As with the musket demonstration last year, we found Ben to be friendly and informative, and passionate about the Fort, its history, and the nature surrounding it. We started out on the north side of the Fort which borders the Coast Guard Station. Martha asked about a ground plant which we both thought resembled what we call Galax in Highlands (see picture in my post of January 6), and which seemed to grow out of the bare sand in some places. He said it was called pennywort and it was the bane of local gardeners because it grows so abundantly everywhere.
Next along the path was a good stand of wax myrtle, or bayberry; Ben plucked a few leaves and rolled and crushed them in his hands, and we could indeed smell the familiar scent we associate with bayberry candles. It was a good insect repellent, he said, and sometimes when they were out working and ran out of insect repellent they would rub it on their exposed skin.
Yaupon was next long the path (I did not get a good photo), a type of evergreen holly. Local Native Americans made a tea from its leaves called "the black drink," which caused vomiting and purged their bodies in preparation for a long journey.
Winged sumac had also been damaged, blown down almost sideways, their roots exposed; the rangers did not know whether it would survive or not.
We also spotted prickly pear along the way, which he said was quite painful to the touch. Although the sharp spines could be pulled out of the skin of the unfortunate passerby who fell in it, tiny itchy quills remained behind, so small that they could not be seen; they could best be removed by applying duct tape and pulling them out.
Cat briars were another hazard. Ben said they sometimes planted them along areas they did not want to be disturbed, barbed wire to the hapless hiker. At the root of the briar was a large tuber the size of a sweet potato, which he said could grow to an enormous size.
Even sharper were the Spanish bayonets, which locals sometimes planted under their windows to deter burglars. I reached out and tentatively touched one of the sharp tips, and it was as sharp as a kitchen knife.
From there, we walked down to the beach; it was low tide, as it had been during my run yesterday. Martha told him we had spotted a Portuguese man-of-war in the surf the previous week, and Ben told us something that I did not know at all. Notorious as a very painful stinging creature (although seldom fatal), he said if he found one he would puncture it with a stick, dig a hole with the heel of his boot, and bury it safely under the sand. The man-of-war appears to be a single organism, but it is actually four different organisms, working in synergy, each of which cannot survive without the others. Each one provides a function for the survival of the others: the top gas-filled bag which allows it to float, tentacles for feeding, tentacles for defense, and the bottom organ that deals with reproduction. It seemed an apt metaphor for society itself.
It is truly a revelation to walk the beach with someone who knows what he is looking at. Ben began picking up tiny shells and talking about them.
Clockwise from the top left is a jingle shell, so thin that it easily crumbles into shiny flakes. Then a tiny whelk, the same whelks that we saw seagulls pick up and drop in the parking lot at the Bath House last year. "That's actually a learned behavior in gulls," Ben said. Then we found a sea-bean, a small pod washed up here in this place from some distant land. Also known as drift seeds, they are seeds and fruits adapted for long-distance dispersal by water, usually produced by tropical trees and carried on ocean currents for perhaps thousands of miles. And finally, a smooth stone, a "worry stone," worn smooth by the ocean. They are often carried in the pocket and gently massages by thumb and forefinger, according to Wikipedia: "This action of moving one's thumb back and forth across the stone can reduce stress." As can walking on this beach, I thought.
"Is that like sea glass?" I asked, and he said yes it was, and immediately spotted this piece of jagged sea glass, not yet worn smooth by the ocean. I have been looking for sea glass for many years - they say you cannot find sea glass; it finds you - and Ben simply plucked one up out of the sand, which makes me think that it is absolutely everywhere if a person can slow down and look carefully.
We came upon some huge bird tracks, almost as big as my hand, which Ben thought must have come from a blue heron, the largest of the herons and common in this area. We must have missed it by only only an hour or two, or a few minutes.
We walked up onto the dunes then, and Ben explained that this entire area had once been ocean, which at high tide would lap onto the road to Fort Macon. The wide expanse of sand dunes was due to the success of the Christmas tree program, begun in the 1960s; the carefully-placed trees retain the blowing sand and created all these dunes, some of them ten feet above sea level. Here is a Christmas tree trunk sticking out, still visible under a dune:
We came upon a concrete wall that extended above the sand, which we had noticed in previous hikes. Ben told us, amazingly, that this was a wall designed to stabilize and enforce the area around the Fort by Robert E. Lee, who was an engineer at the Fort.
All around us, sand dunes extended, perhaps a half-mile from the road. It was an amazing feeling to know that beneath our feet these dunes rested on the remains of Christmas trees, which came most likely from the mountains where we live, and which sat in hundreds and hundreds of homes in the area, lit and decorated and spreading gently over gift-wrapped packages on Christmas morning while "O Tannenbaum" playsed in the background.
"Thank you for your time," we told Ben. "We may have been a small group, but we were an interested and appreciative one!"
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