Vacation Day 1: The War of Fog

6/30. Warm and muggy when I wake up at 4:30 to catch the 6ish Acela to Massachusetts. I lay out sweatshirt and sweatpants before I take my shower, and totally forget to pack them before I leave. (Big frakking mistake.) On the way up to Massachusetts the sun is shining in a cloudless sky all the way up through Connecticut. Maybe the weather reports are wrong? No such luck. The second we cross over into Rhode Island clouds like a comforter fill the sky. A really thick, Martha Stewart comforter, too, not one of those K-Mart jobs that the sun can shine holes through without even trying. This cloud cover could protect you from a meteor shower. Asteroids would skip off it like a flat stone on a lake. And the temperature drops 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, so that by the time we hit South Station, I feel like Joel Fleischman wearing his weekend-at-the-Hamptons whites in Cicely Alaska.

First thing I do when I get to Ocean Bluff is walk up to the beach. It's about noon, and it's low tide. This is the good news. The bad news is that between the fog and the cloud cover, the best color camera in the world can only take pictures that make everything look like tinted black and white shots:




And because the beach changes with every storm, and there were a couple of beauties in June, the sand that last year went all the way up to the sea wall is completely gone this year. In its place are the kind of rocks that would give Sisyphus a heart attack:

You need a Sherpa just to get from the stairs to the sand.

What does no sand and 15 to 20 feet of nothing but rocks mean for the tides? Well, at low tide, with anything less than a totally cloudless sky, because there is no section of the beach that is ever free from getting hit by the ocean, you can't really lay down a blanket because the sand will be wet throughout the day. And at high tide? You are home taking a shower, because the "beach" looks like this:


This is why I spend the first day of my mini-vacation sitting on a beach chair in the back yard, reading Mistborn and working on my fogburn.