“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” 
― Marcel Proust

It’s pretty amazing the things we see when travelling. I’m not talking about the tourist traps or grand vistas, for me, it’s about the mundane and pondering what something is and how it got to be there.

On a recent trip to Baja, I came across several stacks of wood along the beach. They were out-of-place and were not there last year. In fact, this stretch of beach has a significant absence of driftwood. Last year this wide swath of beach separated the San Jose  del Cabo estuary for the Sea of Cortez. The estuary, is the outflow of fresh water that has accumulated via sand streams (a slow percolation of groundwater from inland) and is separated from the ocean by a strip of land. In this case, a beach, about 50 meters wide.

The estuary is rich with plant and bird life as opposed to the rest of this mountainous, desert peninsula, dominated by rock sand and cactus

I wondered who had stacked these pieces of wood in this fashion and automatically assumed it was the surf fishermen or surfers who frequent this strip of beach. The who remains unknown but how the wood got here became clear on talking to people who were in the area after hurricane Lydia came through the area last fall.

The heavy winds and rainfall overwhelmed the estuary causing the whole structure to shift several hundred meters east. The wood came for trees uprooted in the estuary and deposited in the ocean, which eventually pushed the wood ashore. Apparently, it was quite unpleasant after the storm as not only trees and garbage, but also wildlife and people squatting within the estuary lands were also washed out to sea.

So, this simple odd composition has a story to tell, if you but ask.

Nikon D800
Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G I AF-S VR Zoom @ 116mm
1/250 sec, f/8.0 ISO 100

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