Can you recall last time you discovered a book by total chance and it totally reoriented your thinking about a subject? I can. One of my most memorable finds was in a moldy cabin’s soggy library. I pulled it off the shelf, read it one sitting, and nothing about the ocean has ever been the same.<\/p>\n
Waves and Beaches: The Dynamics of the Ocean Surface<\/i> by Willard Bascom is a classic of natural science. I own the 1980\u2019s revised and updated edition but the book first came out in 1964.<\/p>\n
Waves and Beaches<\/i> begins: \u201cIs there anyone who can watch without fascination the struggle for supremacy between sea and land?\u201d Well, no, not if a person is even remotely sentient and actually manages to hit the beach every now and then and notice, I mean really look hard at what is all around you.<\/p>\n
Until reading this book, I thought I was noticing everything at the ocean\u2019s edge. As it turns out, there is a lot more to understand about the sand I walk upon and the waves that hypnotize me. For starters, I had no idea mathematics played such an interesting and elementary role in the motion of waves or the slope of beaches. I only wish I’d had a math teacher in junior high or high school who loved this book. It might have made me love math instead of utter indifference toward it.<\/p>\n
Bascom\u2019s 365-page book examines everything related to waves and beaches and explains them right down to their tiniest tumble or, literally, a grain of sand.<\/p>\n
One of the utterly fascinating benefits of reading this book is learning the names of features I\u2019ve seen a million times but didn\u2019t even know had names. Take for example, the various marks on the beach made by retreating tides: swash, backwash, rills, cusps, domes, pinholes, ripples. I can\u2019t say I\u2019m now obsessed with identifying everything I see at the beach, but a bit more knowledge of the natural world isn\u2019t such a bad thing in life. In fact, a lot more might save the planet.<\/p>\n
In Waves and Beaches<\/i>, Bascom writes simple yet beautiful and informative sentences like: \u201cWaves are undulating forms that move along the surface of the sea.\u201d Or try this one: \u201cA beach is an accumulation of rock fragments subject to movement by ordinary wave action.\u201d And my favorite: \u201cBeaches are ever-changing, restless armies of sand particles, always on the move.\u201d Bascom might have considered himself more of a scientist than a writer, but he knew how to construct metaphors in nature and slyly present them to readers:<\/p>\n
\u201cA wonderful time to observe\u2026is early in the morning, especially after a high tide. Often the air is still and pleasant light fills the sky. The beach is clean and virginal, the night\u2019s waves erased the human marks of the previous day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amen.<\/p>\n\n
Can you recall last time you discovered a book by total chance and it totally reoriented your thinking about a subject? I can. One of my most memorable finds was in a moldy cabin’s soggy library. I pulled it off the shelf, read it one sitting, and nothing about the ocean has ever been the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4273,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,32,28],"tags":[36,877,96,48,13,878,875,876],"class_list":["post-4272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-beaches","category-writing","tag-beaches","tag-math-in-waves","tag-ocean","tag-oregon-beaches","tag-oregon-coast","tag-random-books","tag-waves","tag-willard-bascom","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4272"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4275,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4272\/revisions\/4275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}