While at the beach this summer I was reminded of an interesting story about a couple I once encountered. I was walking along the beach in Bar Harbor, Maine with my family. I’d gotten a little ahead of them for a while and was walking by myself when a couple stopped me. I don’t remember how old they looked, but definitely old enough that their following question surprised me. They pointed to the rocky beach below us and asked me in a concerned voice “Do you know if they’re having a drought here?” Um, what? I’m sure my face relayed how stunned I was as I looked at the couple, then looked back at the beach where the low tide was gently lapping the stones. They were clearly a couple, yet somehow two separate people had managed to reach adulthood without hearing about the tides? They both spoke English without an accent so it seemed unlikely it was a language related misunderstanding. I had no idea where to begin in explaining tides. Do I start with the moon? Throw an apple at their heads and start with a lesson on gravity?
Hoping I’d heard them wrong I said “Well, it’s low tide…so it means the water is off the beach. Um, have you heard of tides?”
The couple responded with “But the water was far back off the beach like this when we walked by this morning!”
“Yes” I responded, “Low tide happens twice a day…”
I hoped this was their first day on the beach if they kept catching low tide. Anyone who has ever been to a beach town knows that the high and low tides are posted everywhere; on the beach, at hotels, even some restaurants have them listed. But somehow these two had made it out of their hotel and down a beach path twice in one day without encountering a sign.
I left them to their musings since I wasn’t sure what other questions I was going to have to try and answer… “Did someone dump salt on the beach? The water tastes salty!”
