St. Augustine Beach Hike

We decided to take a hike on St. Augustine Beach, which is a half mile bike ride from our campground.  Our goal was to hike up to the point of the peninsula in Anastasia State Park, which was an 8-mile walk.

The day was sunny but blustery, with 20-25 mile an hour winds.  The winds came whipping across the dunes and shot white sand at us as we walked into the wind up the beach.  But the effort was worth it because the day was so clear and beautiful:

David said the sky, the clouds and the ocean made him think of a Wallace Stevens poem, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds."  Stevens lived in Connecticut but visited Florida often, and his poetry reflects the lushness and color of the Florida environment.

SEA SURFACE FULL OF CLOUDS
                          [Excerpt]
                          by Wallace Stevens

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And a pale silver patterned on the deck

And made one think of porcelain chocolate
And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine

Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds,
Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms
Unfolding in the water, feeling sure

Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then,
The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?
Oh! C'etait mon extase et mon amour.

So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds,
The shrouding shadows, made the petals black
Until the rolling heaven made them blue,

A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth,
And smiting the crevasses of the leaves
Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.

Because of the high winds and the rain last night, the waves had been energetic.  We walked as the tide ebbed and left us little treasures in the sand, such as this one:

The birds were alternately feeding, hiding from the wind, or flying in flocks across the waves:

The beach was pristine - just white sand and red-orange shell-gravel, occasionally graced by picturesque detritus such as this one:

As we said, the birds flocked everywhere.  Here, they rest on the sea side of the dunes to escape the brisk wind:

Any small object served as a windbreak, as these little pipers demonstrated:

What this was, we could not quite tell, but we're confident it was vegetative despite its antennae:

Over the sandblown dunes, we spotted the St. Augustine Lighthouse as it carried out its lightly duties:

"...and whence they come and whither they shall go, the dew upon their feet shall manifest..."

How can the eyes and soul recover from the pleasures of such sights?

Toward the north end of the peninsula, the waves are making a second cliff of dunes seaward of the existing cliff of dunes - but the new one is red where the old one is white streaked in green:

This fellow was struggling to tell us something, but we didn't understand his language:

Converging lines.  Don't stop looking at this until you see the pelicans:

A shrimp boat adds a parenthetical to the declaration of the waves:

Japanese sand art, courtesy of the beach grass:

View of another red sand cliff --

-- and the same in detail, crowned with crepuscular rays:

We discovered these two perfect shells, whose brothers and sisters gave their colors to the beach:

And, again, the birds convened an honor guard to see us on our way as we walked back to our bicycles in the late afternoon: