Camping the Gulf Coast

[Wyody]

There is something special about the Gulf Coast with cloudy moonlight striking soft shadows across the near-white sands, with the occasional billion stars peeking thru and then consuming clear-breaks in the clouds, everything shining right down on you during a very isolated, late-night skinny-dip in the giant ocean.
Distant waves shine silver and dim to gray and the breakers come ashore with an urgency not quite like the South Atlantic - where they ho-hum their way onto the sand ... and not at all like the Pacific - where they come pounding like Atom Bombs to devour the rocks and land around you ... the Gulf waves are busy, small but strong.
The bluffs on Padre Island shield you from the rest of the world and only far in the distance can you see signs of any other human life on the beach at 3 in the morning.
Standing ankle-deep in mountain-sized dreams and being somehow removed from reality ... it's like standing in ... like standing calve-deep in a painting painted centuries ago. You can even imagine a pirate-ship beyond the shallows - with your eyes wide open.
Occasional lost crab sidles by to ask directions and then scurries for some unknown cover ... never having said "thank you" but instead, barreling off with a wave of the claw.
And there's the wind - sometimes a breeze, sometimes a long, continuous whooshing - but always there, finally cooling the night in and out of the tent, finally taking the slight burn of the day's 95-degree sun away with it, adding nothing but substance to the invisible yearning for the sea.
Gulf Coast camping. Do it with someone you love. I did.
YARRRRRR

[yessirnosir]

THAT'S the way to do it. Whenever I've gone camping it's to get away. Far away... from the others and the things they've put up. It'll all be there when I get back. No need to think about any of it while away. It's a totally different existence being at one, or even two with the natural world. Or is that the real world? I tend to think it is.

I've never camped at the ocean, but there's a place in Maine that I have had my eyes set on for a long time. It's an island that one can walk to at low tide. Nothing there except a stone marker where a young man lost his life while swimming back in the 60s.

You have me thinking about it once again, Wyody.

[Wyody]

Originally Posted by yessirnosir

THAT'S the way to do it. Whenever I've gone camping it's to get away. Far away... from the others and the things they've put up. It'll all be there when I get back. No need to think about any of it while away. It's a totally different existence being at one, or even two with the natural world. Or is that the real world? I tend to think it is.

I've never camped at the ocean, but there's a place in Maine that I have had my eyes set on for a long time. It's an island that one can walk to at low tide. Nothing there except a stone marker where a young man lost his life while swimming back in the 60s.

You have me thinking about it once again, Wyody.

When we start thinking about our cosmic-personalities and our "vision that goes behind the eyes", it is easy to imagine ourself as the only person with two-feet on Earth and our heads in the cosmos with the stars and comets ... a sense of "Universal-ness" ... and quite often, solitude is the only avenue to find that feeling - and it is refreshing - and it is reality ... more-so than the clock-punching, sidewalk-licking life we sometimes have to live thru just to find those moments.
I remember Maine as a great getaway - for me, it was alongside the railroad tracks near the shoreline - when I was still new to Pine Forests and the ocean, riding a brown boxcar with all of my dreams, visions and realities still intact ... and growing.
Getcher behind out there YS. What a great remembery it sound like! Write us about it too!