Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Keeping The World Safe...

...from SCUBA diving. At least that's how it feels some days at the dive shop. I'm there, showered and appropriately dressed (usually in something red), and hardly anyone comes. We have fun stuff. Why don't people come to see me? Oh, I know, people are cautious in bad financial times and WI people seem especially cautious, but come on, people. I get lonely, Mrs. & Mr. Boss need to eat and pay for her vacations thither and yon, we need some customers. Come in and buy a new mask and snorkel or learn to SCUBA dive, you know you want to.

August 17--Sylt Island, Germany. As much as they were able to the town leaders of Sylt bent the island to their will. They allowed the road to twist and turn, taking the easiest path down the middle of the twenty-four mile long island but they were temperamentally unable to be as free with the wide swath of sandy beach. The sea marched in orderly ranks of waves spaced about twenty feet apart in groups of three, but the constant sculpting and re-sculpting of the beach was unsettling to the order-loving Germans. All along the rocky face of the bluff where land met beach they built a big mesh of timbers like a cofferdam that was meant to keep the sand in place. In theory it was the perfect solution but no one told the winter ice that pushed onto the beach in the spring and the gales that pounded the shore in the winter. Even the Germans with their rigid control of their lives couldn't control the sea.

I can write this way because all of my ancestors are of German heritage. I know quite a lot about things needing to be in control and in nice straight lines. ;-)
--Barbara

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