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.

Low Tides in Puget Sound Offer Rare Views

A friend from Vashon Island told me on the phone this morning that the tide was so low he could almost walk to Tacoma. Well, not quite. But in spite of his delight in my legendary gullibility, this time his statement contained more than a clam's squirt of truth. The low tide near the Narrows Bridge, for example, was predicted to be -2.7 feet, just after 11 a.m. this Monday, Aug. 9, 2010.

Now let me tell you something I probably shouldn't admit; I'm a person with a weird and hard-to-satisfy curiosity about crazy things like what it would look like if you could slice down through a mountain, stand behind a waterfall, or use X-ray vision to see underground burrows of little critters. As a teenager I once wiggled down through the slanted opening of an abandoned bear den dug into a river bank in Alberta, Canada, there to discover the bear's secret world: a cozy little room with a padded floor and a ceiling of tree roots. But that's a story for another day. Anyway, back to the low tide; obviously I was dying to see what was usually under the waves of Puget Sound.

Unfortunately, I had an 11 a.m. appointment with my physical therapist that could not be changed. I begged my husband to get down to Titlow Beach, since I couldn't, to take some photos of the old pilings there, ghosts of the beach's busy past when Titlow had a ferry landing and other waterfront commerce. He obliged, then gave me a bonus by heading to Point Defiance to take additional photos there. So in case you're curious too, here they are. Enjoy! Scroll down to see them all.

Recollections of Collections and Living Little

Candy the collector in 1956

Kids know something adults forget: there are tiny worlds of wonder right at your feet. Back in the days when I lived much closer to the ground, I knew those worlds intimately. Like a bug blazing a trail through a mini-forest of grass blades, I lived the exuberant life of explorer. Biology and geology were my favorite fields of research, often conducted barefoot on Vashon Island’s beaches.

The only problem with being a specimen collector came from sharing a bedroom with my big sister. That, of course, also meant sharing the bedroom closet, including the floor of that closet, which happened to be the location of my museum of specimens. (By the way, this was the sister who grew up to study interior decorating. Does that tell you anything?) For lack of proper display cases I kept my specimens in rumpled brown paper bags, unmarked but categorized none-the-less. For reasons I consider quite petty, she had “issues” with this.

Back in the 1950s, before the curse of plastic bottles, a walk on the beach could yield handfuls of beach glass, the power of nature made evident in colored gems ground down to frosty semi-smoothness after years of caressing by water and sand. Being a sharply observant beachcomber under three feet tall, I found plenty. Naturally one of the paper sacks contained beach glass.

“WHAT? ONE! DID YOU SAY ONE?” (That’s my sister yelling when she reads this.) OK. I’ll admit that there were three, one for each color: beer bottle brown, pop bottle green, and opaque white, (once clear). Actually, make that five. I forgot about aqua, and the most precious of all, cobalt blue. So there were five. What’s the big deal? The beauty of those pieces of beach glass made it all worth while. I admired and fondled them so often I think I took over where the water and sand left off, and smoothed them even more in my tiny hands. And if you held them to your nose you could imagine the faint scent of the sea. So dreamy.

“Somewhat-less-than-dreamy” might describe the scent that arose from a few other paper sacks in the closet. My penchant for seashells meant I couldn’t pass up any, even those rather recently inhabited. The clam shells left over from a seagull’s lunch, with half-dried bits of clam guts still stuck on, smelled pretty bad. But I found them beautiful. Just like the purple muscle shells, their insides held rainbows of mother-of-pearl, and sometimes barnacles decorated the outsides. I’d seen barnacles alive in the water, tiny creatures flicking hair-like body parts into the brine. Those stuck on my shells, though closed tight, still held the wonder of their underwater world. But the prize for smell and fascination went to the sack full of still moist sand dollars, their tops etched with leaf-like designs. They became to the closet what unwrapped Limburger cheese is to a refrigerator.

Did I mention the rocks? Rocks come in all colors, so that collection took up a lot of space. They look so gorgeous wet on the beach, in jade green, butterscotch gold, white and gray. Some came in brick red, and my Dad told me they weren’t really rocks, but ground down pieces of real bricks, from the many brickyards that once operated on Puget Sound, because of the native clay. They deserved their own special sack. Agates too. So did the “wishing rocks,” the ones with white rings around them, possessed of certain magical powers. All the rocks lost some color once dried, but it was nothing a little spit couldn’t fix.

Now when I walk the seashore in Tacoma, at Pt. Defiance or Titlow Beach, I catch myself crouching down, intent on the close-up view. It was a lot easier at age three. But I still wonder at the grains of sand, the lost feather, the bits of seaweed, green and brown. The kid in me can’t help hoping I’ll find something really special, a perfect periwinkle or the now rare piece of beach glass. My closet is still full, but not with these treasures. I finally gave up the collection, maybe as late as my early teens, when I discovered more interesting specimens: boys. And yet, if you showed up on my front porch today you could find a rock or two, or maybe a shell. I hope I never get so grown up that I can’t delight in turning away from the great big world around me and focusing for a moment on the one at my feet. Next time you’re out in nature, move a little closer to the ground and remember how it felt to live little.