When I was going to naval school in Pensacola one weekend several of us went to the beach on the gulf side of Pensacola Beach. As we were carrying the ice chest out and spreading the blankets the kid from Ohio went running ahead and made a shallow dive into the water. He came up on the other side sputtering. “This is salty!”
“Why do you think they call it salt water?”
“I didn’t think it was this salty!”
We didn’t know how to answer that one.
Having spent about half my youth in California I was quite familiar the sea. Add six years in the navy (on shore, not ships) and thirteen in San Jose didn’t slow that down any but thirty years in Carson City and PhoenixMetro have.
After seeing Pacific combers I found the ones in the Atlantic unimpressive and the Gulf even more so.
Yeah. I used to live on a lake that was roughly 1/2mile by 2 miles. Not big. In my current Florida coastal residence many days the Atlantic Ocean has less surf than my little lake had on especially windy / stormy days.
The Pacific means business all day every day. The Atlantic here resembles a wading pool a lot of the time. Until a hurricane delivers it a couple miles inland, then it’s plenty aggressive.
I had a boogie board when I lived in L.A. (When I was a kid in San Diego we used short, heavy-duty air mattresses.) I loved boogie boarding. Unfortunately, Birch Bay only gets waves during storms, and those only very, very rarely compare to SoCal waves.
Me too! I’ve always lived within a few miles of Lake Superior and not very from from many of Minnesota’s 10,000+ lakes. I feel like I’m not a stranger to blue water at all.
Chromatically, “blue water” is deep water and/or clear water. The near-shore ocean even up to 100 ft deep ~= a dozen miles offshore is often greenish from runoff, a muddy bottom, etc.
A large lake with a rocky steep-sloping bottom can be pretty darn blue even relatively close to shore.
Are you a stranger to Hamm’s Beer?
I don’t know that that’s entirely accurate - I’ve definitely been places where the water right on the beach is blue. My understanding is that the greenish water off the East Coast of the US is due to phytoplankton - and the fact that I live a few miles from the Atlantic no doubt explains why that line never made sense to me. I would have thought lots of the US was “strangers to blue waters” - I never saw blue or even blue-green water until I visited Florida.
That’s what I was thinking.
I grew up near Tacoma, maybe about a mile from the shore of Puget Sound. I’d been out on the Sound in various boats, some pretty small. I even took ferries to Vancouver Island a couple times, which is about a 25 mile crossing.
I live near Boston now. In five minutes I could walk to the Mystic River, which used to be tidal estuary where clipper ships were built. A dam was built downstream some years ago, but I’m still pretty close to Boston Harbor and the ocean.
By the Navy definition, “blue water”, a couple hundred miles offshore, is another thing entirely.
That’s “sky blue.”
The song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” has been invalidated. John Denver released that song in 1971, declaring West Virginia was his home.
But in 1972, Denver released the song “Rocky Mountain High” in which he declared that he had been born again in Colorado and it was now the home he had never known before. (Admittedly he talks about himself in the third person for much of the song but his confusion is forgivable considering his recent rebirth.) So Denver could no longer go home to West Virginia.
As a teenager I lived in a city on Lake Michigan. During my 21 years in the Navy I spent a lot of time out in/on the ocean.
I always understood “Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water” to be a reference to the state, not to a person.
So did I. WV is hard-scrabble Appalachia, with no coastline.