I recently ran across an old (2008) blog called “The Daily Asker.”  It was written by a woman as an answer to the popular notion that women don’t ask.  She set herself the task of asking a question every day for a year and blogging about it.

Her question on day 256,  March 13, 2009 was prompted by the message she received in a Chinese fortune cookie:  Your patience has the ability to test even the sands of time. She thought she understood what it meant but, as she asked people what they thought ‘the sands of time’ were, she found many different interpretations.

I think if she had asked me, my thoughts would immediately have flown to the sands of our twenty-eight mile long beach.  They are the sands most familiar to me.  And I would have prefaced the word ‘sands’ with ‘shifting.’  (Wasn’t “those shifting sands of time” part of the refrain in an old Willie Nelson song?)

My fascination with our Peninsula’s shifting sand stems partly from my inability to grasp huge chunks of time.  Geological formations from the ice age or the gradual effects of global warming are hard for me to wrap my mind around.  But the physical changes in our environment that have happened in my lifetime – those I can grasp.  And there is no clearer demonstration of those changes than right here in ‘my own back yard.’

The picture of Boulevard Avenue in Long Beach showing it at the very edge of the beach is one of my favorites.  (Well, OK, it was probably taken fifteen or twenty years before I was born, but still…)  Boulevard is the street just to the west of today’s Highway 103 that runs right through downtown Long Beach.  To think that the surf was once only steps away from it!

I do clearly remember that, when I was a child, we could clearly see the beach as we drove from Ocean Park south.  It isn’t just that the trees have grown up either.  It was only a short sprint to the water from any of the “approaches” – at Oysterville or Ocean Park or Long Beach – to the surf.  Now, it’s a healthy hike.

I would chalk it all up to my overactive imagination or my dimming memory but, in fact, according to the City of Long Beach’s Dune Management Report done in March 2000: Between the time of statehood in 1889, to the present date 1999, the shoreline in the City of Long Beach has grown approximately 2,000 feet west.Tinker’s town, like any other beach town, was built on the shoreline. Today, downtown Long Beach is separated from the shoreline by an expansive dune system.

Meanwhile, on our eastern shore of the Peninsula, the sands have been disappearing.  The sandy beaches along the bay during my childhood are no more and, in their stead are mudflats and salt marshes – habitat for all sorts of interesting critters, but no longer a playground for sandcastle-building children.

Well, those are some of the thoughts that come to mind when I consider that question posed by “The Daily Asker.”  Not that she asked me…