talking meme day 3

[rivendellrose]

umadoshi asked "What's something you love about where you live? (Open to interpretation.)"

One thing I love about where I live is that it's really close to the water. Now, the really nice kind of "right by the water" that comes with fancy views is up the hill from me and they don't have apartments in that area, and it's ridiculously expensive. But I grew up on and off boats, so the fact that I live a block away from right on top of one of the local shipping marinas is enough for me -- it means that on a good day everything smells like the ocean, here, and I can walk down and watch boats come through the locks and watch the great blue herons nest in the spring (and destroy the trees they nest in, because herons are like that) or fish in the rest of the year, and watch the salmon go through the fish ladder on the locks in the fall (and watch the seals and sea lions wait just outside of the locks for the salmon, because they're not stupid). The town I grew up in had a festival every year themed around when the salmon come back to spawn, because that's how important salmon are here (okay, and because we had a huge hatchery in town).

If I want to walk a ways, I can go down to the marina and walk along and look at the boats -- and read their names, because if you know boats you know half of the fun is deciding which boat you want, and the other half is deciding which boat, regardless of desirability, has the most clever name -- and then walk past that to a little beach that, while it's often crowded during the summer, is still a nice place and has a little snack hut and a playground and a wetland area where there are ducks and turtles and, a lot of times, even more blue herons. And the herons who hang out there are super jaded and don't care about people, so you can get surprisingly close to them. I like to walk around there and look for beach glass, because it's a good excuse for a walk, and it's nice to collect something that's technically trash but is also really pretty.

There's another beach that's more like two hours' walk from my place, and that one's in a state park so it's actual good trail-hiking to get to rather than just sidewalks, so that's where I go when I really have a lot of time. Go up to the trails, walk around, maybe spend some time on the big lawn in the middle of the park or the grassland over by the bluff where I often see rabbits and hawks, and then down the hill again to go visit the beach and look for more sea glass and see if I can spot any herons or anything else interesting. There's a lighthouse at the end of that point, but it's not open to the public, so I don't usually go that far. There's also a sewage treatment plant in that general vicinity (the area was a military base before they made it into a park, so the whole thing kind of weirdly mixed-use), but, in a very sweet gesture that's only sometimes empty but always a bit charming, the area around the treatment plant is planted with beach roses. They tried.

Downtown proper has a couple of other really great waterfront parks, and I'm going to be giving school tours at one of them this spring because it's a sculpture park run by the museum I docent for. They did a great job of blending native plants and landscaping in with the sculptures, and the tour I'll give there is about both sculpture and ecology, so... I'll probably make a post about that sometime this winter when I start panicking that I'm not properly prepared for the tours there. They've done some really great stuff with ecological reclamation, too, trying to bring back the natural habitat along parts of the waterfront so that baby salmon (again, I told you, salmon are important here...) have places to hide while they're in the stage in their development where they're leaving the rivers but not quite ready for open sound yet.

The other park is more of a usual park with trails along the water, but it's special to me because one time back when my husband and I lived downtown we decided to take a walk through it... and then just kind of kept going and wound up almost in the neighborhood we now live in, after going through this whole railroad area and everything. It was a fun day.

So... waterfront parks and being by beaches, I think is what I'm trying to say. XD

Comments

[umadoshi]

This is so lovely. *^^*

(I almost never get to the actual shore, despite no place in Halifax being very far from some aspect of it, but even just knowing the ocean is so close is comforting to me.)

[rivendellrose]

Thanks! ♥

I feel the same way. Even when I wasn't living this close to the water, I've always felt like living far away from it would make me twitchy. Living far away from mountains, too. I don't like land that's flat.

[umadoshi]

I loved almost everything about living in Toronto for the two years we were there, and the exceptions were the smog (so nasty sometimes, although not bad as big cities go) and the absence of ocean. Lake Ontario=NOT REMOTELY SIMILAR.

[mekare]

That sounds great! I live near a sound too leading into the North Sea. I grew up at a lake and have always wanted eater where I live. It‘s pretty different here but for me the view counts. I can walk 10 minutes and look out to the sound so that‘s great.