The Beemers' Sunset
The sun rises in the east, doesn't it?
About a year ago a rain storm passed through our area. I realized that the area immediately behind the storm was fairly clear and the sun was starting to set. This gave me a chance to head out to see if the clouds at the back of the eastward-headed storm were being lit up by the setting sun in the west. This can be a pretty dramatic effect in the right conditions. If so, the beach was the best place to go get pictures of it. I grabbed my equipment and the Missus and I headed out on the arduous 13-minute drive to the Atlantic Ocean.
When we arrived at Sandbridge Beach we followed a shiny, new BMW into the parking lot. I was grabbing my camera and tripod out of the back of the car as the BMW’s occupants exited their car and grabbed beach chairs from the trunk. The couple was late-20something or early-30something. They were dressed casually but in clothes that looked expensive. They both had hair styles the cost of which appeared to match the cost of the both the clothing and the car. That is to say, expensive.
We were a little ways behind the Beemer couple as we crossed Sandpiper Road from the parking lot to the beach. There’s a boardwalk through the cut in the barrier dune leading to the beach. I was assessing the clouds out over the ocean and beginning to realize that because of other clouds between the setting sun and the departing storm we likely weren’t going to get the lighting effect I was hoping for. The Beemer couple, however, were definitely not going to get what they went to the beach for. They suddenly stopped several yards ahead of us at the end of the boardwalk / beginning of the beach and their shoulders seemed to drop simultaneously. They said a couple of words to each other and suddenly turned around. As they headed back to their car, they passed us and we both heard him say to her, “The sun doesn’t set for another 20 minutes. We have time to find somewhere to see it.”
That’s right: They went to a beach on the eastern seaboard, facing east, to watch the sun set.
The moral of this story is that money can buy you lots of things but it cannot buy you a basic sense of direction.
So anyway, here is a picture of the sun setting, in the west, taken at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, only 2 miles south of Sandbridge Beach. I hope they found their way there.
