Candide

I apologize for not posting or answering asks. I am elbow deep in schoolwork and really shouldn’t even be on the internet!

As a break from my work, I went for a nice long walk along the beach and picked every fiasgan shell on the strand. I have no idea why it was just therepeautic.

I think the English for a fiasgan is muscle or something. They’re those dark blue tear-drop-shaped shells you find on the beach. And on the rocks, you find them in clusters. The fiasgan itself has two shells which are kind of on a hinge - really hard to crack open - and they have this big pink foot thing that they attach to the rock like an anchor. They’re a nightmare to remove if you’re trying to scrape clean the keel of a boat…

Fiasgan is a lovely word as well.

When I’m on the beach, I like to walk beside the high tide mark. Sometimes I see a scraggly line of brown seaweed, sometimes I see cockle shells, brilliant white, a glacier snaking, and sometimes I see winkles, tumbling along like a river of gold. The seaweed and shells are a testament to the ebb and flow of the tide, going in and out, in and out, in and out, without fail. But, beautifully, they are also a testament to the moon dancing in its orbit around the earth.

For me, the most beautiful thing about these shifting high tide marks is they shift in tandem with the movements of the moon. The moon’s dance is an elipse, when closest to the earth, gravity yanks the oceans out of shape, the tides retreat and rise, surging across the beach and pushing the high tide mark further up the shore. As the moon travels, getting farther from the earth, the high tide mark crawls down the shore, yet, the previous high tide marks remain…

The moon is writing about its journey in the sand. The paper fills with line after line, until one night, the moon reaches its farthest point away from the earth, and then the high tide mark begins to climb up the shore again, slowly erasing the earlier draft, until it reaches its highest point on the shore. 

This is the Full Moon. It’s remarkable that I can deduce the phase of the moon from the lines on the beach. In a literal sense, information about the moon’s position in its orbit is actually written on the beach. Now, of course, the picture is never as simple as: beach covered in tide lines = new moon; only one tide line at top of shore = full moon, but, generally, this correlation does hold, and in an ideal system, I could plot the position of the high tide mark against the position of the moon, and find some constant of proportionality. However, the system is complicated by sun caused spring tides and such like…

Yet I will say this. It is beautiful to think that the moon is writing a diary of its travels in the sand. It is one of those truths that makes science so inspiring. We can see connections in the world - meaningful connections. There is a causal relationship between the moon’s position, the strength of the gravitational force, the height of the tide, and the position of the high tide mark. For what its worth, this is what I feel when I walk along the beach in the evening. When the moon makes its entrance into the heavens, I’m not surprised, it’s been here all along, under my feet, written in the sand and the seaweed.