We traveled to St. Augustine, FL, our favorite day-trip when we want to mix city-doings with time on the beach. The morning was overcast and drizzly, so we spent a couple of hours visiting our favorite haunts in St. Augustine. We breakfasted and toured the Leitner Museum during the rainiest part of the day. The museum (a former hotel built by Rockefeller's Standard Oil partner Henry Flagler) has some fascinating but rather pedestrian personal luxuries of some of the wealthy northerners of the late Victorian period. Overall, my impression of the museum is that it is more of a mausoleum - and the few recently (more or less) acquired collections (donations) on display are not up to par with what one might expect in such a grandiose building with the history that it has.
A very brief history of the ancient town and the Flagler era is found at this webpage, home of the bed-and-breakfast at the historic Wescott house.
The sun came out, and we lit out for the beach at Anastasia Island State Park. Winds were blowing onto the shorefront at about 30 knots. Red flags warning of dangerous riptides were flapping. We spent a lot of time just lazing in the wind watching the water from beach chairs (which tried to blow away if you didn't sit on them!). After a while I went a-walking - combing the lines of stranded sea-wrack for tropical drift fruits and seeds (seabeans) blown ashore by the weather. I walked north for over a mile picking as I went along, saving just the best one or two examples of each of the types seabeans I encountered.
Seabean.com is a great resource to help you identify and research those fruits and seeds you might have brought home from you last vacation to Florida, and to get in touch with other folks who collect these interesting oceanic oddities.
A brief list of the species I took home, more or less in order of abundance:
- "Indian Almond" - Terminalia catappa
- Spondias mombin
- Manicaria (a palm fruit)
- Saccoglotis "grenade fruit"
- "Sea Heart" - Entada gigas
- Dalbergia - flat coin-shaped legume
- Manchineel - poison ivy tree
- 2 other yet unidentified disseminules
As always, I collected a pile of plastic trash while beachcombing. I concentrate my efforts on a single color to make it more interesting. This day the color was blue, so I returned with an amazing array of blue refuse, including a toothbrush, several butane cigarette lighters, a mismatched pair of child's penguin hair barettes, and a bazillion lids and seals from beverage bottles. The scourge of plastic floating in the oceans and being cast up on the world's beaches is a legacy that will long outlive us and our children and that will bear witness to our species' wasteful and harmful habit of discarding our chemical leavings everywhere. Visit the Greenpeace animation showing the Pacific trash vortex to learn more about the journey of plastic trash in the world's oceans. Scientists estimate the Pacific gyre now has a carpet of plastic trash about the SIZE OF TEXAS.
The 2-or-so mile walk, while beset with wind, was not unpleasant. The beach was anything but crowded, so one could lose one's self in activity and introspection. But my eyes kept burning. I learned later that that stretch of north Florida was under red tide alert. My eyes watered and burned for 2 days.
Florida, beaches, beachcombing, seabeans, drift seeds, Anastasia Island, Flagler, St. Augustine
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