you’ll be surprised.

... And the sea.

Posted in Observation Deck | Tagged Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, oceans, Pacific, Persian Gulf, travel | 2 Comments

A Cold, Blue Dawn

Posted on October 1, 2010 by C. Patrick

I’m not a wake-up-to-watch-the-dawn kinda guy. I like sunsets better. Sipping pina coladas on the beach while a big, red sun sinks into the waves is more or less the perfect end to any given day. Dawn seems too cold to me, like a Parisian fashion model stalking down a runway. Partly, this is because it often is cold in, you know, the morning.

Still, sometimes I find myself in a position to watch the dawn, and when that happens, I try not to miss it. This morning, for instance. I was on a beach in Jacksonville, Florida, well before daybreak. As I sat there on the steps of one of the many wooden staircases built to give access to the beach, I watched the lights of buoys, markers, and fishing boats out in the darkness. They flickered like firefly mating calls. South was the glow of the city, distant at the faraway curve of the beach. Above me was a bright, horned moon; to the northeast was the Big Dipper. The waves of the Atlantic roared, even though I could only see hints of their shapes lit by the white glow of moonlight.

After a while, a line of lightness appeared in the east, a deep blueing of the nighttime black. A cloud bank on the horizon took a shadowy sort of form. The waves continued thrumming. A chill breeze continued pushing at my back.

The blueing crept higher in the sky, replaced in the lower firmament by a ruddy blush the color of that Parisian fashion model’s eye shadow. The Big Dipper began to fade from view, although directly above me the waning moon was still bright, surrounded by a corona of stars. The clouds to the east became more distinct, some fading into the background of distance, others showing themselves as long, black lines against framing redness.

Tiny birds zoomed across the sand at the edge of the tide, many of them darting fleet-footed on the ground, but some of them flying so low that it seemed as if they were running on their wingtips.

The blueing expanded, reaching out toward the sides, arcing around me, even while the ruddiness began to contract, to focus upon the spot on the horizon that the sun was steadily approaching.

Surfers appeared from over the grassy, still shadowed dunes behind me. Their long boards were tucked under their arms; sleep and anticipation fought for supremacy on their faces. The birds began to call out as if they were welcoming the surfers.

The firefly lights out on the Atlantic resolved themselves into the forms of ships, some much closer than I would have guessed an hour earlier in the pre-dawn black. The Big Dipper had vanished completely. The moon had lost its circlet of stars. A yellow band appeared between the blue and the blush, signaling that even though the sun wasn’t yet visible in the sky, dawn had all but turned into day.

There was one last flaring of neon across the clouds low on the horizon, and a brightening to near-incandescence of the clouds closer and higher. Everything in the sky became crisp and clear. It was a sky that cried out to be savored with coffee. But I’ve never been a coffee drinker.

Then, as the surfers caught their first big waves — waves they sometimes rode the length of and which sometimes turned on them, burying them momentarily beneath thick sheets of cold water — the ruddy red blush contracted even more, and then more, until it became a hemisphere rising up in the distance.

The sun had awoken one more time.

I watched it as it bellied up out of the eastern Atlantic, becoming full and red, then full and yellow, and finally shrinking to a white brightness that was painful to look at, forcing me to turn my gaze to the joggers and seashell hunters that had mysteriously and magically appeared on the beach while I had been busy watching the dawn. After a moment, I joined the wanderers, seeing if I could find any interesting shells or other flotsam left behind by the receding tide.

It had been a beautiful dawn.

Still, give me sunset and that pina colada. At least you don’t need a coat. So excuse me a moment while I wander down the beach a ways, find a place to read, and wait for the sun to work its way to the other side of the world.

~*~

Dawn as seen from the beach in Jacksonville, Fl.

No sunrises were harmed in the writing of this essay. If you’d like to tell the author about your favorite coffee blends, feel free to use the comments section, below.

Posted in Observation Deck | Tagged dawn, Jacksonville Fl, travel | 2 Comments

Feet Slapping on Pavement

Posted on September 20, 2010 by C. Patrick

by C. Patrick Neagle

When I went out on a ship this last time (I teach college English classes on US Navy ships as a hobby), I found myself with a great deal of spare time. To occupy the hours, I decided to start exercising more. Also, I wanted to be irresistible to women when I got back to the States.

Television had taught me that to be the aforementioned irresistible stud muffin, I could start jogging, buy a Bowflex(tm), or be incredibly wealthy. I couldn’t afford a Bowflex(tm) or the shipping charges required to have one delivered to the middle of the Mediterranean; an inability that also precluded, obviously, the option of being incredibly wealthy. Instead, I took up jogging.

I’d tried jogging once before, years back. I made it around the block, thought I was going to have a heart attack; stroke; hallucination of giant, talking pandas; or all of the above, and so decided never to jog again.

As with most of my vows of that type, here I was, breaking it. It would join the vows of “I will never eat broccoli!”, and “I will never become a teacher!”, and “I will never work in food services!” Okay, I’ve managed to avoid that last one. So far.

Jogging on a ship sailing the high seas is an exercise in itself. Said sea is not usually flat; therefore, neither is the ship. One side might be tilted up on one rounding of the deck, then tilted waaaaay down on the next. Builds good ankle strength.

I got used to that, though, as well as being occasionally sprayed with seawater as wind kicked a wave up over the side of the ship. I also got used to dodging weird things scattered around the decking: buckets, rope, power tools, machine guns … that sort of thing.

At first, the jogging was painful. Six times around the ship was roughly a mile. I started at three miles, with two miles of walking scattered in. Okay, okay, possibly three miles of walking scattered in and two miles of actual jogging. Even so, my legs hurt, my back hurt, my arms hurt, my legs hurt, my feet hurt, my legs really, really hurt. Still, not bad for a guy in his fort … er … early thirties. Especially one who had never jogged before.

By the time I left the ship, I was jogging four-and-a-half miles a day, three or four days a week. I looked forward to it, even. But though the pain everywhere else had worked out, it was still hard on my knees.

People always say that: “Jogging is hard on your knees.” What they don’t say is that “hard on your knees” means that said knees will feel like tapioca spooned into a boiling cauldron before being dumped out into a seething brine of piranha, all while each individual tapioca bead is connected to your brain via a network of nerve endings constantly being diced by some chef or another from the Food Network.

Like that.

This awareness-opening pain gave me an excuse to cut back on the jogging when I returned home. Also, I started dating (Hey! It worked!). Also, it was hot. Also, I was whiny. Four times a week became three. Three became two. Then two jumped straight to lying on the couch watching re-runs of “Ghost Hunters.”

Strangely, I could feel the lack. I’d had a lot more energy when I was jogging. I did more, even wrote more. I didn’t feel the need to take a nap in the middle of the afternoon. I ate better. I drank more water. Life was gooder on the drug of jogging. Yet I just couldn’t bring myself to go outside, stretch, and just … um … do it (Sorry, Nike, I wear New Balance shoes).

Then one day I said, “Darn it, self, I’m going to go out and jog.” So I did. Right after I helped a friend of mine move something, waited for the rain to quit, hung out on Facebook for a few hours, made lunch, brushed the furballs out of the cat, read a chapter in my book, wrote some e-mails, took out the trash, lay on the couch wondering about the pain tolerance of tapioca, and did the laundry. After all of that, and after fighting off the urge to just take a nap instead, I put on my New Balances, went outside, stretched, and took off down the sidewalk.

I’m not to where I was. I’m only jogging three-and-a-half miles a day, once or twice a week. Toward the end of a day’s jog, I notice that my gait is more like a shambling lumbering rather than a gazelle’s prancing. Also, I notice that I’m being outpaced by anorexic sorority girls hurrying to class while carrying armloads of books. Still, I feel the energy coming back. I almost look forward to going out for a jog.

In any case, it’s better than working in food services.

~*~

The author would like to note that he has nothing against those who work in the food services industry and that if they see him dining at their place of business, they shouldn’t do anything too horrible to his food as a result of this column. He just doesn’t want to work there himself.