Hill Repeats

My weekly running has not varied much from the usual route since we have been here.  It’s two-and-a-half miles to the Fort Macon Visitor Center and a little over a mile to the Picnic Area, where I have been running intervals.  With extra loops around parking lots and return runs on the beach when low tide permits, we can complete six- and even eight-mile runs, even more in previous years.  I never grow tired of the Fort Macon road with its running/bicycle lane alongside.  It is the perfect place to run out here, really, except on the beach at low tide.

Today I felt like running something different, though, so I turned into Henderson Boulevard, the next road down toward Fort Macon, and explored a little.  It ends at a parking lot and beach access point, and there are some flat-top motels along the way, including the Sand Dollar with its hopeful “Daily and Weekly Rates” sign and Pelican’s Roost.  They were deserted this morning but I expect they are completely booked in July.

The next road down is Sea Dreams Drive, the entrance to a cute little neighborhood that ends in this row of colorful houses that we see from the beach, lined up like a box of crayons facing the ocean.

At the entrance to Sea Dreams is a remarkable house called “Bridge House,” which stretches over the road.  On most mornings when we run by, there is a little white dog standing precisely in the middle of the bridge and he barks furiously, no doubt a highlight of the day for him. 

The road climbs steeply once you run under the bridge, more steeply than you would expect out here, and then it climbs again up a longer hill, and back down steeply again before reaching that row of pastel crayola houses facing the ocean.  It was here that I decided to run short hill repeats this morning, back and forth, running hard to the top of a hill, then easing down the other side.  My friend Skip Taylor told me about the benefits of short hill repeats, and they are a great workout.  In Highlands, I run them at the top of Sixth Street, but I think these hills this morning were steeper than that one.

The only other hill out here is the tall Atlantic Beach Causeway that spans Bogue Sound, part of the course of the Crystal Coast 10-K and Half Marathon that we have both completed in previous years, one year in a 35-mph gale.  So it was nice to discover some surprisingly steep hills so close to the condo.  And it felt good to this mountain runner to be running hills again.

Dredging and Nourishment (Part II)

I last wrote about the $18 million Morehead City Harbor Dredging & Concurrent Beach Nourishment project in my post of January 2.  We had watched in curiosity on that day as long sections of pipeline were being moved into place down near the jetty at the Fort Macon Picnic Area.  A week later, we walked on the beach toward Fort Macon and realized that the actual dredging had begun.  Piles of dark dredged material were being spread out along the beach, watched by curious beach-goers like us as well as an unusually large flock of seagulls.  

I don’t know what I thought that the stuff being discharged through the pipe would look like, but I was surprised that it was so black.  That makes sense when you consider that it would be sedimentation that originated upstream, probably soil from farms and construction.  A day or two later, I walked out on the walkway at the Picnic Area and watched as this dark stuff was being pumped upward, like a dark mushroom, and was then being pushed away by bulldozers.

The informative project website confirmed that dredging indeed was fully underway.  “Weeks Marine's cutterhead-suction pipeline dredge, the J.S. Chatry arrived to Morehead City Harbor on December 29th, and transited to the most seaward reach of the channel to start dredging with concurrent beach nourishment on January 6th.”  (I love the way engineers talk!)  “In terms of the beachfill, the dredged sand is pumped through a submerged pipeline from the channel that lands west of the terminal groin at Ft. Macon State Park where the land-based pipe is affixed to.”  

Someone on a local Atlantic Beach Facebook page posted photos of the J. S. Chatry, apparently taken from a boat out in the harbor.

We walked a mile down the beach to check out progress the day before yesterday and watched as bulldozers continued to spread the “dredged material” out along the beach.  It was not a very attractive look for a beach!  I wonder how long it will take for this stuff to be covered up with sand brought in on the tide, and with shells and sand dollars and sea stars? 

As I continued to read about the project, I realized that this was just the beginning of “nourishment” that is to continue toward the condo building, under the Oceanana Pier, and ultimately as far as the “Circle” in Atlantic Beach, where the Causeway from Morehead City meets Fort Macon Road, a mile or so away.  Our walks and runs along this lovely, flat beach will be greatly impacted by this project!  Gone will be the white sand on the beach in both directions from where our walkway and dune-top deck open out over the dunes onto the sand, where fishermen set up with their rods augured into the sand, where little children with plastic pails gather shells, where kite-flyers show up every weekend.  If we want to walk on the beach I suppose we will have to drive down to the Circle and walk westward from there.

It reminded me of the Joni Mitchell song:

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone;
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.

It’s not pavement, but it’s the color of a parking lot. Something else to disturb the quiet seasons.

P. S.  I hope readers of this blog will appreciate that not once in this post did I mention the political events of the past week, or those of the coming week!

Disturbance of the Quiet Seasons

We should not have been surprised that the Trump presidency would end like this after four years of scandal.  Still, the enormity of inciting an insurrection continues to sink in, and as more details have come out it is clear that our nation narrowly avoided the murder of our Vice President, Speaker of the House, and many of our legislatures by a MAGA-hat-wearing, angry mob.  So we continue to watch much more television than we have watched in a long time, hoping not to see yet another “Breaking News” banner on the bottom of the screen.  Some are thinking that the worse is over, that January 6 was the last gasp of white supremacy, while others are predicting more violence on or before January 20, perhaps in state capitols around the country.  We are awaiting with bated breath the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the 20^th and a hopeful new era of competent leadership. 

Only two weeks ago the din and the sordidness of all of this was in the background, and we felt that we could take long walks on the beach and enjoy the simple pleasures of living beside the ocean.  But our serenity has been shattered, as it has for many, and it will be difficult recovering that sense of peace and tranquility that is at the heart of our annual Sabbaticals.  As T. S. Eliot wrote in Murder in the Cathedral:

We have suffered various oppression.
But mostly we are left to our own devices.
And we are content if we are left alone.
We try to keep our households in order . . .
Now I fear disturbance of the quiet seasons.

This afternoon we turned off the news and took a four-mile hike on the Elliott Coues Nature Trail at Fort Macon.  We are fortunate that the Fort and its hiking trails are so close to this condo, and that there are several hiking options.  So far this year we have completed the new loop trail near the Picnic Area and the Oceanside portion of the Coues trail which climbs up on high sand dunes and overlooks the ocean. Today, with a strong 25-mph wind blowing off the ocean from the southwest, we took the relatively sheltered salt-marsh portion of the trail, which winds through a shady maritime forest and offers views over the marsh and Bogue Sound to Morehead City.

 
There were a lot of folks out on the trail on this Saturday, including many families with children.  Perhaps they, too, were escaping the frightening news on television.

There are some wonderful twisted live oaks and red cedars in the forest, and as expected we were out of the wind.  

There is always something about hiking, as with running and walking on the beach beside the ocean, that helps restore that sense of serenity that we strive to feel:  the fresh air, the friendly people passing by with a smile and a word of greeting, the happy dogs on their leashes – the quiet seasons. 

We returned to the condo refreshed and rosy-cheeked, after a detour across the Causeway to Blue Ocean for dinner:  Parmesan-baked scallops and roasted sweet potatoes, which I offered to prepare this evening.  I hope I won’t set off the smoke alarm as I did the last time.

In the Midst of Madness

It has been difficult not to be consumed every day by the riveting drama unfolding in our nation’s capitol, where lawmakers still don’t seem capable of addressing the problem of a President who incited a violent insurrection last Wednesday.  Nothing like this has ever been done by a sitting President, and why he has not been removed from office before now continues to amaze me.  At least the House will be voting on articles of impeachment tomorrow, and even Republicans like Chris Christie are on record as saying, “If inciting an insurrection isn’t an impeachable offense, I don’t know what is.”

We keep watching the images of those rioters storming the Capitol building on January 6, some of whom have apparently been apprehended.  They were so bold that most of them were not even wearing masks, and so their faces have been publicized by the FBI and recognized by their friends and their families and their Facebook followers.  Sadly, we know of at least one resident of Highlands who attended the rally.  Whether or not he was among the rioters I do not know, but he very well could have been. 

This morning I have been reading about Lizard People, a subject of which I confess I was completely unaware.  According to an NBC News article, though, the recent Nashville bomber was one of a large number of people – some of whom might have been among those who stormed the Capitol – who believe an insane theory that a race of reptilian beings invaded Earth and created a genetically modified lizard-human hybrid race called the Babylonian Brotherhood.  These beings are plotting to take over the world, and they include Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth II, Alan Greenspan, and Mick Jagger.  (Queen Elizabeth?!!)  I could believe that a handful of lunatics might believe this science fiction, perhaps even a few hundred.  But according to the article, a 2013 Public Policy Polling survey found that 12 million Americans believe in this Lizard People conspiracy!  Why have I not heard of this before now?  Also among the rioters were many QAnon supporters, who believe that "Satan-worshiping pedophiles like Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi" have taken over our government, and only Donald Trump can stop them.

Lizard People.  QAnon.  How many people who live down the road from me believe in Lizard People?  In QAnon?  I’m not sure I want to know.  What I do know is that critical thinking is the vaccine against this kind of ignorance, that truth is the vaccine against lies, and that justice and accountability is the vaccine against insurrection.  That kindness is the vaccine against cruelty, and love is the vaccine against hate.

So the days go by, and we continue to live our lives in the midst of this madness, praying that more violence will not consume us before January 20.  We escape from time to time from the spell of cable news.  We still run our miles, we walk on the beach, we read our books in the evening.  Children still build their sandcastles on the beach and they wash away in the incoming tide.

And in Highlands, January is in full swing.  This morning Martha read on Facebook that Highway 28, the road we take from our home in Clear Creek to Highlands every day, was a solid sheet of black ice.  And it snowed just the other day.  We would not be running or hiking very much in January in Highlands.  We are thankful to Martha’s Aunt for letting us stay here in her condo, where just now, as I am writing, and after a night and a morning of showers, the sun has broken through and is shining on the ocean and it is a balmy 47 degrees.

Insurrection

It is difficult to believe that only last Sunday I could write about that foggy day on the beach where Martha found a royal sea star.  It seems like so long ago.  So much has happened in only a handful of days that it feels almost like the day the twin towers were hit on September 11, 2001.  Far fewer people died this past Wednesday than on 9-11, but the shock was surely just as great as on that day of infamy 20 years ago.  I knew this would not end well, but I never expected to see this vile, corrupt, incompetent buffoon of a President incite a MAGA-hat wearing mob to storm the Capitol.

 

 

We broke our rule about turning on the television this week and on Tuesday night we watched with growing optimism as Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock won election to the Senate, giving Democrats the majority.  On Wednesday morning we began to watch the routine counting of the electoral vote in Congress, and when we realized it would take most of the day we went to the grocery store.  That’s where I heard the shocking news on NPR that the Capitol had been overrun.  We hurried back and watched with horror, together with most of the country and the world, as the unbelievable scenes unfolded before our eyes.  I never thought we would see a Confederate flag carried through the rotunda, or legislators crouching on the floor in fear of their lives. 

January 6 - Epiphany Day.  Maybe this will be an epiphany for some of his supporters.  Needless to say, we have been watching the cable news ever since as this story continues to unfold, and in fact it is on as I write this latest post to the blog.  Surely Trump will be removed before January 20 one way or another, and the guilty and the complicit will be held to account.   

Until then, this blog will fall silent for a few days.  Perhaps we can return by then to quiet walks on the beach looking for sand dollars and sea stars.

Royal Sea Star

The fog began to roll in yesterday afternoon just after lunch.  There is nothing quite like fog at low tide on a beach like this.  One memorable day last year, I was running back from Fort Macon on this beach and it was so thick that I lost sight of the sand dunes and the buildings behind them.  But I knew approximately how far I had run, so I stopped and made my way up to the dunes blindly, eventually finding the path to the walkway and the condo, still invisible in the fog.

Martha had started walking while I was finishing up some work on my computer (my silent computer!), and then I went down to meet her on the beach.  These fishermen looked like they were settled in for the rest of the afternoon.

Figures appeared only faintly in the distance.  It was a ghostly and beautiful experience, the calm surf lapping quietly up onto the sand, everything fading into the mist.  Up ahead I thought I saw Martha but could not be sure until she got closer.

What did she have cradled in her hand?  She was beaming.  Another sand dollar?  No, something far more unusual:  a royal sea star (Astropecten articulatus), which had just washed in, a bright light in the fog.

It is the unexpected that I like the most,
Like the royal sea star we found,
Phoenician purple, like a Christmas cookie
Squeezed from a piping bag.

Dredging and Uninstalling and Running

On our hike on Thursday afternoon, we had noticed that the equipment that had been staged in the Picnic Area parking lot was no longer there.  It had all been moved down onto the beach between there and Fort Macon, and the $18 million Morehead City Harbor Dredging & Concurrent Beach Nourishment project was well underway (see post of December 18).  Silt will be dredged from the Morehead City Harbor, a State Port and the deepest one on the East Coast, and deposited on this beach.

The engineer’s description of the project posted on the Carteret County Shore Protection Project was fascinating, at least to this former Town Administrator who has watched sewer plants, water plants, pumping stations, and water tanks constructed over the years. 

“A cutterhead-suction dredge utilizes a crane situated on a barge that positions the cutterhead, which looks like a gigantic drill bit, along the seafloor.  The cutterhead agitates the sandy bottom, and the resulting slurry of sediment and water is subsequently suctioned into a long tube transitioning into a pipeline that can be extended to a specific target area.”

Two weeks ago, we had seen this head-high pile of pipe on the beach, and on one of my runs I had passed one of the many tractor-trailer trucks that had carried them there.

 

I walked the length of the pipe, each one of which was about 30 feet long, and counted about 200 sections, which would mean a pipeline at least 6000 feet long, long enough to reach the edge of the harbor inlet.  Track-hoes and bulldozers were lined up at the time, ready for the project to begin.

 

I did a little research after seeing this impressive pile of pipe, and for what it is worth to any curious readers of this blog there are some absolutely wonderful videos out there on the internet; just go to YouTube and search for cutterhead suction dredges.  The dredge will be positioned in the channel and sweep back and forth, while the “cutterhead” turns exactly as a drill bit does, and silt is sucked up to the surface on what I think will be floating sections of light tubing that will ultimately connect on land to a mile-long pipeline.

On Thursday, we found that most of the sections of pipe had been fitted together into several long sections of this pipeline.  “How can that even work?” I asked Martha.  “Imagine pumping silt through a pipe a mile long!  It looks like it would just pile up inside and stop!  I don’t think it’s going to work.” 

There were a lot of folks down on the beach looking at this pipeline.  A friendly young man and woman asked us if we knew what was going on, and of course I obliged with an explanation, trying not to act like I was being the smug expert.  They were equally amazed.  “I think they will pump it all the way to the end, spread it out, then remove a section at a time and work backwards,” I speculated. 

Up ahead we saw some flashing lights and heard some beeping.  A bulldozer was approaching, and as he neared us we saw that he was dragging a section of pipeline behind him that looked several hundred feet long.  I took this video (which I am proud of learning how to post):

As it passed by, we saw that there was another bulldozer behind the section pushing it, as locomotives do on a railway.  

I wondered how these sections had been fitted together.  The man we were talking to speculated, as I did, that they had been welded, but I know a little about welding and upon reflection I don’t see how this rusty, barnacle-encrusted pipeline had been welded.  I wanted to ask someone who really was an expert, but they all seemed to be busy dragging and pushing this pipeline into place. 

“Weeks Marine's cutterhead-suction pipeline dredge, the J. S. Chatry, is scheduled to arrive the 1st week in January,” the project website said, “And could begin channel maintenance/nourishment on January 5th.”  Until then, readers of this blog will have to wait with bated breath.

Yesterday, the first day of 2021, did not go as planned.  We had noticed that the internal speaker on my laptop computer did not sound as loud as it used to, although I had been able to listen to some wonderful Christmas music through new earphones that Martha had given me for Christmas.  I researched the possible cause and learned that the best solution was to uninstall the audio driver software and reinstall/update it.  The uninstall worked fine, but I spent most of the day trying to reinstall/update it.  I dived deep and visited more websites than I can remember, installing and restarting my computer dozens of times.  I learned what a High Definition Audio Bus was.  I learned that the recommended Realtek ALC3202 Audio Driver for Windows 7 could not be installed for some unknown reason.  I even downloaded the Avast Driver Updater and Scanner program, and when I ran it I was told I was off-line, which of course I was not because I had just downloaded it.  At one point I found myself beginning to watch what I thought might be an informative YouTube video before realizing that . . . I could not hear it.  I finally admitted defeat when Martha, seeing me slumped over my laptop, said, “You don’t look like you’re having fun.”  I was not, and so we went for a walk on the beach together.  And then I was.

I have a tradition of trying to do things on the first day of a New Year that I would like to continue for the rest of the year.  For several years, I have been running in the New Year’s Resolution Run in Highlands, a Fun Run to start the year off on the right foot.

New Year's Resolution Run 2020

But because of Covid and because we dissolved our running club this summer, and because we are here, there was no Resolution Run this year.  But this year we at least walked on the beach and ate some healthy food, and I wrote some poetry and played some music and read a book.  And because of my semi-long run on New Year’s Eve, I ran today instead.  It was unseasonably warm again, in the mid-60s, and I was determined to make up for a day spent mostly at my computer yesterday.  I have been running the final mile of some of my runs out here as fast as I can, and last week I finally got under eleven minutes.  That’s what I did again today, thinking almost angrily as I picked up the pace that I would make this count, that I would start the New Year ambitiously, that I would put the hammer down.  So it was very gratifying to clock a faster final mile than last week.  My fastest mile this year!  And my longest run (three miles) of the year, too!

When I returned to the condo, Martha went for a walk on the beach.  She wrote in the sand with a feather she found and sent me this photo.

Like everything we write in the sand, it has already been washed away by the tide.  But it is a New Year, and we are looking forward to it being better than last year (Good Bye 2020!).  “Tell me,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”  What will we do this year?  Martha found this and hung it on the wall (the substitute for our little kitchen blackboard at home), the first quote for 2021.