Tales from the Beach

The beach in Panama City Beach, Florida, USA

This year my wife and I took our usual beach vacation around our anniversary.  We've been to Panama City Beach on the Florida panhandle a few times now (see, for instance, this post from 2017, "A Nerd at the Beach"), but this year we had a new thing to contend with: Tropical Storm Barry!  It was headed for Louisiana, but here's a thing about tropical storms: they are really big and affect a lot of surrounding areas.  We only had one day with a lot of rain, but the sea was so rough and the risk of rip currents so high that nobody was allowed to swim in the ocean during most of our trip.  How did we fare despite this calamity?  Here are some short tales that might tell.



Florida is a Garbage Fire

After arriving at our destination on the beach, we unpacked and went for a quick swim.  We noticed things in the water.  My wife said they were jellyfish.  My eyesight without glasses can basically be described as "when Velma from Scooby Doo loses her glasses" so I was mostly taking her word for it, although I could sort of see some jellyfish-like shapes if I squinted.  So, we got out of the water after less than five minutes.  That was the only swimming we would do for the whole trip.

That night I sat on on the balcony overlooking the beach, enjoying the sound of the surf and the salt on the breeze.  There were amateur fireworks of increasingly dangerous varieties (it was less than a week after the 4th of July).  After the fireworks ended and the police arrived to investigate 20 minutes after the amateur firework artists fled to their hovels, crab-hunting families continued to scour the darkness, their flashlights bobbing up and down the beach.

I noticed a faint flicker.  It grew a bit stronger.  My first inclination was to think someone had started a bonfire on the beach.  It grew stronger yet.  I remembered that fires (and fireworks) are forbidden on this part of the beach.  I noticed the fire was inside one of the many garbage cans that line the edge of the beach.

My inclination was to go down there and try to put it out with some sand.  But what if there were fireworks in there?  Or bullets?  (This was Florida, after all). I wasn't about to put myself in danger to save a garbage can that could entirely burn down on the sand without incident.

While I sat there watching, the fire grew and grew.  Eventually it engulfed the entire garbage can, which, as I had hypothetically pondered earlier, entirely burned down on the sand without incident.  There was some nasty black smoke from whatever plastic the can was made of and whatever mélange of sunscreen, broken beach chairs, motor oil, rotten alligator steaks, or whatever Floridians put in garbage cans at the beach.

Eventually the fire department arrived and put out the dying embers.  The next morning a tractor came and scooped up the charred remains, mostly just ash and a metal rim at that point.

And that's how our Florida vacation began: with a literal garbage fire.


That's Okay, We Didn't Want to Go in the Water, Anyway

As I mentioned above, Tropical Storm Barry put a bit of a damper on our Florida vacation as the water was closed for swimming starting with our first full day there.  We switched hotels for the last night (for boring reasons, nothing dramatic), so we had a few hours to kill.  We drove around a bit, but we thought it would be kind of funny to go to see the new movie Crawl (aka, the one with the giant alligators) while we were in Florida.  By this point in the trip the prospect of spending a few hours in a comfy chair in the air conditioning eating popcorn sounded pretty nice, too.

How was the movie?  It was a silly horror movie with a plot of sorts, but mostly giant scary alligators doing lots of cheap jump scares and taking big chunks out of mostly unsuspecting humans.  The movie wasn't very good, but at least it made us slightly less excited about entering bodies of water.

(Yes, I know that alligators are freshwater swamp creatures and we had nothing to fear from them in the ocean, but it made for a joke that amused me).

After the movie I chatted with a kid (maybe about 12 or 13) in the lobby about the movie.  I made my joke about how I didn't want to go in the water now.  Some locals overheard and came up to make sure that I wasn't planning on swimming because apparently several people had drowned in the area in recent weeks (details here).  Those rip currents aren't messing around.

To me, the water didn't look any rougher than the ocean I've swum in in Hawaii many times, but I'm not an oceanographer or a local who knows the area.  Take the advice of the experts and the locals: don't swim when you see those double red flags.  Or giant gators.

Slug Life, or, Carry On, My Wayward Slug

On our last night we noticed something moving on the beach at dusk. It was a sea slug of some kind, about five inches long, stranded on the beach by the tide. We decided to help it by pushing it back into the water with a bottle.  We're not marine biologists.  We had no idea if the thing was dangerous or not, but a water bottle somehow seemed like a safe and sanitary instrument for slug aid.

After several tries (it comically kept rolling back on the beach with each new wave) we finally got it rolled back into the sea.  I said "Godspeed, little slug!" But then I realized speed isn't something conducive to slugs, and this might be offensive to slug kind (it may also presume that that slug is a theist). I spent the rest of the night wondering if I should have told it to go back to the Slug Life or to Carry On, My Wayward Slug.

Further research indicated that the etymology of "Godspeed" actually has nothing to do with speed.  So maybe I'm clear when it comes to offending slug kind, at least etymologically.  When it comes to the slug's philosophical views about the divine, I may still be on shakier ground.  Who am I to know the mind of a slug?  Who am I to impose my vertebrate agenda on this free thinking invertebrate?  Who am I, indeed?

Break Dancing When Wet

I saw this sign and immediately thought this person was doing some sweet break dancing moves.

Where Did You Go?!

I had rented a car for a long multi-state journey to visit family and friends in Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri and to attend CONvergence.  I decided to keep the Nissan a while longer for the Florida trip to avoid driving our ancient Saturn through the wilds of rural Alabama.  When I returned the Nissan to the car rental place three weeks, nine states, and 4,000 miles after renting it, the car rental employee looked at the mileage and exclaimed, "Where did you go!?"

Godspeed, little Nissan!  Godspeed!