Beach Walker

After arriving at my resort, I went for a walk on the beach out back. There are a lot of pictures here, but the shoreline seemed infinite today, like I couldn't have begun to understand it with a thousand pics in this blogpost.

I've enjoyed the exit signs around here, since they depict someone running rather than walking. It lends a sense of urgency and fitness to my sense of life.

The walls of my guesthouse have some information about sea life on them.

The beach itself is a gray-sand beach, but close up to the guesthouse there's an area with beige sand for kids to play in. Maybe kids get dirtier and gray sand is easier to see when it's tracked back into the resort? So give them beige sand?

To beachward.

This view reminded me of a view at Kailu Beach Park.

If I were going to measure the shoreline, which line would I choose? The dry line made by the tide? The line along the wet receding sheen? Something seaward?

Maybe this line of the wave...

A while ago I started watercoloring and watching people paint on youtube. I stumbled onto a view people painting beach scenes like this with reflections in the receding sheen.

I was heading over toward a jetty.

At the jetty I found a lot of people trying to catch something--crabs I think--with rotten fish at the end of reeds. This activity seemed to be enjoyed equally among kids and young adults.

Hold on, let me take a selfie.

These huge concrete items were what made up the shoreline. I imagined the engineering team who dreamed them up selling them to governments by telling them that they're shaped to be equally stable in any orientation that they're placed, so they can be placed in any orientation without giving much attention to how they fall, since once they land, they won't settle further. Concrete items like this create a very complex shoreline. I would need to harness an ant to walk the length of it.

But the ant would be washed away no doubt.

The ant wouldn't have legs as well adapted to clinging to rocks in the midst of waves, as the crab.

Looking from the jetty over to the point that reminds me, statistically speaking, of Kailua Beach Park.

When I was walking out to the jetty, there was a man flying a kite. On my way back from the jetty, now aiming to walk over to the point, I saw that another man had shown up with a kite with a tail.

On the walk toward the point, I met someone who had caught I fish and let me take a pic.

I liked seeing this family out at the beach, and I'm looking forward to going to the beach sometime soon with mine.

a might fortress

I started noticing some salty dogs.

And then in an abandoned part of the beach I saw a man waiting for the waves, digging in the sheen with a shovel, and then throwing things--so small I couldn't see them--into a bag. If I had been in Indonesia, I would have asked him what he was catching. 

But one interesting thing about being here is that, compared to in Indonesia, people are hardly interested in the fact of my presence. I kept expecting people to say hello to me or to come up and talk with me, but that didn't happen ever. I'm so used to that type of friendliness at this point that I felt like a ghostly figure out walking on the beach, unseen but seeing.

I think these dogs saw me.

But maybe they were watching the man who dug.

I looked ahead toward a sail and a dog.

But then I looked back at him. His reflection in the sheen seemed better than anyone's.

Okay, back plodding toward the point and the sails.

Hold on, let me take another selfie.

As I moved farther away from the jetty, I looked back and saw there was a pinnacle sticking up, farther away, past it.

But I kept walking toward the point.

It was pretty misty while I was out walking, and I saw this ship out on the horizon.

Over here, the concrete items, with their shoreline of sand, gave a good illustration of how difficult it would be to measure the shoreline. I imagined the sand were water, and I tried to look hard enough, but now that it's over, I don't think I looked hard enough.

My luggage for this trip is my laptop case and my backpack, both crammed full of a week's supplies. Even so, there were fleeting moments among the concrete items when I thought I might stuff this driftwood into my backpack as well. And then I imagined I would bring it back to Utah with me from Indonesia. And then I imagined other 12 inch by 6 inch items that I might prefer to carry back from Indonesia instead of this piece of driftwood. 

At that point, I knew we would be parting ways so I took another picture and turned toward other sights.

Like this piece of driftwood, that seemed like it ought to be an animal, a fossilized flamingo or a stork.

Looking back over where I had just walked.

At least three potential shorelines to measure here.

I watched this woman approaching the shore. Once she got in close, a wave came and capsized her little boat. She was calling out for help and for a second I thought the help would need to come from me. (The help involved wasn't life or death, I could see, because she was doing a fine job standing up in the shallow water. She just needed help getting her boat right-side-up.) But then in became apparent that she was calling directly to a friend of hers on shore. So I let that friend give the help, and I kept walking.

There was a canal that emptied into the ocean, with the canal's mouth divided from the ocean by the sand, under and through which the canal water flowed clear to the ocean. It was a little dog kingdom in there.

The killdeer's Taiwanese cousin.

Lounging dogs.

But one saw me and began stretching.

And then it laid back down.

Some wedding photos in progress.

Wedding photos with kites.

By now I was walking back to the jetty to try to learn about the pinnacle I had noticed from the distance.

I climbed to the top of the jetty and kept walking.

Some other wedding photos in progress.

The pinnacle, I could see, was at the end of a long cement pier where a lot of people were fishing. There were signs and gates that seemed to be indicating that no one should go onto the pier. But everyone was going around the gates, so I did too.

The easiest way to measure this shoreline would be in the apparently straight line of the pier. But the actual shoreline kept shifting with the waves at the base of the pier.

On the other side of the pier, the water was much calmer, and barnacles lined the waterline. Would the texture of the barnacles become part of the shoreline's measurement?

Someone might say (if they cared to talk with me about barnacles and shoreline measurements) that the barnacles corrugations shouldn't be part of the measurement because they're living things and not the actual inert earth.

But then I would say: Okay but then can the dead barnacles and their corrugated shells become part of the measurement? If my interlocutor said no, I would ask if they thought that sand ought to be seen as shoreline. If they did think so, I would remind them that a lot of sand is made up of shells and coral. And BAM--I would have won this argument that no one would ever care enough to engage in with me.

Then I looked out into the ocean and in the distance I could see a little duck. It looked like a ruddy duck--that same type of shape. But then at times it looked like it had the beak of a puffin, except no so brightly colored. I zoomed in as far as I could with my camera and waited, because it kept turning away from me. I could see that every once in awhile it would turn its eye toward me. And I wanted a picture with its eye showing. Finally, it turned its eye toward me and I snapped the photo. And then when I got the photo onto the computer, I realized it was a floating can, and the eye was a hole in the top.

I couldn't tell if this post was of rock or metal.

Ahoy the pinnacle!

Look how the wave, which came from the right, spread water all over the pier, so that measuring the length of the shoreline would involve tracing the jagged line of the water sitting on the pier.

I looked toward land and saw a ship traveling out of--what was it?--a river or a bay.

Out out

I watched with other people

And I was rewarded by seeing a ship christened the Bungo Princess. It turns out that you can get day-by-day information on the location of the Bungo Princess online here.

And off the Bungo Princess sailed, being 103.64 meters long and 19 meters wide, having a deadweight of 10034 tonnes, sailing under the flag of Panama, built in 2009, and currently at a latitude and longitude of 23.47167 and 119.9243. (All this information accurate as of 15 minutes of my writing it. To keep up with the further movements of the Bungo Princess, see the link above.

And then a wave disrupted the straight line of the easy shoreline.

A lot of people were walking back, and I was too.

At the gate, I was a broom that was made of such a magpie's collection of straw that I wanted a picture of it.

Just a sec, gotta take a selfie.

I was just taking some pictures a little closer to the resort and I got curious about the building to the right.

It was a glass-walled enclosure that turned out to be a wedding building as far as I can tell.