When the tide is in we have to take our morning walk on the sidewalk along A1A rather than the beach. It is one of several facets of our life dictated by the tides here in The Little Hacienda, but perhaps the most significant. The morning walk is a post-newspaper, pre-breakfast ritual that sets the tone for the day. A lot rides on it.  And the tidal influence on the walk, whether in or out, is not just a one-day event in a repeating 12-day cycle. (More on why it’s a 12-day cycle later.) Given that, for most veteran morning walkers, (more on them later, too), the window to get out there is relatively narrow for one reason or another, the tides, either high or low, can influence the walking pattern for an entire week.  Factor in the time of year, (light in summer; dark in winter), heat, cold, wind; and you have yourself a far more complex set of circumstances than just walking out the door.

There is a solid, if diminishing corp of regular morning walkers, several of whom are former runners, like ourselves, whom we used to encounter on beach and sidewalk when we were younger, before knees and hips and general fatigue, (geeze, do I really have to keep doing this?) took their toll. They are friends we greet with a smile and wave, and sometimes, though not always, a brief conversation.  Friends who have a specific place in this marvelous tableau; friends you don’t have over, or visit. For the most part we know little about them, what they did, how many kids they have, marriages, their politics, etc., all the sordid details.  It is a friendship of commonality, the walk. Some whose names we know; most we don’t. There is a symmetry and balance best left undisturbed, I think.  There are some characters among them, whom I could describe, but I won’t, because you never know who might go out and pick up a copy of The Skinny Island Post tossed in their driveway by a wayward busboy trying to make ends meet with a second job, and find themselves unflatteringly depicted.  Over time it has become a rather beautiful representation and recognition of interconnectedness: I don’t need to know your history, it is enough to share the morning, because that is why you’re out here, and I know that. Have a good day.

The tides will have none of that. Unthinking and unfeeling, they are the clock.  When there is a low tide an hour or two before dawn, or up until two hours after, the beach is walkable for virtually a week in the morning.  And then it moves, and so do we.  If there is a low tide at say, 5 a.m., the next morning it will be about 50 minutes later, and so it goes, 50 minutes later each day.  It takes about 12 days to run through the cycle, to another optimal low.  When a high tide takes over for a week or more, we take to the sidewalk, because the sand is just too soft where we live to trudge through.  Lower tides provide firmer sand. Now, there is also a seasonal difference.  In the winter months, there is less tidal movement, meaning, there is significantly less difference between a low and a high. Very few walkable beach days consequentially.  The regulars we meet on the sidewalk say, “Cant wait until we get our beach back!”  I don’t know how many folks get into it in the depth I do, but the result is the same.

The beach, when it is wide, is a bare-footers paradise, affording a broad meander, should you choose, from wading in shallows to a faster-paced packed sand, counting of steps, forward progress, but all in the presence of shorebirds, crabs, and the occasional rolling dolphin. This morning, probably the last on the beach for several days due to rising tides, we were rewarded with the discovery of a Loggerhead turtle making her way back into the water after laying her eggs.

Unlike the beaches just south of us, our sand is not the fine-grained variety that compacts nicely.  Ours is large-grained and reddish, I guess caused by underlying shell material, and it can be exceedingly soft. What we lose in that department is more than made up for in its inability to support traffic.  We don’t have cars on the beach here like they do just 5 miles south.

When it’s too soft, we take to the sidewalk, which is itself a relatively new thing in comparison to how long the beach has been there.  The sidewalk was built not long after we moved in, some twenty-three years ago.  I don’t know what walkers did before that.

The sidewalk is very convenient, and parallels the beach for several miles in either direction. There are no buildings on the east side of A1A from Flagler Beach to a mile and a half south of us, so it’s a clear vista. But it’s still a sidewalk, and most folks have to wear shoes if they’re walking anything more than a few yards, which is the first limitation.  You just can’t dig your toes into a sidewalk, and the soles tend to wear out pretty quickly. As a native, I have evolved Florida feet, a modification, in my case brought about by going shoeless in the hot streets and sidewalks of Tampa as a kid, that allows walking barefoot on just about any surface for an indefinite length of time.  But I generally lace up, too, in case of the odd rock or bit of sharp litter.

Walking on the sidewalk when the tide is too high for the beach turns out to be just exercise, with the added inconvenience of having to actually watch where you’re going.  You can get lost in thought, or not-thinking, on the beach, you can meander.  You meander on the sidewalk and you end up in traffic. Ah, traffic.  The noise, the distraction, the interruption. And then there’s the people.  On the beach you can give people as wide a berth as you want, still acknowledging with a smile and wave, but you get to control the intimacy.  On the sidewalk, it’s personal, the distance between dictated by the width of the sidewalk.  Literally too close for comfort, even with the regulars. Over time, say 10-15 years, you are expected to say a little more than Good Morning, you are expected to reach out, to know more.

Or not, come to think of it.  Maybe the mechanism that’s responsible for getting someone out of bed at the crack of dawn, hot or cold, rain or shine, to walk 3 miles, year after year, is also responsible for a kind of comfortable solitude, a gradual, enveloping peace, that neither seeks nor requires validation. An alternate route.  I think there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.