The Disappearance of Daytona

(Warning Unedited Full Size Images)

Back when I was a little boy, all the way up until I was young man of college age when I wandered away from home, I have a memory of an incredibly wide beach. All up and down the North Florida Atlantic Coast you could drive your car on the beach. There was plenty of room for two lanes of traffic, parking, sun bathing, games and surf.

Something has shrunk. Granted I spent much more time north of Daytona at Crescent Beach and maybe memories appear larger in the side view mirror, but this beach is where the auto races that gave birth to the Daytona 500 were first held and there sure could not be a car race on this beach any more.

A short walk on a famous wide sandy beach raised a lot of questions.














I'm still attracted to the small pretty details however. Life is more palatable when you can focus more often on the pretty side of things.

We used to make soup with these small clams called donacks. Their shells over time formed coquina, a type of sedimentary rock.














I went to the country beach back in the day. There was a collection of small beach houses by the beach ramp and the rest was miles of wild sand dunes. These buildings on this big city beach at the south end of Daytona now, still look fairly new. I doubt that these tall condos were parked on this beach twenty years ago.














Besides the tall condo buildings perched on the edge and the narrow beach that was just wide enough for a single row of parking and one lane of one way traffic, the sand dunes were for the most part gone. My sister who has walked this beach for twenty years says it was the hurricanes that took the sand away. Beach erosion it is called. It had a name long before the hurricanes. It seems to me "The Hurricanes" were in 2004. I wonder if there are not a lot more things going on to cause this dramatic loss of sand.


















I know for sure there are a hell of a lot more people in Florida than when I left the last time for twenty years and with all those new people comes all the new construction, cars and traffic. I am still adjusting to this notion of so many people. Fortunately I have a still quiet mountain top to return to. I am very glad for that.














Way back when, in the olden days we drove across a scary little wooden draw bridge that crossed the Inter coastal waterway to get to Crescent Beach. That bridge is long gone thank heavens. A new one was built to replace it and another one added between it and the Bridge of Lions to accommodate the increased flow of traffic.














At one of the cricks that flows into the Inter coastal, a gated fly-in golf course community has provided a nice boardwalk to walk down to the water. I could tell by the graffiti on the boardwalk this place was more of a teenage hangout than a place folks might actually want to come and spend some time.














Cabbage Palms and Bald Cypress lined the banks of the coffee colored waters. Strange birds shrieked in the distance, but were no where to be seen.














These waterways are preserved from necessity. At low tide and in between major rains, the flood plain of swamp loving forest is revealed as a muddy leaf littered floor. The gated fly-in golf course community needs this crick to drain the place.














Despite the graffiti there are still some beautiful places to see at the edge of the neighborhood.