Such Treasures

It was still raining this morning, which is not a bad thing at all at the beach when there are books to read.  But we both badly wanted to run this morning, and we did not particularly like the idea of getting soaked.  So we waited it out; I went to the Recreation Center where there is a large, adequate weight room, and Martha did some shopping.  It was 11:00 a.m. by then and we realized that the rain had stopped completely, so we hurried back, tied on running shoes, and got moving.

I thought it might be good to run some tempo miles at the pace I hoped to run in the upcoming 5-K on Saturday.  So after a little warm-up I started off fast, right out of the door, and completed two miles at a nice clip.  Martha got started earlier than I did, and ran to Fort Macon and back for a total of five miles, farther than she had planned.  I slowed my pace when I reached the Fort and went out onto the beach.  I already knew that low tide was at 11:30 a.m., and so a return run along the ocean would be just perfect.

The beach between the Fort and the picnic area is the widest I think I have ever seen, perhaps 200 meters, smooth and flat as a pancake.  What a joy it is to run here, the channel markers out on my left, and then the open Atlantic Ocean, as far as the eye can see, wave after wave breaking gently.  It was still overcast, and the colors seemed to be trapped in that spectrum between brown and gray and pale blue, as if  an artist had found his water painting tin only contained these colors.  But beautiful pictures can be painted with limited colors, perhaps even more so. 

Half-way back, someone had carried a Christmas tree, which had been placed up against the dunes to stabilize them, down onto the beach and stood it upright in the sand.  If I had not been trying to keep up a good pace, I suppose it would have been nice to hang little scallop shells from its branches with threads of seaweed, a further re-purposing of this festive tree.

I keep looking for sand dollars, like the one I found on this beach last year, but all I saw was broken shells, bits and pieces, and I came back penniless, with nothing to place in the offering plate we keep in the center of the table to collect such treasures.