Big Surf and the Obliteration of Art

The dull slate grey Fall has arrived and with it the wet cold that goes through you into your joints. This is my least favorite time to be on the beach as there is always a wind and it is always a damp cold one. I went down to work on my "friendly jetty", a low sloping wall running down towards the waterline. It was friendly because I left a gap to walk through at the midway point, unlike the big concrete variety that dot the shore here. This picture you can see it at the end of the day. I worked another day on it, but then before I could photograph the latest manifestation two days of high winds and surf obliterated it...back to the drawing board. Fall is a time of change and the beach is certainly dynamic around now, unfortunately it is also dull grey. Here is the long view of the jetty before she was washed away. I was kind of liking this little thing, but so it goes.

I had made a set of colored stone circles a couple of weeks ago and last week added a new circle or reddish stone. I thought the bottom photograph was interesting with the circles juxtaposed with the shelf of washed up cobbles to the lakedside of the circles. These circles were also casualties of the high surf this week. Amazingly the surf had to be high enough to wash over about a two foot high rampart of these cobbles that had been pushed ashore a month ago by similar conditions. I thought this rampart would protect things until the ice dunes arrived. Wrong again.

A lot of stone has washed ashore in these last two storms and a shitload of construction material as well. Bricks and concrete blocks and that kind of thing. The place looks a little shaky right now, especially in this light. This week a snowstorm also blew in to the tune of about 8 inches. I haven't been down to the beach to see the results, but it was certainly a beautiful snow. It was accompanied on Sunday night with a pretty impressive electrical storm. That's something you don't see every day. The lightning flashes were incredibly bright, reflected off of the snow on the ground and in the sky...God's camera flash.