Sunset at the River

Today I went down to the James River to enjoy the sunset with a friend of mine. There were several observations that I found noteworthy. One was the mix of raw nature and the development of man’s hand. If you fix your eyes on one spot you could be under the illusion that you were in the middle of nowhere. All the eye can see is the rocks on the beach, the vast plain of water, and a beautifully colored sky with a sliver of the sun peeking above the horizon. Unfortunately, we are not in the middle of nowhere, a glance over my shoulder and there are cars driving along a busy road. A look down the beach will reveal one of the largest shipyards in the world. We counted nine contours of planes flying overhead. So while it was nice to imagine, even if only for a second, that it was just us and nature, the truth is we where in the midst of man’s development.
The second note worthy event was the bombardment of hundreds of seagulls. Several yards in front of us in the water a fish or something had died and the gulls were fighting for a piece of the meat. They where swarming and squawking all around us, I felt like I was in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. It was a crazy sensation being in the middle of their struggle to feed themselves and survive. Groups of about fifty birds would dive bomb all at once forcing the group of fifty already on the fish to move. I had never seen anything like it.