I’ve given up taking pictures at the coast: a two-dimensional image captures so little of the depth and sparkle and whoosh and roar and glow that it feels almost insulting. I like doing watercolors because it’s agreed from the get-go that you’re cropping out most of the experience and presenting an approximation of it–or, you’re presenting how it felt rather than how it looked.
We’ve been camping on the coast now for I think 4 years for my friend Steph’s birthday. This time we got to introduce her dog, Mabel, to the ocean, which was really fun (though I think Mabel found it a bit overwhelming; Wright’s Beach is not a swimming beach). We foraged seaweed at Shell Beach again and got thoroughly smoked while cooking our meals over an open fire, which I’m obsessed with and which is always a somewhat fraught and dramatic experience: this year my friend Marshall and I worked *really* hard on making a pineapple upside-down cake in a cast-iron skillet set on the coals. Believe it or not, it turned out great…until a raccoon ate most of it during the night because we forgot to lock the raccoon-proof pantry box at the campsite. Cassandra named him Stanley. She even managed to snap a pic of Stanley with his little grabby mitts full of pineapple. I guess the universe was worried we were going to get big heads about what great campfire cooks we were becoming and sent us Stanley to keep us humble. Thanks, Stanley.
The Rookery 