Life is a Beach

That's an old cliche ain't it... but it's still true...

The Waves hit the beach sometimes soft... sometimes hard, tearing things up, changing the landscape... and then, they recede...

Just a constant ebb and flow... You either learn to ebb and flow with it, you get in step with its rhythms ~  or you get smashed against the rocks.

I read a book recently; Last Survivor; a story by Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell. The true story of what some might think the failure of a military operation... but if you stop and let his words percolate, in truth, you will see a wondrous truth. The story Marcus relates contains and is the story of what is the essence of True Victory.

It is the story of men who, no matter the cost, they simply would not yield hope. They simply would not Quit. Highly intelligent men, yet that simple word ~ defeat ~ is not in their vocabulary. They can not comprehend it. They deliberately, and courageously refused to be in possession of whatever you must have ~ to Quit.

It was a choice... and they made it.

I am not a shadow of Marcus Luttrell and those men. I am a worn out picture taking, broken backed old soldier, biker cowboy, word wrangling, redneck, busy body...

But... I will never lay down, I will never give up... Quitting is never gonna happen... not while breath still inflates my lungs.

Success ~ Victory ~ is not getting where you are going, It is not the conventional wisdom of "Winning"... it lives in NEVER stopping. NEVER yielding Hope... NEVER QUITTING. Refusing to Ever admit defeat... only... another obstacle to be dealt with.

Life is a choice people. It is not, it has never been and It Will Never be Fate. How you live your life and what it becomes is a choice.

Which way you go in this life... You choose. It's as plain as that.

Closer in to Port Orford is another small beach we found called Paradise Point...

Crowded too. Wasn't much room left to even turn around walking along the surf out there! :)

 OK... small if a few miles in either direction is lil'.

 It's come to me, walking on lonesome black sand beaches that the spirit I find in the act of pushing a motorcycle through the wind is found in many of the parts of this life, and in many of the passions of people...

Walking alone along those beaches...

... Scaling a sheer rock face ~ muscles straining and on fire, dropping out of the sky beneath the thin shroud of a hang gliders fabric, shooting down a tumbling river in a tiny plastic boat, preserving the scenes before your eyes ~ with brush strokes on a canvas, pushing your aching body and screaming lungs to the edge ~ to make the distance of a Marathon...

There are many ways that a person turns his spirit loose in this life. The only true loss... would be to keep it always contained.

The next day we chose to go back to the beach at Cape Blanco... my perseverance paid off... I got to photograph what some go their whole life without ever even seeing. I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time...

*Moby Dick swimming off Cape Blanco*

... To capture an Image of the Fabled... Moby Dick! Swimming in the rocks off the cape. :)

*Cape Blanco Lighthouse*

The winds were much calmer this day, and I could stand on the bluff without the fear of landing far below in the Sea. Without the screaming wind the color of the surf had returned to that beautiful blue from the dirty brown it had been along the shoreline.

Below the Cape itself, to the south, the state built a campground and access to the beach itself... Good friends Mike and Cathy stopped in our camp for a couple of nights on their way south along the Oregon Coast...

Their truck was skinny 'nuff to make it down onto the sand. But, watching the tires of their single wheel pickup... rubbing on the drift wood stacked along the trail, buttressed my belief that our own wide butted Dodge... with its extra set of wheels just wasn't gonna make the trip! :)

Another 18" or so of width WAS NOT gonna fit through that driftwood keyhole!

A surf fishermen was working in the late afternoon to produce his supper...

*Cape Blanco Fisherman*

While we walked on the beach and watched, he landed a single small fish... but plenty sufficient he said, combined with a bit of rice for a fine meal...

Heidi, being the more openly curious and less shy of the two of us... walked over to see what he'd landed.

*A Beach Fisherman's supper*

It was what he called a Surf Perch. Not a bad life.

In the morning Mike and Cathy pulled out for points east... and we took another stroll in the sand...

We found beautiful soul filling vistas, that soothing music of the surf coming ashore... oddities of the sea... and Agates...

... along the way the strains of Bob Seeger rolled through my head...

"I'm older now and I'm still runnin' against the Wind..."

I will ALWAYS... be runnin'
Brian