A moment on the beach…

I was watching the news this morning and started to get depressed. The economy is falling apart, they want my tax dollars so they can hand them over to people who already have millions in off shore accounts, one stupid campaign ad after the next… Enough already!

There is not much to this story, nothing really new, or too terribly exciting. It’s my way of mentally escaping every now and then. Sometimes I can actually make it to the beach, sometimes I have to do the ‘zen out of body experience’ and just look at pictures.

1600's Nautical navigation chart

In any event, I’m going to the beach now. The sights and sounds are amazing if you slow down long enough to take a look. Most of the beaches I’ve found are terribly crowded. Some however, are amazingly desolate for being so close to civilization. I much prefer the desolate beaches. They are mostly the ones I have to get to by boat, during everyone else’s work week.

We were walking along on Anclote Key one day and found this little crab in a shell. He appeared to be doing nothing more than idling away his day waiting on the tide to come back in. He was in no hurry to go anywhere or do anything. I envied the crab a little. So relaxed and peaceful, well, until I came along and disturbed him.

The beach I’m on has been here literally hundreds of years, and has changed only little. Hurricanes come and go, shorelines shift and change, but this is like it was in the 1500’s. I found a nautical chart at the Library of Congress that showed Anclote Key as an anchorage for the explorers back then. There is a little anchor symbol in just about the same spot I anchor at. (Click on the chart for a closer view, look near the upper center) French, Dutch, English, Spanish, everyone that had a chart stopped here. It was listed as having fresh water up the Anclote River, along with game and fruit.

No hurries back then, just basic survival. It was without question a tough way to live, hunting your food down in something other than a grocery store isle, where gasoline prices determined what your tomato cost. But then again, they didn’t have to worry about failing economy’s, what to wear to work that day, or why did my retirement fund simply vanish.

They spent a lot of time on the beach. Here was most of what they needed. Fish, oysters, clams, and inland was the fruit, deer, and fowl.

I stand on this beach sometimes and try to wonder what the early explores felt when they looked upon the unspoiled land of unlimited opportunity. Spanish Galleons simply used this as a stop over point to replenish their fresh water and food stores while transiting from Cuba to Mexico and back. The native Indians looked at the odd people and were happy when they sailed on.

Waiting for the tide to come in

I’ve anchored my sailboat in the same place they anchored their wooden ships. Sailors of that time only knew a compass and the sun for time and speed. I have a GPS that keeps me within a tenth of a second, and 7 feet, anywhere on earth. I don’t know if I would brave the journey they did, even with my wind generator and solar panels. It is remarkable what the explorers accomplished, especially considering what they had to work with. One such visionary stood on this beach over 400 years ago. He looked at the same stars I am looking at, he listened to the same relentless surf washing the shore I hear today. We were both barefoot. Many years have drifted into the eternity of the cosmos. Many souls have pondered the past and the future from this beach. They were brave indeed, and here they stood, in the very same spot I am today. Perhaps he was looking at a crab, just like mine.