My weather app was flashing red yesterday with high surf warnings. We are getting the last tired remnants of hurricane/tropical storm Leslie moving up the Maine coast, bringing strong onshore winds and high seas, followed by a night of thunder storms and a morning of showers. This being southern Maine, and there being actually no real threat to life or limb, such a warning brings out 3 types: surfers, tourists, and locals…so, actually…just about everyone left in Maine in September. 🙂

There were probably 100 surfers in the water off Gooches Beach in Kennebunk, a high number considering Maine waters are wet-suit waters, and a good run on the best of days lasts about 30 seconds. Still if you are a surfer in Maine, you make the best of any opportunity. There were also more tour buses along the beach than I have ever seen on a single afternoon. It is the start of the fall foliage tour season, so I expect to see the leaf-peeper buses begin to arrive, but I suspect this weekend some enterprising tour company in Boston put on a Maine surf special, or, at the least, more than your average number of buses left the interstate in Kennebunk to loop the beaches and see what the waves were up to. And finally, there were the locals like me…drawn to the beach to take a few photos of higher than average seas…hoping for some drama.

Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 235mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The 4 frames per second burst rate on the SX40 is just the right speed to catch the waves at peak if you shoot through.

And for the Sunday Thought. It is beyond denying that there is something in the human spirit, or at least in the human soul, that enjoys bad weather…that wants to walk the edge of the storm…that that wants to face into the wind and feel the sting of flying water. As above, it is, at least in part, the drama, the excitement, the mild rush of adrenalin that a calculated risk, a considered threat to life and limb, brings. There is a tipping point of course, where the excitement of the storm tips over into terror, but when it is just a high surf warning there is little danger of that.

I would like to think too, that there is a real spiritual element to it…that in facing the awesome power of nature we affirm both our selves, in our most durable, and yet totally vulnerable, smallness, and our relationship to the awesome and the overwhelming. It is a taste, and only a taste, of the root of all religious experience. It gives us, whether we know it or not, whether we are ready to admit it or not, a hint of what it might be like to be overwhelmed by the awesome love of the creator God…to be caught up in the surf of grace and lifted in a glorious spray over the rock of our selves into brief beauty. It gives us a sense of how small we are in our own loves, and how great and all embracing is the love of God in which we are submerged, in which we are carried on toward glory. And yet we endure. We are safe. We are, when surrendered to the awesome, most certainly and most truly ourselves. Our durability is in our vulnerability, and we can actually delight in our relationship to the awesome and overwhelming.

I would like to think (and really there is no one to stop me) that that taste of the divine is what draws us all down to the beach when the high surf warnings are flashing.