Intracoastal at Sunset #2

Another evening spent with my partner, a glass of wine, the setting sun, the water and clouds. I always take the camera, and we go to our bench at the end of the dock. The evening sky and the water are constantly and gloriously changing. “So obvious,” the alter ego says. But not so – if I don’t take the time to use the senses God gave me to be in this world, I won’t notice all the subtle and not so subtle beauty of the variations in it. Crossing boat wakes created the exceptional reflections in the water this evening, and I especially enjoy the backlit violet, mauve, salmon and pink clouds. Our bench is located across the Intracoastal from a small piece of natural landscape created by a tiny county preserve. In fact, so little is left of the natural South Florida landscape, and I often try to picture what passengers on the Celestial Railroad saw from the little train’s windows as it traveled South from Jupiter, Florida, through the non-existent stops of Mars and Venus to Juno, at the north end of Lake Worth. There were farms inland with pineapples, and other tropical crops, but palmetto and sea grape covered sand dunes would have paralleled the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the horizon in both directions. Juno was the capital city of Dade County that included all of Broward and Palm Beach at the time, a Ninety-mile long stretch of the Sub-tropical East Coast of Florida. The Seminole Indians had won their war with the United States and so the Indians still remain to this day. At that pre-Flagler time the Indian population probably exceeded that of whites living in the small coastal towns. Paradise was buggy, sweltering hot and humid in the summer, but lovely and cool days with warm nights made the winter attractive, and that climate eventually enticed Flagler and the rich Northerners who filled this coast with an eighty-mile long strip of concrete.

No matter the concrete, the sunsets from our small piece of Flagler's railroaded (pun intended) paradise are magnificent.