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Gulf Hike before/after So there I sat, staring into the gulf after hiking miles to the shore, wondering about the decisions that led me to that point. Miles of sugary white sand, empty of development or people, a sandpiper, raced through the tide, careful about getting his feet too wet. The Gulf is a deceptive bitch. She looks tepid and temperate, weak without reserve, like an eunuch that had been freshly gelded. I felt none of the low menacing power that I usually feel when I sit along the shores of Lake Superior. Lake Superior can kill you, Jack, and she knows it. The cold will freeze you in minutes, and squalls can spring up that will split your ship in half, like the doomed Edmund Fitzgerald. When the rare summers occur that allow for a moderate amount of swimming, the Natives shake their heads and wail lamentations, as the bill will become due. Mighty Superior never gives up her dead. But the Gulf seems friendly, almost tamed. Colonized. Oil rigs lounge lazily off-shore sucking up the black blood of the earth, a blight on the horizon. The coast is over-built, but the homes pay mute testimony to the deceptive power of the sea. Indeed, high stilts are required in the new construction, and after hurricanes Ivan and Katrina, no one dares ask why. The survivors were there, and the those that weren't just don't understand. Sunny and cheerily aqua blue, I suspect she's like a cheating wife, the one that drops the nuke on you one day, telling you she leaving you, taking the dogs and children, and, oh, by the way, has been fucking everyone including the mailman behind your back. It's something that not everyone is equipped to come to terms with, and those that do will only grimly understand. I sat there and thought about my life, mistakes made, choices made and not. Things could have ended quite differently for me, and still might. Fortune favors the bold, after all, and I have nothing if not for a taste of the weird. The unusual. The different path. The spontaneous. The excitement that comes from leaving the comfort zone. After all, I do like a bit of excitement from time to time, even if that means the hikes I truly like have a low element of death involved, or real possibility of suffering if you Fuck Up. Having said that, it was all indeterminate still. I yearned for more and still do, but that yearning is not wisdom. It's a ride and we all end up in the same place. I nodded to myself as I stood up and dusted off, looking around, calculated my time back to the parking lot and casting a weather-eye to the sky. I set forth back to the car, miles off, with the roar of the deceptive surf in my ears, mindful to keep my head up and my mind aware and in the moment, not brooding over lustful ideas and day-to-day bullshit. One must stay in the moment when the moment is there to be had.
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