Field trip!
Played hooky today. I was supposed to go to a meeting this afternoon, but I made excuses and we sat on the beach and drank beer. Well, I drank beer — Uncle B doesn’t touch the stuff. He took pictures.
We watched this pair come in to shore. That’s a barge laden with boulders being pulled (and, at times, pushed) by a tug. The tide was coming in and they brought the barge *right* up to the beach. Then a great big front-end loader on the deck of the ship took the boulders one by one and splooshed them into the sea, where another front-end loader on the shingle picked them up and arranged them in a sort of wall.
Boulders from France, I guess. They’re building a sea defense. They’re perpetually building a sea defenses here. This part of the shore is constantly moving and eroding and they go to sometimes weirdly heroic lengths to preserve the coastline as it is.
In other places, they are weirdly indifferent about seas and flooding that encroach quite near to houses.
I get the impression from things overheard that there are two warring camps here: sane and competent engineers versus hippies. The environment attracts both kinds. And the hippies, having come up through the academy, are often in the decision-making managerial positions. Which is usually to let nature take back land our ancestors sweated blood to reclaim from the sea.
It’s kind of like the banjo forums: divided between conservative worshippers of the Church of Earl and lefty nutbags from the Church of Pete.
September 3, 2014 — 8:59 pm
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