Part Three: Saltwater

Saltwater is my favorite. It is refreshing. After a good swim in salt water, my lips taste like salt and my body feels extra invigorated. 

I love finding beach treasures. During this trip, I found a little bone. It is clean from the saltwater and white from the sun. 

What sort of creature did it belong too? A seal? A dolphin? A raccoon? A beautiful beast yet to be discovered by humankind? It is a mystery. Most probably, an easily solved mystery, but a mystery none the less!

A sea monster! It looks an awfully lot like the marsh monster from the previous post.

Sometimes all you need for a shelter is a slanted wall of driftwood and a bed of sand. Comfort comes in all forms.

Sometimes the best place to spend your time is among scattered pieces of driftwood underneath the blazing sun.

I use to have a friend who I met because I did caregiving for her when I was in college. She told me an interesting theory she had about human evolution and saltwater. She thought that at one point, humans were amphibious creatures. We walked around on four legs like most mammals. But we spent a lot of time in the sea. It was the sea that helped us stand on two feet. The waves bobbed our front legs upward, the boyount water kept us stable. Soon, we started to try and move about land the same way we moved in the saltwater.

She was imaginative, my old friend. She read a lot of books. We would go seeking out books together. She'd get stacks of mysteries and pile them around her bed. She could read a whole book in one night.

It wasn't till years later that I was struck with the same joy of a twisty-turny mystery book. I no longer lived in the same town as my friend. I wrote her a letter requesting a list of her favorite mystery novels. Instead, she sent me a whole box full of yellow paged, musty smelling mystery books (The best kind of books!)

One time she told me another story about the ocean. She was camping on the beach when she heard the strangest noises. They were long, baleful howling calls. Not like dogs, almost like a person. When she peeked out her tent, she saw a a huge figure lumbering across the shore. It was a big foot! She could feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She closed the tent flap and pretended to be asleep. The mournful big foot wandered onward, in search of something else.