Tide Unawareness? Oceanographic Agnosia? Something Like That.

We’ve been to many places on the Gulf Coast, my lady and I, but we’d never gone to Port O’Connor, so that was my suggestion this time. I’d bicycled through a few years ago but couldn’t remember – and the Internet seemed disinclined to say – if there is actually a shoreline suitable for bathing there. Yes, there can be. A long pier projects into a bay, and we walked to the end of it. The town’s attraction seems chiefly to be fishing. But there is plainly lots of beach, and we returned to it and walked out to the water’s edge and stuck our toes in it. We might have swum, but only after a still longer walk right into that bay. It was low tide. I was totally surprised by this.

I seem to be vastly underobservant as well as minimally expectant when it comes to seaside affairs. It hardly occurs to me what the sea is doing, even when I’ve been in daily view of it. Is there something wrong with me?

Could be, since I once made up a story involving tides. Who the heck does that? Couldn’t I narrate something that truly happened? My grip on reality is so tenuous as hardly to constitute a grip at all. Even after encountering tides at eye level and then knee level and then lower.

There had to have been a time when everyone knew about tides. Portuguese has the vocabulary, maré for the general phenomenon, preamar for high tide, and baixamar for low tide, but while my knowing these attests to newspaper-reading diligence, it was too late for that swim in polluted Brazilian beach water. I never gave ‘em any thought at Portorož, or at Mersin or Taşucu. I don’t know the Slovene or Turkish words. Does the Mediterranean even have tides?

Well, much of the rest of the world does... Although I am struck now by how little I’ve read about them. Surely D-Day’s exact timing depended not just on what the weather was doing but what the water was too. On the other hand, when the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil just hours before Napoleon’s forces arrived in Lisbon, either the tide was luckily favorable or that city hardly has any. I cannot recall any there, or at Panama, the city I mean, which is right on the Pacific Ocean. I didn’t happen to note any beached freighters there, nor in the sheltered waters of Luanda. Tides perhaps simply don’t matter. The world copes just fine. Though I wonder whether the scuttling of the Graf Spee within sight of Montevideo had to be scheduled just right. I’ve never observed great changes in sea level thereabouts, but it sure would be embarrassing for Nazis to blow up their own ship too hastily, find it hardly sinks at all, then have to wait for the water to rise again so they can row ashore and get themselves interned, by Uruguayans of all people.

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Back to Port O’Connor: I am hoping our picture of it gets in the newspaper! My lady’s hometown weekly. She had brought the latest copy, with a view to being photographed holding it up next to some exceptional sight. Readers who travel send these images to the editor, who may publish them. As it happens, just across the street from the beach is a wildly oversized Adirondack chair with the town’s name painted across the giant backrest. I suggested, and my lady agreed, that this was a perfect photo op. She sat on the edge of the seat, the Fourth of July issue conspicuously in hand, and I took a couple of snaps. We shall see if they make it into print!