Thursday Ramble: Coastal stories

Today I did a random roll back through the photo archive and landed on these two.  Taken at a small park, along the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco.  We had been in SF for a couple of days for a meeting of a board I was on.  Cousin Joan picked us up from the hotel and we went north, out across the Golden Gate Bridge and along the coast.  She had someplace in mind of lunch, without reservations, we ended up a little farther up the coast for a fun lunch, I had Oysters.  

Where the little park was at that I took these photos, there was a World War II era bunker, a gun emplacement. It was a little surprising to see.  To realize that there was a genuine fear of invasion on the west coast.  

Here on the east coast, the primary concern was submarines, and there was active submarine and anti-submarine warfare along the east coast.  Just north the Kennedy Space Center, there is a national park and seashore.  Periodically the storms will uncover the shell of a German U-boat that was sunk, and washed up on the beach. The staff at the park are always fast to close off the area, and reburry it.  Only once in my 20 years of hanging around there did I see parts of it sticking out of the sand.  Reminders of the past, in the shadow of our space program. 

While I was living in Florida there was a large exodus from Cuba, thousands of people left the island on small boats and makeshift rafts.  The currents pulled the rafts up the east coast, the Coast Guard would intercept them, and pick up the survivors.  There were so many rafts that they couldn't retrieve them all, so they would mark them with a red or bright pink X indicating that all of the people were off the raft, and leave them to drift.  Dozens of them washed ashore on the beach just north of the space center.  Over the years, I have regretted that I didn't take photos (it was in a period when I was not taking a lot of photos, and decades before phones had cameras,) or a souvenir,  a makeshift oar to show the length to which people will go to escape an intolerable system, and seek a new and better life.  

Well I am much happier with this than the first ramble I wrote, about life and death - it was depressing me as I wrote it.