Nightswimming In The Past

GoldenGateWindowREDUCED4

Gun port window in Fort Point, looking out on the Pacific Ocean at the entrance to San Francisco Bay.

MIKE HUMPHREYS: Not unlike gun ports at Fort Pickens and Fort Jefferson.

ME: Fort PIckens proper is about 25 years older than Fort Point but both are brick masonry fortresses of similar basic design and armaments. Another like fort is Pulaski (a little older than Pickens) in Savannah GA (and it has a moat!).

One big difference between Forts Pickens and Point: I'd never go swimming day or night in the frigid waters under the Golden Gate Bridge but as a teenager I often went skinnydipping after midnight in the soup-warm Gulf waters on the beach across from Battery Langdon at Fort Pickens. Forty years ago, that beach was covered with nothing but sea oats and rolling sugary sand dunes (some were as tall as we were); today, after the hurricanes and after some park 'improvements', 90 percent of the dunes are gone and there's a parking lot (see photo below). So sad. I visit that beach every time I go home, it’s like stopping by a cemetery.

BTW, there *is* surfing at Fort Point but wetsuits required (and the 'beach' sucks).

MIKE HUMPHREYS: Michael, you forgot one thing, when you said "...Forty years ago, that beach was covered with nothing but sea oats and rolling sugary sand dunes..."
Stickers.
Sandspurs, if you will.
I hated those things.
But I have heard that with all the storm activity over the years, they are now gone.
Good riddance.

ME: My memory is often benevolent in the way it 'erases' such unpleasant and thorny bits from the past. Instead of sandspurs, all that comes back to me is the warm water at 1AM, the warm midnight breezes, the squeaky sugar white sand that seemed to shine under a full moon, and the tiny bioluminescent organisms in the Gulf that stuck to us (especially in our pubic hair) coming out of the water, making us seem to glow in the dark, too.

We were burning in our own youth. We
did glow, especially in the dark on a beach.

skinnydipping