booty
We saw a sea urchin shell on the beach near where we stayed, but it was cracked. I bet you’ll find a whole one, I said to Steve, because when he sets on a mission that’s it, and I didn’t care about finding a whole one so much. I like the cracked ones, and the one I found seemed precious enough. And that was the only one we found. For a few days and many beaches.
Then we went to Point Udall, the easternmost point of the United States (St. Croix is a US Virgin Island). You have to drive and drive along the coast, and you can see that you’re getting to the end and you think it must be now and then now but you keep heading further east. We stood there for a while, special not so much because it’s the easternmost point of the United States but because it’s the easternmost point of this island and you can’t see anything except ocean ahead of you, and to either side ocean. And it’s windy, like a point like this should be. It felt important that already this baby has been as far east in the US as possible, and has been along the equator, and has been to Seattle and Mount Rainier, pretty far west, and will go next week to northern Michigan, pretty far north.
We stopped just after Point Udall, parked our rental car and slid down a grassy hill to another blue beach. This was the sea urchin graveyard. We didn’t pick up more than a tiny fraction of what we found: perfect sea urchin shells, one after another, thousands of them. Illegal maybe: we mailed them home wrapped in our clothes to keep them whole.
