American Banjo Camp Bonus— Nature Photos of Marrowstone Island -

This past weekend, my total immersion in bluegrass and old time music at the American Banjo Camp made Marrowstone Island seem like enough of a paradise already. But those four days of ecstasy also included the joys of nature.




View from the road that leads to the beach        Photo by Candace Brown

 

On Saturday afternoon, I took a break from the workshops to enjoy a walk in the September sunshine. From the bluff on which the old buildings of historic Fort Flager still stand like sentinels in open fields of summer-browned grass, I followed a narrow road that hugs the brushy hillside as it descends to the beach below. 





This is the island's northernmost point, home to the U. S. Geological Survey's Western Fisheries Research Center — Marrowstone Marine Field Station, a 5.2 acre site that originally served as a residence for the keeper of a lighthouse once located there. As a native of the Puget Sound region, a fifth generation islander, I inhaled marine air with my life's first breath. And I inhaled it again here, as deeply as I could.

photo by Candace Brown







Grass and gravel gave way to sand. Always the collector, I spotted two wet rocks of vivid green which I posed on a driftwood log to capture in this photo before they dried. Rocks, like people, can appear drab and ordinary until you see them in their best light, brilliant, colorful, exquisite. Let us remember that we can all shine this way, that our real beauty exists even if others don't always notice.

 

photo by Candace Brown

The quietness of this place, the rustle of beach grass, the cry of gulls, and the slosh of waves against the shore both eased away what remained of my cares from the previous week and replaced my sleep deprivation with a new energy that refreshed. I found abandoned driftwood structures made by children in their play, seashells, flowers, a feather caught among leaves, and most of all, peace.

 



Now I share it with you. No more words, just images. Come along for a walk on the beach.

 









 

 

 

And that wasn't all. It couldn't talk about enjoying nature at Fort Flagler without mentioning the abundant deer. When I returned to the camp, I found this family—including two of last spring's fawns—of feeding on fallen apples. A short while later, someone came along with a dog on a leash and they fled in long, graceful leaps, back into the forest, ending my nature walk but beginning another full and memorable evening of music at the American Banjo Camp.

 

I can hardly wait until next year.

 







Copyright 2012 Candace J. Brown applies to all photos and video in this blog.

Sea Sisters

"Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," wrote Rudyard Kipling. But those differences don't always matter. Last Sunday I savored a walk along Crescent Beach, on the shore of British Columbia's Boundary Bay, in the company of a dear friend. Although born on opposite sides of the continent in very different maritime communities, we recognize in each other a spiritual kinship. With my roots in the Puget Sound area and hers in Nova Scotia, my heart attached to the Pacific Ocean and hers the Atlantic, we still feel unspoken bonds of understanding and a shared wistfulness that draws us down to the sea.

As strange as it seems, I had never seen Crescent Beach in daylight. I once stood on the footpath next to it in the chill of a winter evening, the scent and sense of the sea coming to me through the dark with only moonlight illuminating the waves. That night my friend and I shared a dinner with the men we love in the coziness of Pelagos Greek Restaurant right at the water's edge. Candlelight, calamari, and a nice red wine, the windows steamed up by the warmth of good food and friendship, set the scene. Above the music of their voices I thought about the mysterious paths our lives take and how we all ended up together.

My friend and I are both musicians, soulful creatures. She's an accomplished classical violinist. I play jazz. But we understand each other on many levels and one of those is the level of our truest selves, our basic essence, our need to be at sea level, to breathe oxygen-rich, marine air, to hear the cries of gulls and the sound of waves. After our walk on Sunday, we sat on the porch of a coffee shop called The Wired Monk, and talked about these things, and more.

We shared stories of our families. In August of 1880, mine left Tacoma in a small boat to become some of the first few settlers on Vashon Island. Hers arrived in Nova Scotia in 1752. Their blood is our blood. Their ghosts influence our yearnings. We summon them through legends of the dreams and dramas of their lives and connect with them as if time meant nothing.

No words are necessary to explain the call of the sea. We "sisters" will walk that beach again and leave our footprints in the sand. The tide may wash them away, but it can never obliterate where we came from and who we are, which are one and the same.