After a weekend at the beach, it is only fitting that I link to this beautifully illustrated WaPo article on beachcoming. You will never guess what the top item collected at beach cleanups was in 2021.

Just kidding, of course you will — it’s cigarette butts.

Visiting Montauk beach at Calvert Cliffs, a family member had one mission: to find a shark tooth. Millions of years ago, this part of Chesapeake was warmer and mostly under water. Many a shark dropped a tooth or a hundred during that time; today, they tend to drift to the shore with some regularity.

Searching for a speck of black in a tapestry of white-gray brought to mind Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, more specifically the chapter about learning to see, and yet even more specifically, her discovering praying mantis egg cases This is a longer blog post from The Examined Life about writers and insects; scroll down for the Pilgrim… excerpt. everywhere she looked, once she learned what one looks like.

My own learning-to-see training started with watching birds — not organized or consistent enough to be called birdwatching — and realizing in short order that not every brown-gray bird smaller than a robin is a sparrow, that blue jays, cardinals, and woodpeckers are actually quite abundant even in urban areas, and that those blue jays, as magnificent as they are, usually sound like nails on a chalkboard. The beach makes for even better training grounds. For novices like us there are mermaid’s purses and loggerhead turtle tracks — we saw both during our Outer Banks excursion — things alien enough to immediately be recognized as something. The mental exercise consists of discovering what that something is.

Not so with shark teeth, especially not with the small ones you are more likely to come across during a daytime summer stroll, as opposed to a planned break-of-dawn winter expedition. Is it a spiky piece of iron ore? A fossilized crab claw? Tooth of a mammal? Who knows!? Short of finding a 6-inch dental behemoth, casual beachgoers like us will come up with a million reasons why this black triangle isn’t an actual tooth, and why this other may be, without ever knowing if they are correct. Annie Dillard could put that insect egg casing in a jar and see dozens of tiny praying mantisses scuttle out and devour each other. I can put my black triangle in a dish and look at it until the Sun implodes, and it will continue being that same black triangle, possibly melted.

Unless, of course, we find an expert to tell us why these ridges here mean that it comes from a shark’s jaw, or why this dent over there means it is actually part of a crab. And, knowing that, we will know with certainty — conditional on us trusting the expert — what those two particular artifacts are, but could hardly extrapolate to other pieces of black material found on the beach, and most certainly not to those nestled on the forest floor, or buried in the desert sands, or hiding under the carpet of a 3-story walk-up.

This is in fact very much how medicine works: sometimes, the symptoms are clear enough and occur often enough that you may know as well as an MD that there is a urinary tract infection brewing. But too often — most of the time, in fact — the problems are subtle and chronic and may not develop into something recognizable until it is too late — in which case you better find an expert — or, maybe, never amount to much of anything — in which case you need that expert even more, the most valuable part of medical expertise consisting of the knowledge and experience needed to muster the confidence to say that something is just a piece of rock.

Update: Two months later, we went back and found some.

We came to Calvert Cliffs for the fossils, and the cliffs delivered!

Duck (🦆), North Carolina.

Another one on our travel list: Calvert Cliffs State Park — home to the most fossils per square foot on the East coast, and neighbor to the state’s only nuclear power plant.

Chesapeake Bay is a natural wonder of the world and Maryland has its best parts, making it clearly the best state in the union — no contest.

Reading my post from yesterday one may think I have something against Smith Island, Maryland. Nothing could be further from the truth! Between the nature, the solitude, and the food, it has been on our list of places to visit for the better part of this decade. Stars seem to be aligning for August of this year, so fingers crossed.

We have been watching some videos in preparation, and An Island Out of Time (YouTube link) were 25 minutes well-spent. The island has been getting less and less hospitable for humans compared to the mainland, and it has nothing to do with its supposedly sinking.

This is our second time traveling to the Outer Banks. Henceforth OBX. The first was seven years and two children ago, when I attended a grant-writing workshop held at an upscale resort in Duck, NC.

We were further down south this time, in Kill Devil Hills, ⊕ Yes, these are actual town names. There is also, of course, Kitty Hawk, as well as Nags Head. I’ll take those over European place names — looking at you, Vienna VA — any day. in accommodations that were decidedly more homely — and it was great!

1. Not sure how general knowledge of OBX is — I certainly didn’t know anything about them before coming — so I will summarize the geography thusly: a thin strip of sand oriented north-to-south parallel to the Eastern coast of North Carolina, famous for being the Wright brothers’ chosen site for their glider tests and, ultimately, humanity’s first flight.
2. That thin strip of sand is perilously close to perishing: there was a moderately severe storm on our first day and parts of the road closest to the beach were half-flooded for days; waves are picking at the beach little by little, often helped by clueless beachgoers who make coastal erosion into a family event, little shovels at the ready; so, you’d better see it while it’s still there.
3. And there is more than the beach there to see: the Wright Brothers National Memorial, for one, but also Jockey’s Ridge state park which was even better for being so unexpected (we found out about it by my scrolling around the map and wondering what the big yellow splotch was — incidentally, a random scroll around the map is an excellent way of semi-spontaneous trip planning, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron).
4. I still find it amazing that, with everything else being commodified and price-tagged, the beaches of North America are still mostly free. And that there are so many of them. Yes, the Mediterranean see is warmer, friendlier, better to swim and wade through, and just plane nicer. But the beaches, on top of being hostile to feet, are also much more crowded and much too often open only to those who can pay for a lounge chair.
5. Last month the digitizer on my 5-year-old iPhone Xs Max stopped working and I could no longer postpone an upgrade. What a good thing that I did! It turned out that the touch screen was not the only broken part — the image stabilizer was also dead for who knows how long and I thought I was just very bad at taking sharp photos. Anyhow, this was a well-documented trip.
6. Photo processing has… changed in these 5 years, to the point that this is probably the last time I would bring a DSLR on vacation. I barely got it out, I still haven’t transferred the few photos that were there, and I shudder to think I will have to process them myself — mostly by lightening the shadows beneath the glaring sun, something the 14 Pro Max that I got can do much better on its own and without being asked. It’s magic.
7. Sun blocking technology has also changed. Yes, the sunscreen is now amazing, but the better news is that you don’t have to use that much of it with all the clothes and headwear protects from the sun without being uncomfortable to wear or (this is the new part) get wet. My pale-skinned easy-to-burn 10-year-old self would have loved going to the beach a whole lot more if these were around back then.
8. To the last two points, here is some of that breakthrough technology in action:

Chris Arnade’s travelogue from Senegal (Part 1, Part 2) is well worth your time, especially if you can also spare a minute to read Tyler Cowen’s notes from Kenya and a Masai village. To put the two in (somewhat uncharitable) contrast:

This past weekend there was a conference at the fanciest resort in Dakar, the one with its own golf course. The title was something like, “Solving all of Africa’s problems, 2023!” and representatives of various global non-profits, charities, and NGOs were flown in to spend four days talking about what Africa needs. Presumably something only they and their friends can offer.

Verus:

Kenya Is Poised to Become the ‘Singapore of Africa’

Papermoon Diner, Baltimore’s finest eye spy establishment.

The food is good, too! Best bread pudding in the Mid-Atlantic.

Our first day of vacation:

• Basement flooded for the second time in as many weeks.
• Washing machine unusable until further notice.
• Needless to say, we’ll be traveling light!