Treasure in the Shorebreak

Provided something doesn't get in the way, my family has a weekend ritual. My wife gets up and heads down to the beach early. She cracks the dawn patrol with all the other pre-dawn risers. I usually get woken up by a kid about an hour later. Turn on the TV in our room, tune it to Sprout or Noggin, then try and catch a few more winks. The other kid usually shows up about 15 minutes later, then the argument starts about who gets to lay next to Daddy. So, I push over from my side of the bed and am now sandwiched by the two mongrels. Another 15-30 minutes goes by, hopefully with me sleeping, then it's time to get up. 6:45am is the latest I ever get to sleep in til. Feed the kids, pack up all the crap, wake up the baby, change her, give her a snack for the road and we are off. We usually get to the beach around 8:30. During that time, our kids makeshift Papa usually arrives at the beach. He's pretty much always thier. Meets us at the beach on Saturday morning, goes to our house that night, then back to the beach on Sunday. It's a ritual, and I would say we've got it down to a science. I usually paddle out around nine or so and surf til 11:00. Papa Eric, we'll call him, usually surfs during the late spring to mid-fall, but then stops when the water gets real cold. I don't really blame him, he's been surfing the better part of his 60 years and has probably experienced most things he's gonna experience in surfing. During the cold winter months, he usually plays on the beach, with either the kids, or his RC sand and rock crawlers. He's kind of a kid himself and our kids have grown very fond of him over the years.

So one weekend, Papa Eric didn't go to the beach. He had some things to do and took the weekend off. The kids and I showed up at the planned time and spread out. My wife got out of the water and noticed a large log floating around in the high tide shore break. I was tasked to go get it. So I waded into the water and retrieved this large square log. Needless to say, it was the hit of the weekend.

We purched it into various positions. It was a plank that the kids could walk, a teetertotter, and numerus other things that it seems, all the kids on the beach that weekend enjoyed. We left it thinking that the next weekend we be returning and our glorious log would still be right where we left it. I mean, come on, who would take an old rotting log from the beach?

Tuesday, I got the kids off to school, then returned home with our daughter. Papa Eric pulled up a few minutes later. He says, "Hey look what I found on the beach." I went into the events of our weekend and explained to him that we were hoping that log would have stiill been at the beach when we returned. His response, "You know what that thing is made of?, It's solid redwood." You see Papa Eric is a fine woodworker and uses one of our garages as a workshop. What do we get out of it, you say? Well, he makes us stuff for our house. Plus, we get to use one amazing set-up of woodworking tools whenever we please. So getting back to the story. He had just finished making us a nice booth for our kitchen.














Probably the most funcional piece of furniture we have in our house right now. At the time, we just put the booth in, but were still using our old table until a new one was built. Well, you can probably see where this story is going. He made the most amazing table.












I think the table that was made out of that old redwood log, that came washing up on the beach, the log that all the kids on the beach played on for a whole weekend, will probably be in our family for a good long time.