An Evening at the Marina

Today, after spending all day in my apartment working on writing, and writing related things, I suddenly decided to go for a walk. I grabbed my coat and my camera, and left. I crossed Old Island Highway and continued down the short half block to the river's edge. Where I live, the river is just reaching the point where it spills into the sea. So I have the best of both worlds.

There is a small woodland at the water's edge, with rough paths running through it, right along the shore. Just before I reached the water, I passed the place where I dug a hole one night not long ago, to bury my beloved cat; Catherine, on a night when x was at his near worst. She isn't buried there, x took her body away. There is only the hole to remind me. Somehow, though, her spirit is in those woods.

I got to the water, and removed my camera from it's bag. As I was setting the ISO and getting the shutter speed and aperature right, a duck couple paddled out from the reeds. I wasn't fast enough to take a photo of them - the current took them and they were quickly out of sight. I wandered along the path, taking photographs of everything - trees, shadows, reflections on the water.... Digital cameras are marvelous! As long as you have a large memory card, you can just keep snapping away, without any distress over whether you're wasting film. And there's no waiting for the photos to be developed, you just plug the camera into your computer when you get home!

There is a large passenger plane (regular sized, not a small personal plane), that is supposedly being readied for sinking as a diver's artificial reef. It's mired in red tape and being kept behind a fence. It suddenly loomed through the trees, looking like a crash site. I took many photographs of it, it's quite haunting. As I left the woods near the marina, I turned to take one last photograph of the path. There is a tree there, arching over the path. Just as I was focusing my camera, a pure white feral cat stepped out from the trees and posed for me, in the very center of the walkway. Perhaps it was Catherine's ghost ... but it showed perfectly in the photographs, so I suppose it was just a wonderful coincidence.

I reached a lookout with a wooden fence, overlooking the sailboats in the marina. As the night settled down around me, I took my last shots, then put my camera away. I had a smoke, and walked back home.