I have been going to the moominbeach since I was less than one year old. I can remember lying in the back of our old black Ford as a maybe-five-month-old infant listening to the gravel hit the bottom of the car as we drove Six Mile Road. I can remember the wind sussurrating sussurating susurrating (one “s”, two “r”s, KW) when we turned onto the old Birch Point Road. The one my granddaddy and his friends originally built back in the 1920s or whenever.

The moominbeach is a beautiful wide sand beach. My iPhone pedometer app measures it at about three-quarters of a mile but that may be overstating it just a tad. At either end of our beach is a rocky peninsula. Or peninsulae, would probably be more accurate, if you can remember your high school Latin. You walk the rocks for a while and then there’ll be a bit of beach and then another little rocky peninsula and another beach. The destination if you go west is Birch Point and if you go east, it’s Cedar Point. Neither of these hikes are very long but they were both adventurous expotitions when we were kids.

We don’t walk the beach to Birch Point much any more. There are more cabins/homes in that direction than there used to be and we can’t use the little paths through the woods because, well, there are buildings where those were. And once when the beach urchins were small, I DID try to walk them over there and a BEAR came along. Mouse and Valdemort each climbed up one of my legs, which left poor ol’ Lizard Breath with NO climbing space. So she just stood there and screamed. Well, of course, it WASN’T a bear. We have bears around but they are pretty rarely seen, especially on the beach. It was Mr. Armstrong’s St. Bernard. Zoe. *I* knew she was harmless but the beach urchins didn’t even begin to wait for an explanation.

The rocks in the photooo are on the way to Cedar Point. That expotition is a little longer and more treacherous and, up until the last couple years, there were no homes or cabins on the way over there. I certainly don’t know every rock on the way over there but there are quite a few that I know well, including that split rock in the middle of the photo. I dunno if Valdemort reads this these days but if she does, maybe she can tell us what it is, since she’s doing a grad program in geology and I fergit what else.

I took a picture of this rock earlier this summer because I wonder how long it will be there. There are humans living along this boulder beach now and they have big bulldozers and things. They are not supposed to have them on the beach or in the water but I have seen them out there. I don’t really wanta pimp my own blahg entries but here’s the link. It is sad to me that a rock that I can remember seeing when I was five years old and has maybe been there since, I dunno, the retreat of the last ice age maybe, could be thrown 10 yards away by some big Tonka Truck in a few seconds by a guy who has never even walked down to the water to see what the rocks look like there. I don’t understand it but there’s so much that I don’t understand.

I am done. I don’t really want to go in that direction tonight (except I guess I already did). I had never heard the term “boulder beach” until the Full Circle Superior folks got going this spring but it applies to our rocky peninsulae. I think that the days the Superior walkers have to navigate boulder beaches are beautiful but long and tiring. It is easy to scamper over boulders when you are a kid and even then you are tired when you are finished with the short little stretches of boulders on either end of the moominbeach. When you are coming back from Cedar Point and you get back to the good old sand moominbeach, you take off your shoes (if your moom has insisted that you wear them) and you walk in the soothing, cold Lake Superior water.

Cheers to Full Circle Superior and may our rocks stay forever.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.