Rocks, But No Kelp

♠
My bed looked mighty good to me very early last night. On impulse, and for other reasons I ain't ready to write about yet, I took off and drive 100 miles down to the NC Aquarium and the beaches there about to look to see in I could find some seaweed to use for fertilizer for sprouting seeds. I didn't find any. On the way back I remembered that seaweed usually only gets washed ashore after a big storm, and don't last long laying around on the shore.

I stopped a couple of times before I got to Fort Fisher and the Aquarium. Once at Snow's Cut at the entrance to Carolina Beach. It's a canal that was dug to bring the ocean closer to Wilmington. Otherwise, the boats and yachts have to go all the way to Southport or Fort Caswell like the big ships do. One can see the ocean from the top of the arched bridge that goes over it, so I thought maybe some seaweed would have washed ashore through the current passing through the canal at high tide. Wrong.

Fort Fisher, the old Confederate fort I used to go hunting for cannonballs and musket bullets at that place with a childhood friend who lived nearby, has been restored to some degree. The State hauled in a bunch of large granite boulders to keep the ocean back from where they built a visitor's center. I figured some seaweed might have been trapped by the tides in those boulders. Wrong again.

Bad day for decision making. There is public parking between the visitor's center and the rock jetty, and I pulled up and parked my car. There weren't many people at the beach this time of the year, but this spot is at the very end of U.S.Highway 421, and the practical ocean-front end of Interstate 40 (There is a ferry close by that goes over to Southport), and the Center is open year-round, so there are always a few people around.

Right in front of me on the rocks was a young teenager hopping from boulder to boulder, rock to rock, and doing it easily with the grace and energy of a young person. For a moment there I forgot that I was not young, and decided to hop and skip over the rocks myself, just like I'd done in the past when I was a kid. I fell. Twice before I got back to my car. Dumb.

I only got scraped up a bit and a few bruises, but it could easily have been much worse. It's easy to break bones when you're old. I'll be 71 years old in a month and two days, and got diagnosed with every bone disease known to mankind a year ago, including osteoporosis which thins the bones and makes them more easily broken. I was lucky this time.

Since I was in the Wilmington area I decided to go to Paula's Health Hut, a health food store that's been around a long time. I walked through it to see what they had to sell these days. Less than ever. I figured the reason it was low in stock was the other health food store over in one of the newish suburban shopping centers toward the new part of town that resulted from the completion of Interstate 40.

I was right. The new health food store even has a couple or three buffet tables that served all sorts of delicacies and salads. They had expanded to include the stores on each side of it. Exactly the opposite behavior or Paula's Health Hut. People are so fickle. So am I. I didn't buy anything though. I was already getting tired from running around in the big city traffic.

I decided to drive to one more beach that might have some seaweed washed up on the shore because of it's unique location as the entrance to the sound that is located behind Wrightsville Beach., the real playground of my youth. The place where all the bikini-clad teen-aged girls like to go to sunbath. Since the season won't start for a couple of months there were work crews on the beach I hoped to find seaweed sucking sand out of the yacht basin entrance, so that didn't go well either. "There was no joy in Muddville...", so I headed for ho-me.
☯