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Agates and oysters. A clear tide. Stories.

I am south of Driftwood Annie's point, strolling Pitt Passage with two veteran beach walkers. The going is wonderfully slow.

"It changes so much, you know," says one of my companions. It is late winter and the rocks of the upper beach are wrinkled with long undulations that will disappear by spring. "Even just week to week, seems like. Or it's your perception."

Many of our beaches grow steeper in winter. Storms act as bulldozers. Our waves may not compare to ocean waves, but they are enough to send rocks scurrying; sand rises and falls through the seasons like the tide itself. We pass a row of abandoned pilings. Another beach walker, coming the other way, says that to him these pilings lean more every year.

Beaches are aikido masters. Everything on them is loose. By transferring the violent energy of waves into individual rocks that then jump, tumble, heap and fall, they prove that it is in fact possible to dissipate violence rather than pass it on to the next guy or magnify it through generations. But - and this is a big but - to achieve such a feat, you cannot remain unchanged.

To read more from this article, visit: https://keypennews.org/stories/where-beaches-are-born,5273