“The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I stumbled upon this Longfellow poem while researching tide pools, and it just seemed to fit the occasion and mood.  This traveler was wrapping up the evening at dusk on Cannon Beach, soon to hasten toward town with Carl for dinner and a relaxing evening.

The ebb and flow of tides are amazing phenomena to me, and they often leave small but incredible works of art in the form of pools and sand textures.  This evening was no exception.  This pool looks much larger than it is due to the distortion of my wide angle lens.  In reality, the pool is probably the size of a mattress or a little larger.  But I loved the rhyme of it’s accentuated shape and the opening in the sky just above it, along with the shape of the “Haystack” in the background.  Geometric shapes and their repetitious relationships almost always make for interesting visual subjects.  Likewise, so do complimentary colors like the blues and tobacco-like yellows in this scene.

Tide-Pool at Cannon Beach, OR

Never having been to the northwest, much less its coast, one of the things that confounded me is how a bank of clouds and fog could move in and hover for hours on end.  My limited beach time has been spent on the Atlantic or Gulf.  Not only is fog out of character, but clouds roll in and out like an assembly line or conveyor belt.  Not so on our visit to Oregon.  Carl and I spent literally all afternoon (from lunch on) parked here hoping for beautiful light.  There was no drama for hours and hours, then a thin layer of clouds appeared on the horizon as if a magenta filter had been placed in front of the sun.  And it sat and sat and sat until sunset, probably lasting an hour and a half.  The other phenomenon I noticed and that you’ll pickup in this image is how the light and color varied across the sky.  Weather, fog and clouds pushing westward from the east attempted to clear the sky and bring “normal” light, while the magenta glow over the sea gave a colorful light show.

View of Cannon Beach, OR from Ecola Park