I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife…
From Sea Fever by John Masefield
According to ‘International Beach Aficionados’, Galveston Island would be the lower Forty-Eight’s most popular beach area were it not for the brown water and the brown sand. Dark brown, the color of our fertile midwestern farmland, America’s breadbasket. The Kansas, Niobrara, St. Louis, Missouri Rivers and their tributaries, loaded with silt picked up from the farmlands through which they flow, empty their loads into the mighty Mississippi. The Mississippi drops this Midwestern farmland silt into the gulf at New Orleans. The prevailing currents push the silt to the West and Galveston Island is brown. The ‘Redneck Riviera’ to the East gets white sand and blue water.
blackened, crabmeat, crawfish, mushrooms & lemon shallot butter was delicious.
Mary Ann was chatting up a couple at the pool, Chris and Sarah. They are on Spring Break with their two young daughters from the Denver, CO area. As usually happens in such encounters the question from where one hails comes up. “So, where are you from”. “Upstate NY”, Mary Ann responds. “Me too”, says Chris. “What town”, Mary Ann inquires. “Corning”, Chris responds. “Wow, me too”, says Mary Ann. And the litany of common friends and experiences commences.
Sarah and I, both non-Corningites, just sit in disbelief. Chris’s dad, Joe, was the boys PE teacher at Corning Free Academy, the middle school Mary Ann attended. His female counterpart was Woody Craumer, a good friend of Mary Ann’s family. Joe and Woody were the mentors who led Mary Ann to major in PE/Education at Ithaca College. Chris’s older twin siblings (by more that a dozen years) were friends of Mary Ann’s growing up.
Sarah gets out her phone and texts her sister-in-law, Pat. Pat texts back a picture of herself and Mary Ann at cheerleading camp when they were thirteen.
I enter the conversation at summer camps…
The Campbell Inn in the Catskill Mountains outside of Roscoe, NY. The Inn was owned by Woody Craumer’s, Mary Ann’s PE teacher and mentor, family. Mary Ann was both a camper and later a counselor at the camp.
Two of my Great Aunts and my Grandmother at the Campbell Inn circa 1910.
Talk about close encounters of the strangest kind.
Peace…Wanderers in Wonder.
Wanderers in Wonder 
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