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STRANDED...... 
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Taken in 2005 ...
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I was on the beach......A man, a dog on a log......It was a beach party....we had been there all day.....It was about 10 pm. and even the kids had changed out of their wet suits and finishing off the food and we were packing up to go home...... When I was thinking about which photo I have that would fit under the heading "stranded", I thought about the root word "strand".....It means beach in my mother tongue and I remember it being used in the same way in older English literature.......So I looked up the etymology and this is what I found....... "shore, beach," Old English strand "sea-shore," from Proto-Germanic *strandaz (source also of Danish and Swedish strand "beach, shore, strand," Old Norse strönd "border, edge, shore," Old Frisian strond, Middle Dutch strant, Dutch strand, Middle Low German strant, German Strand "beach"), of uncertain origin. Perhaps from PIE root *ster- "to stretch out." Strictly, the part of a shore that lies between the tide-marks. Formerly also used of river banks, hence the London street name (1246). So, I thought.....I'm "stranded" in the sense of standing on the strand and the man and dog are stranded in the sense of being stranded on a log ......
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I find that to be a very emotion invoking picture, but I'm not sure why. I'm sure the man and his dog had made that voyage on other occasions, but the calmness of the water and serenity of the background seem to me to give it a feeling of solitude. It's a beautiful picture. Be a prism, spreading God's light and love, not a mirror reflecting the world's hatred.
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I find that to be a very emotion invoking picture, but I'm not sure why. I'm sure the man and his dog had made that voyage on other occasions, but the calmness of the water and serenity of the background seem to me to give it a feeling of solitude. It's a beautiful picture. My favourite part of this photo is the dog...Dogs have to be trained to do this.....I have had way too many experiences of stupid, large dogs in small boats.......An untrained lab in a canoe that sees a piece of wood float by and tries to grab it.....or even just excited about it can easily capsize a canoe or kayak......They sometimes get excited about a wave or a duck or a seal.... So a calm dog with an exquisite sense of balance is a rare and beautiful thing on the water.
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I can see the value of a calm dog in those situations. When you say a log, do you mean just a regular log, that could roll? Something flat would be a balancing challenge in itself, I could not imagine a round log. Be a prism, spreading God's light and love, not a mirror reflecting the world's hatred.
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You have to find the right log......like I said, if you grow up here, you learn to evaluate logs .....a log is never perfectly symmetrical and many have parts of roots and branches still attached....some logs have been cut down by humans and some are uprooted trees that are washed to the sea by rivers or are uprooted in various ways and make their way to the ocean. For instance, we had a small rocky bay with a reef in the middle, below our house. We kept our boats at a dock, but sometimes we would go into this bay to unload certain things........I also kept my kayak there on a tidal skid. We also played on the beach, explored, gathered oysters, dug clams, gathered sea-weed for the garden......there was a small creek thee too.....sometimes there were seals there and sometimes I heard Orca or Sea-Lions blowing down there when I was up at the house.... One side of the bay was a steep granite bluff rising perpendicular from the sea. There was a large Fir tree growing 30-40 feet up the the wall. .....At half tide, we could only land the 20 ft. wooden boat near the mouth of the bay, unload people and gear and then take the boat to dock........In those instances, we had to climb and leap along a path of huge, raw granite boulders to get home. Sometimes I let the kids off there and so they wouldn't have to walk the 1/4 mile home. There were raw boulder the size of sea-chests and twice that size on that path along the shore..........Then one night after living there for a decade or more there was a big storm.....Not the biggest storm. The prevailing wind here comes from the South East and brings a lot of rain. The Summer had been a dry one.....August and the first half of September had been hot and dry....a veritable drought Summer that year.......Then the storm brought a deluge and high winds for days. After the storm, we went to town for supplies and headed into our little bay to unload the boat. The whole side of the bluff had fallen into the baa.....The roots of that big Fir had grown in tiny cracks between the layer of Granite and then when the rains came, they swelled up and the wind was waving that tree around and it sheered the rock right off......There were huge boulders, one the size of a dining room table laying on the path where we usually walked and that huge tree on top of them.......We couldn't believe that we hadn't heard it, but the howling wind and the crashing waves must have covered it up.....and it must have been while we slept............. OK, I kinda got off subject there...LOL....What was I taking about?.....oh yeah.....the shape of logs.....they are inherently uneven......So when they hit the ocean, they will tend to float with the same side down all the time, which will cause the side under the water to become water-logged and the side above the water to dry out........Some will get split and/or worn on the beach as they get tossed against rocks and gravel......You look for a log that won't spin......if you can't find one, you find some driftwood planking and nail 2 logs together.......etc..... Beach-combing becomes an art-form.....literally......People make art out of driftwood and rocks and leave it for others to find. For years, I used to bring Black Sharpies to the beach and hand them out to the children and we would collect smooth stones and print messages or make faces on them, or on huge clam shells.........We bring a sharp knife and some plastic produce bags and make sailboats ......it's really fun to stand .in water up to your chest and play with little sail-boats.....like Gulliver's travels.......
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  NBA PLAYOFFS New York Knicks vs Indiana Pacers .
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Thank you for that interesting and visual explanation. I enjoyed reading it. Be a prism, spreading God's light and love, not a mirror reflecting the world's hatred.
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Interesting photo and story. 
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I hope the man and dog have life jackets and can swim. 
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