Flash Of Beauty

This is the beach made famous in the novel Land of Love and Drowning. It is named Flash of Beauty. My son and I walked from the Big Bamboo restaurant and beach bar at the head of Loblolly Bay the full length of the bay to the point where Google will tell you that Table Bay begins and runs into Deep Bay. It's a .7M walk to that point. But on all the local maps the long stretch of beach beyond Loblolly Bay simple goes by one name: Flash of Beauty.

As I mentioned in my last post, the narrative in the novel is stitch together with mentions of this beach and it's supernatural powers. If you zoom in on the above and below pictures you may notice one of it's supernatural features: pink sand.

It's so fine it has the texture of talcum powder and feels like flower beneath your feet. Where my son is standing on the water line, you can see the true pink nature of the sand when wet. It comes from the crushed coral (white, red and black) and the pulverized shells (many of which are pink and or white). I found one pink, yellow and white shell deep in a crevice with the beak eating marks of an octopus. The shell was half chewed, with the interior critter removed, on top of a pile of other shells of various sizes and shapes. The sheen on this shell has not be buffed off, as I'm guess it was eaten a night or two before I found it (although, I wasn't lucky enough to find the satiated cephalopod).

The beach's barrier reef keeps the currents moderate, although on a full moon or during a storm snorkeling could be hazardous. But on a day like we had, the typical tropical tides were just a gentle current, like a lazy river. In the above picture you can see that beyond the barrier reef, an outer reef continues down the south eastern side of Anegada. There are not many people or buildings below this point and side of the island. The Atlantic starts to butt heads with the Caribbean as the reef encloses the bottom eastern side of the island. Spanish galleons, British warships and American privateers have wrecked upon those reefs for hundred of years. The local museum boasts over 200 wrecks on that side of the island alone.

The Arawaks, the larger of the two native Caribbean peoples before the northern european and north Americans slowly but steadily exterminated them, lived on Anegada for over a 1000 years. They remind me of the people of the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. That pueblo is the longest inhabited town in North American, over a thousand years. It's a perfectly protected natural phenomena, too. A large 300' high butte surrounded by a valley and then a mesa that forms a perfect circle around the valley. The Arawaks benefited from the atoll of Anegada being hard to see from a distance (their lack of height vs the Acoma pueblo's advantage of height); both peoples benefitted by  the natural topography; big valley and big reef to protect them from outsider's attacks. Yet the people of the Acoma Pueblo still exist, while the Arawaks of Anegada, on an atoll only 30' above the sea at it's highest point, only exist in the evidence of conch shell pilings on the south east side of the island that formed ancient burial grounds.

This beach, Flash of Beauty, holds a quiet allure with it's sea grape trees, wild flowers, birds and fish. The same shellfish, that give the sand it's pink color, are eaten in the salt ponds in the center and south east of Anegada by the flamingos; yes, Pink Flamingos! The climate change is drying up the salt ponds. What I remember as a cloud of birds in a large pond, close to the bridge on the road to Loblolly Bay and Flash of Beauty beaches, is now just a small flock of a dozen of so flamingos on a much diminished and distant pond. The sense of a cloud of pink has faded like the dawn and dusk mares tail clouds. Yet at Flash of Beauty, the frigate birds soar, shore birds skip, and the sugar birds cackle.

I must reread the section of the novel that refers to the birds and fish and their shape shifting ways, as I've lost my train of thought reliving my time, exactly a week ago today, on the beach and hearing the crashing waves and caribe breezes in my inner ear.....

Good Night, Native Peoples and Supernaturals, G'night