I took my scooter down to the beach in the early evening yesterday, mostly to feel the cooling wind of my passage at the end of yet another day of oppressive heat and humidity. We don’t get many of those in Southern Maine, not enough to justify the cost of an air-conditioner certainly, so when we do get them, all we can do is sort of suffer through with window fans, iced drinks…and occasional scooter rides when things just get too drippy.

Turns out the sky over the ocean and the marshes was spectacular. I puttered about from place to likely place, cooling myself in the rides, and took a lot of pictures. 🙂

This is the view last night out to sea from one of our semi-private beaches. I like the low angle. It was taken with my Samsung Smart Camera WB250F, which, unfortunately, does not have an articulated LCD. What it has is an excellent, no-tripod-needed, in-camera HDR, which was called for here. I am learning, for the the low shots, to shoot more or less blind, and straighten in software later 🙂 Rich Tone mode. 24mm equivalent field of view. Recorded exif for the three shot sequence was f3.2 @ 1/500th @ ISO 100. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone.

And for the Sunday thought: I was also having, yesterday, a Facebook conversation with a young friend, the son of an old friend, about choosing a place to live. I gave him several suggestions from among the places I have lived and visited, but then he specified that he needs the ocean. “Being able to look out over the water from the beach and not to be able to see the other side, is something that I really need. I need that sense of curiosity and the sense of greatness that the power of the ocean displays.”

Today’s image is, in fact, the view he grew up with. The family moved inland while he was still young, but his grandparents still have a house on this beach, and I am sure he looked out on this sea often enough each summer so the view became part of the essence of his soul.

I, on the other hand, grew up in hills. My father and mother built a house on the shoulder of a high hill in rural New York State. The view that shaped me was pasture and woodland stretching away in folds to the horizon. We never got to the ocean at all. When we wanted, as people will, whether they can articulate the need as such, a wider horizon, the mystery and the wonder of the long view, we would drive up, or hike up one of our green mountains. For me, the view from a bare hill top, or even more, the view from a stony mountain top, especially under a spectacular sky, has the same power as the view out over the sea does for my friend. It might be more “homey” and even more “homely” but it is still full of power and glory.

I did not come to the sea, really, until I was a young man, and then we lived by the ocean just long enough for me to miss the view when we moved far inland to the desert mountains of the Southwest. I am, after all, back by the sea. And yet, I found that same mystery and wonder in the desert. Oh I have never seen a real desert, with sand dunes or stony flats running on to the eye-level horizon, but I found that sense of power and grandeur in the intensely living desert of the American Southwest, always with its mountain islands rising to the sky in every direction. And the view from the tops of those mountains! There was a wonder.

And then, too, while we lived in New Mexico, we spent time in the Rocky Mountains of Southwest Colorado each summer, camping and hiking. I defy anyone to climb even a 10,000 foot, wildflower infested, peak in High Peaks area of Colorado and not feel the awe of that long view!

More recently I discovered the far views of the Potholes and Prairies region of North Dakota. Such skies. Such an expanse of land. And I have, on a few trips there, learned to love the gentle vistas of England…from the hills and lakes of mid-lands to the mountains and lakes of the Lake District, to the rolling expanse of the Dales, to the grandeur that is Scotland, Skye, and the Hebrides.

And last year I was totally blown away by the awesome skies over the somehow miniature, certainly manicured, and always canal cut, landscapes of Holland.

And, come to think of it, I have felt exactly the same wonder and awe standing in a redwood grove where I could not see 1000 feet in any direction or the sky at all…where all the power and majesty was in the size and age of the life around me, where the long view was not spacial but temporal.

And waterfalls…falling water…rapids even…the eternal rush is always enough to take my breath away.

So what does it come down to? I need to live in a place where I can feel the awe of the long view, the energy of what is wild and wide and beyond my control, certainly, but I have come to realize that the awe is not in the place, but in me. If I never again saw the view out over the ocean on a day with a great sky, I would miss it, but it would not stop me from finding the awe of the place I was in. And I realize in writing this that I am about due for high mountain experience. I miss the mountains! But that will not stop me from scootering down to the beach on a hot day to find the awe that lives out over the ocean and the marshes. Today, since the mountains are too far, I will go find a waterfall, and maybe some dragonflies, and a deep dark forest.

Those are well within the reach of my scooter…and they will do for the awe of the day!