Beach Town Research Articles

Predicting Land Cover Using a GIS-Based Markov Chain and Sea Level Inundation for a Coastal Area

New Hanover County, North Carolina, has been experiencing rapid population growth and is expected to continue this growth, leading to increased land use and development in the area. The county is also threatened by sea level rise (SLR) and its effects because of its coastal location and frequent occurrences of major storms and hurricanes. This study used a land change modeler to map the land cover change throughout the county over a period of 20 years, and predicted land cover distribution in the area in the years 2030 and 2050. Statistics revealed that the developed land in the area increased by 85 km2 between 2000 and 2010, and by 60 km2 between 2010 and 2020. Such land is predicted to increase by another 73 km2 by 2030, and 63 km2 by 2050. This increase in development is expected to occur mainly in the central area of the county and along the barrier islands. Modeling of SLR illustrated that the northwestern part of New Hanover County along the Cape Fear River, as well as the beach towns located on the barrier islands, are estimated be the most affected locations. Results indicate that sections of major highways throughout the county, including I-140 near downtown Wilmington and US-421 in Carolina Beach, may be inundated by SLR, which might delay residents during mandatory evacuations for emergency situations such as hurricanes. Some routes may be unusable, leading to traffic congestion on other routes, which may impede some residents from reaching safety before the emergency. Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach are estimated to have the highest levels of inundation, with 71.17% and 40.58% of their land being inundated under the most extreme SLR scenario of 3 m, respectively. The use of the present research approach may provide a practical, quick, and low-cost method in modeling rapidly growing urban areas along the eastern United States coastline and locating areas at potential risk of future SLR inundation.

Perception of beach safety at a destination beach on the Great Lakes

AbstractSurf‐related drowning fatalities are a public health concern in the Great Lakes region of North America, and within Canada there are few beaches with lifeguards and no regional beach safety strategy. This short paper presents the results of a survey completed in the northern hemisphere summer of 2022 to determine the perceptions of beach users at Station Beach in Kincardine, Ontario, a popular tourist beach town on Lake Huron. Results suggest that beach safety knowledge and choice of location to occupy along the beach depend on experience with the beach, with frequent visitors tending to select quieter locations located further from a jetty that can result in a structural rip current. Infrequent visitors tended to be closer to the jetty and selected that location based on convenience (e.g., close to parking), suggesting the need for structural changes to guide behaviour towards safer areas of the beach. Results also highlight the challenges of developing an effective warning system to inform beach users of potentially dangerous surf and currents in the absence of an investment in lifeguards or a regional/provincial beach safety strategy.

Street art as “street fetish”- a new signifier of social class? The case of Brazil’s “Beverley Hills”

ABSTRACT This study explores street art's changing symbolic value and emplacement, the latter of which is reaching beyond the city limits and so-called 'public' space, where commissioned practices are being carried out on individuals' private homes and elite households in non-urban spaces. In this paper I focus on the process of “street fetish”, which has resulted from street art's contemporary institutionalization and shaped by complex socio-cultural, political, and economic process including de-subculturalization and artification. These microprocesses are intertwined with the convergence of authenticity and commercialization, and inseparable from practical, symbolic, organizational, discursive, and semiotic shifts taking place within the (street) art world concerning its market value, which are shaped by and simultaneously shape the field of cultural production and highly influenced by global capitalism. My investigation focuses on the work of one Brazilian street artist, RDO SAMP and his commissioned street art on a private home in the beach town resort of Jurerê International (Florianópolis, Santa Catarina), one of the most affluent towns in the country, which was designed by the world renowned, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and a place, where class distinctions center on enculturated symbolic and material economies.

Song of the Andoumboulou: 300

Song of the Andoumboulou: 300

Ellis Island: A People's History

Ellis Island: A People's History

Costa Rican Beach Towns as Liminal Spaces: Tourism, Transgressions and the Night-Time Economy

Based on a five-and-a-half month ethnography in two Costa Rican beach towns, this article seeks to explain the drug consumption that occurs during touristic experiences by reworking the crime-consumerism nexus framework. Employing an uneven development perspective, it explains why drug consumption occurring within touristic contexts is under-policed and instead treated as privileged playful deviance. In doing so, the article demonstrates how the politics of the night-time economy (NTE) specific to the tourism industry shape the touristic destination into a liminal space that facilitates, encourages, and sustains drug consumption. The article provides new theoretical insights into the criminology of touristic spaces, the NTE, and playful deviance.

Source identification and implications of heavy metals in urban roads for the coastal pollution in a beach town, Busan, Korea

Heavy metals in the sediments of urban roads (RDS), storm drains (SDS), and marine areas (MS) were investigated to assess road pollution in a beach town adjacent to the coast in Busan and identify their relationships with the marine environment. RDS were considerably polluted with Zn, Cu, Cr, and Pb, with mean concentrations of 1090, 178, 171, and 199 mg/kg, respectively. MS were severely contaminated with Zn and Cu, exceeding the effects range median (ERM; Cu = 270, Zn = 410 mg/kg). PCA and HCA identified tire and brake wear in RDS as the major sources of Zn, Pb, Cu, and Cd, and that high levels of Zn, Cu, and Pb in RDS originating from traffic activities contaminated MS through the urban storm drain system. The results suggested that traffic-originated metals in RDS are potential pollutants in coastal environments, and further studies on their fate and management should be conducted.

3D numerical simulation of tsunami generation and propagation, case study: Makran tsunami generation and penetrating in Chabahar Bay

The Makran subduction located at the northwest of the Indian ocean, at the Oman Sea mouth has been and is the source of massive tsunamis that threatens the coasts of Iran, Pakistan, India and Oman. The initial tsunami wave produced by the magnitude and focal depth of Makran submarine earthquake in 1945 is determined based on the Okada algorithm. 3D propagation of the generated mega wave in the Indian Ocean and Oman Sea is simulated by adopting OpenFOAM open source CFD software, in its global sense and verified vs. the available data. The wave characteristics are extracted from the global model at the mouth of Chabahar Bay are inserted as the input in a regional model which consist of precise geometry and bathymetry of the bay and finer mesh size. The wave run-up is predicted at the main ports at the Indian Ocean and Oman Sea coastline. The obtained results are implemented to assess the tsunami risk zone of Teess beach town, at Chabahar Bay coastline. The advanced procedure applied in this research consists of the accurate production of the original tsunami and three stages of global and regional 3D and local 2D propagation simulation, that provides reliable results in more accurate estimation of wave run up height and tsunami risk zone, for practical engineering applications.

‘It Was the Last Time We’d Start the Summer that Way’: Space, Race, and Coming of Age in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor

ABSTRACT This article argues that Colson Whitehead’s much understudied coming of age novel Sag Harbor makes an important intervention into the history of the coming of age genre. Sag Harbor is the story of upper-middle class Black boy Benji Cooper, now an adult, narrating a summer he spent at the majority Black beach town of Sag Harbor when he was fifteen years old. Through a series of extended comparative readings to canonical works of coming of age – James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993) – I argue that such narratives are often dependent on the freedom whiteness grants to move unimpeded through the world. Benji is only able to follow a ‘traditional’ coming of age narrative because his class gives him access to a space – Sag Harbor – which is not structured by an overdetermining white gaze. Thus, by aligning Benji with ‘traditional’ coming of age narratives, Whitehead intervenes in the history of Black coming of age literature, which depicts coming of age for Black youth as learning the limits of Blackness in a society built around whiteness.

Dredging the sand commons: the economic and geophysical drivers of beach nourishment

Beaches are natural capital stocks that provide value through localized storm protection, recreational amenities, and ecosystem services at regional and global scales. In response to increased storm risks and sea-level rise, coastal communities invest in shoreline stabilization by rebuilding eroding sections of the coast through periodic re-nourishment. While conceptual models of the coastal-economic system provide a capital-theoretic framework to study beach management, empirical analysis of the drivers of beach nourishment policy is limited. Using data from 21 coastal towns in North Carolina, we examine the geophysical and economic factors that reflect coastal vulnerability and influence the frequency of beach nourishment investments. We find that beach towns with access to periodically replenishable sand deposits from inlets and river channels nourish more frequently. Beaches that rely on offshore sand reserves are nourished less frequently. Our results provide new insights into the heterogeneous risks that local communities face with higher costs, limited sand reserves and the growing nourishment demand driven by climate change and increased vulnerability.

Sheep, herbs and blood on the beach: discrepant representations of ritual acts for essentialising and reinforcing difference in contemporary South Africa

South Africa’s 2018/2019 summer holidays were marked by a flurry of media reports describing, some in vivid, graphic detail, the ritual slaughter of a sheep on a popular Cape Town beach by a group of #MustFall activists. Their action was in response to reports of a private security company, ostensibly working at the behest of nearby local commercial outlets and residents, having forced Black people off the beach. Focusing on various media reports and responses to the incident, the article shows that there is a revival and regrowth of essentialist expression in the ways contemporary South Africans address persistently overlapping issues of racial and class differences that are made particularly salient through their being marked by everyday discrimination. Through analysis of media reports and responses the article considers the various forms of essentialist expression that manifested during the ritual and in responses to it. In doing that it reveals particular local manifestations of the global turn to a populist politics and it demonstrates that, whilst essentialist expressions take diverse forms, some of which appear to offer empowerment potential in decolonising and other anti-oppressive moments, they also always carry the long-term potential for reinforcing divisive intolerance.

The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History by John S. Sledge

Reviewed by: The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History by John S. Sledge Della Scott-Ireton The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History. By John S. Sledge. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2019. Xii, 243 pp. $29.99. ISBN 978-1-6433-6014-0. John Sledge's The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History is an expansive, rolling, rollicking ride through the history and heritage of the Gulf. As Sledge points out, the Gulf of Mexico, despite its position as the maritime crossroads of the Western Hemisphere, has been the [End Page 373] subject of relatively few scholarly or popular treatments of its history and role in the shaping of our modern world. This volume helps to fill that niche, and if it does not delve as deeply into particular aspects as one might wish, it certainly covers the broad expanse of the places, people, vessels, tragedies, and triumphs that have taken place on, as Sledge says, the "American Mediterranean." The book is organized in a logical, chronological progression, and makes a point of circumnavigating and crossing the Gulf, with near-equal attention on the U.S. states, Mexican coast, and island of Cuba that form its perimeter. Sledge's home port of Mobile is well-represented, focusing attention on a maritime community that often is overshadowed, in literature and media, by New Orleans. Sledge starts his journey with the earliest users of the Gulf, the Indigenous peoples who ringed its shores, extracted its resources, traveled and traded on its waters, and respected its violent storms. Spanish and other European explorers join the story, with their tales of exploitation, violence, and, usually, disaster for all involved. A section on the Gulf's position as a colonial highway for fleets of settlers, slavers, adventurers, and "treasure" ships leads to an entire fascinating chapter on the pirates and freebooters who preyed on those fleets, an element of Gulf history often overlooked or conflated with Caribbean exploits. The development of Gulf ports as a result of the cotton trade, which brought the region attendant growth in wealth and importance during the nineteenth century, sets the stage for a chapter describing the resulting maritime conflicts among clashing nations that focused on the Gulf, from minor squabbles to the only blue-water battle of the American Civil War. The shift from conflict to constructive use of the Gulf is a prevailing theme as Sledge discusses the mapping of the benthic Gulf basin, the expansion of once-local industries like fishing and sponging, the coastal community's response to Prohibition, the growth of tourism, and shipping innovations in capacity and containers. The final chapter brings readers to the present, with a thoughtful reflection on the petroleum industry's focus on the Gulf, with its economic benefits [End Page 374] and appalling ecological consequences as exemplified by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. An epilogue focusing on the story of a beached historic shipwreck neatly wraps up the epic, exciting, and occasionally melancholy heritage of the Gulf of Mexico. The bibliography shows the wide variety of Sledge's research and sources, ranging from academic theses and dissertations to published classics and obscure articles, as well as websites and popular works, and provides many ideas for additional reading. Illustrations, including some lavish color plates, are useful and whet the appetite for more. The book's relaxed style and easy prose make for an enjoyable read. Like Sledge, I have deep personal roots in the region, and I appreciated his constant return to the story of people in the little beach towns and major port cities who make up the unique Gulf Coast cultural gumbo. As a maritime archaeologist with a career focused on the Gulf of Mexico and insider knowledge of the research conducted on everything from Native American watercraft to Spanish colonization vessels to the U.S.'s oldest existing battleship, I admit I would have liked more integration of the abundant, available archaeological data into the historical description. Some important issues, such as slavery and race relations, receive a relatively shallow treatment, and the historian in me wanted more nuanced detail, such as an acknowledgement of Apalachicola as one of the Gulf's busiest and...

Legal pluralism at the beach: Public access, land use, and the struggle for the “coastal commons”

The constantly shifting boundaries between land and sea pose fundamental challenges in resolving land‐use disputes at the coast. In the UK, these difficulties are compounded by the fact that multiple agencies and authorities are charged with managing the coastline. This means the coast is a space of legal plurality, subject to overlapping jurisdiction. This paper demonstrates the consequences of this with reference to Whitstable, on the north Kent coast, where customary law and established (“as of right”) use is clashing with private property rights concerning the ownership of, and access to, a town beach. Noting that the legal authorities are struggling to reconcile these different rights claims, the paper concludes that the effective resolution of land‐use conflicts on a changing coastline demands legal pliability and, ideally, a reduction in the overall number of organisations responsible for the regulation of the “coastal commons.”

The materialization of language in tourism networks

Abstract This article traces how new linguistic practices emerge alongside the development of tourism in Hawai‘i and Japan. We trace and describe two networks of tourism to illustrate how signs, speech, and embodied communication materialize in actor networks. We frame these new spatial repertoires as examples of language learning and language change that occurs as an effect of human mobility intersecting with material affordances in new environments. We compare the relatively new emergence of such spatial repertoires in Izumisano, a residential neighborhood in Oʻsaka, to the more established repertoires that have formed in Kailua, a residential beach town on O‘ahu in Hawai‘i. In Izumisano, we focus on the emergence of Chinese alongside English, and in Kailua, we examine the recent emergence of the Japanese language. In both contexts, we identify how language first emerges in written form on signs in relation to other actants such as pancakes, airports, and train stations. This signage later becomes part of the embodied actions by service providers who acquire multimodal verbal repertoires through their interactions with tourists.

James McNamara.

James McNamara.

On Self-Rescue

On Self-Rescue Abigail Greenbaum (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 14] This past summer, I didn't run the Upper Green, the Chattooga, or any of my favorite whitewater rivers, because my kayak skirt no longer fits around my pregnant belly. That's what I say to my boating friends when they invite me on trips. But the truth is I haven't been on rivers since before my body showed its tenant. I've been scared. Pregnant, I've lost my balance. For weeks, I couldn't rise from bed without the contents of my stomach rising also. In the early days, I felt stoned on my own body, a fuzziness around the edges of everything that happened. I lived from sleep to nap to sleep. My body's resources have been focused on growing earlobes, or on maintaining an ecosystem in which fetal eyes can move from their fishlike starting points to their final location. Learning to read a whole new set of instincts and sensations, I feel strange in my own skin. I don't trust the physical instincts I once had. Paddling in actual swift water has felt undoable. I've long been afraid to roll a kayak up from the river water in which it has [End Page 15] flipped, but I still spent several years learning how. The first time I tried to roll, I floated in a north Georgia sporting-goods store's wave pool, with a hired instructor spotting me. I didn't even own a boat. Before that lesson, I'd paddled one river, the Tuckasegee in North Carolina. The wide canyon, flanked by a rail line, eased between tall mountains, its water sifted into gentle but defined channels where beginners practice their skills. I loved the bounce of continuous waves under my hips, I loved how the kayak became an extension of my body, the mermaid tail of my childhood dreams, but I'd been scared when, as I attempted to cross a gentle current, the flow grabbed my boat's edge and pulled me under. Rolling back seemed both important and unthinkable, so I paid the instructor fifty dollars to see if I could do it. He can teach anyone, I'd heard. This felt like a challenge in reverse. If I couldn't roll—and I fully expected that I couldn't—I'd find friends for a rafting trip. I'd never mess with skirted boats again. The store's pool had a wave that could be switched on, but after talking to me for less than a minute, the instructor could tell I wasn't near ready to practice in current. Before we tried a roll, he asked me to flip, then count to ten before I swam from my boat. Hang out under the water, wait, feel the boat settle. There's a mechanical reason for this; a boat still rocking from its flip resists being righted. But he also wanted me to feel how long I could actually wait before breathing. He promised that this was longer than I thought it would be. He cautioned that paddling requires awareness and calm, especially when upside down in turbulent water. He told me this is why potheads make such good boaters. I did not know until then that I could be afraid of water. I grew up in a Massachusetts beach town. I dove into waves and body-surfed them to shore. I steered outboard motors through creeks and marshes, across bays. I tossed anchors and jumped onto docks to tie lines. I swam for hours. Maybe the difference was that in a kayak I would be upside down. And when I first tried to paddle in whitewater, I was no longer a child. I had learned, in other ways, how to fear. I have a strong hip snap, the foundation of any roll. Novice male boaters, I've heard, are more likely to muscle their way up, trying to wrench the boat with their upper body and paddle. You need the paddle stroke, too, but the whole thing starts when you drive your hip toward the surface. In the store...

A Tour de Farce of Language

A Tour de Farce of Language Cheryl A. Emerson (bio) Paraguayan Sea Wilson Bueno Erín Moure, trans. Nightboat Books www.nightboat.org/book/paraguayan-sea/ 112 Pages; Print, $15.95 Erín Moure's most recent work of poetic translation performs what at first appears as a burlesque of language, reminiscent of the comic monologues of Louis de Funès, the French "fufu" who famously slaughtered linguistic borders between French, English, and Spanish. Similarly, Moure's Paraguayan Sea transports the mixed Portunhol/Guaraní of Bueno's Mar Paraguayo into her invented Frenglish/Guaraní mix, making Paraguayan Sea a singular accomplishment in that it translates the language of origin into a target language that is also original, a move from singularity to singularity. On a certain level, Paraguayan Sea can be read as a tour de farce of language, with pages that revel in linguistic impertinence, what the sole narrator—the "marafona floozy"—describes in the end as the weave of an "étrange slaughter, more perfect than anything is perfect when what's in question is death." The entanglement of language and death— and their solitudes—is no accident, and also the moment where Paraguayan Sea proves to be far more than a comic play of tongues. Whereas the ancient Tupí is extinct, along with its peoples, Guaraní is one of the few remaining indigenous languages still spoken and passed on in South America, protected as an official language of today's Paraguay. Because the extermination of colonized populations and the death of languages are coeval, the weavings of Guaraní into Bueno's Portunhol and Moure's Frenglish bespeaks resilience, resistance, and loss: la ancestral speech of pères et grandspères that infinitely vanishes into memory, they entertain all speech and tricot: those Guaraní voices turn tender only if they persist in weaving: ñandu: there is no better fabric than the spiderweb of the leaves tissées together. The weaving together of English, French, and Guaraní—the most recent iteration of a practice Moure has joyously called "transelation"—here carries an unmistakably comic affect, especially in the string of diminutives ad absurdum the marafona floozy reserves for her little dog Brinksy (Brinks'i, Brinks'imi, Brinks'michĩ, Brinks'michĩmira'ymi, Brinks'michĩmira'itotekemi). But Paraguayan Sea also plunges the reader into depths far beneath the comic play of signes, into an ocean abyss (porãitereí) "far beneath the ligne of silence. Il n'y a pas de langages là. Only the vertige de language. It tells me I existe." It is fitting that the narrator of Paraguayan Sea, a marafona floozy—"catin trollop, the biggest trashy flooze in Guaratuba"—of ambiguous gender, should speak a trans-language, in a mixed current of poetry and prose that migrates across genres of confession, fable (morangú), murder mystery, and tale of trans-generational love. She is an outcast "inscribed in the heart of the marginal, of those cast aside and crestfallen in diners dogged by all that is vain and barren." Simultaneously "witch [and] guru," "fate and fortune," the marafona floozy provokes mixed feelings of admiration, fear, and disgust "in the natives of this exiled crumbling bit of seaside in Guaratuba of the province of Paraná" where "there's nobody, personne, no one who speaks my langue." The floozy's extended monologue spins an intricate web of language, death, loneliness, and desire, in arabesque patterns that "symphoniques, interweave." The floozy might or might not have killed "the oldie," her 85-year-old captor/lover/provider who is already dead in the opening pages. From the very start, she claims her innocence: "never killing him despite my efforts to endure nights and days of pure abuse in a macabre obsession with tricking his grizzled neckskin. No, believeyoume, I speak truly: I didn't kill the oldie." Variations on the theme of "I didn't kill the oldie," "it wasn't moi who killed le vieux guy," or "I'd never do him any harm" repeat a dozen times throughout the text, interlaced with a doubled confession of her passion for "le boy" with his "hovĩ-hovĩ" eyes of greenish-blue. We witness her loneliness in the Brazilian beach town...

Los Perdidos

Los Perdidos Beth Alvarado (bio) My father-in-law was orphaned when he was child. He came to this country from Mexico, looking for his family and, although he didn't find them, he created his own. He worked on the roofs to support them. Hot-tar roofing, in Arizona, in the summer, is one of the hardest jobs; the temperatures on the roofs can get to 135 degrees. Although he never had even a basic education, he was fluent in two languages and could do complicated geometric equations in his mind. He was curious about everything, and would go to the University of Arizona Medical Center to listen to the public lectures or to Armory Park for the Mariachi Festival. He watched the news programs from Mexico almost obsessively, but he never went back, not even for a visit. Whenever my husband, Fernando, watched the news and there were stories about murders or gang violence, he would always say, "Please don't let it be a Mexican." He'd been born in Tucson, and his mother's family was at least fifth-generation: one side had a Spanish Land Grant near what is now Los Angeles and the other side had Native American roots. In other words, the border crossed them; they [End Page 25] didn't cross the border. His father had been born in the States, too, in California, although he grew up in Mexico. Still, Fernando self-identified as "Mexican," not "Mexican American," and certainly not "Hispanic" or "Latino" or even "Chicano." Gloria Anzaldúa explains it best when she writes, "We say nosotros los mexicanos (by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity but a racial one). We distinguish between mexicanos del otro lado and mexicanos de este lado. Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul—not one of mind, not one of citizenship." I didn't really notice this passage in her essay until after Fernando had died, so I'm not sure if he would have agreed, but I think so. If you ask our children "what are you?" they will both, like their father, answer "Mexican" without even thinking, so deep is their affection for and identification with his side of the family. "Mexican" even though there are times when, like their father, they don't feel "Mexican enough." When my daughter was about five, she asked me, "Aren't you at least part Mexican? Just a little bit?" I thought about it before I answered, because you shouldn't claim what isn't yours. "I am inside," I told her. "In my heart." ________ I was always the one who wanted to go to Mexico, to see the museums and Frida Kahlo's house in Mexico City, for instance, and to San Miguel de Allende. Fernando would always tell me it was too dangerous. We had gone once to San Carlos, a small beach town near Hermosillo, with my family when our children were small. I remember when we were at the border, going south, while we were waiting for my parents to get car insurance, some of the Mexican border guards were asking us about our children, if they were both ours. Because Michael was dark and Kathryn light, this was not an uncommon question, especially in the '70s. After all, even though people had intermarried in the borderlands for generations, Arizona had not repealed its antimiscegenation [End Page 26] laws until 1962. No one ever thought Michael was mine, and Fernando was always afraid they'd think he had kidnapped Kathryn, so he never went anywhere alone with her. The guards also asked, several times, if we were married, and checked our driver's licenses over and over. Back then, you didn't need a passport and there were no identification papers for children. Their persistent questions made Fernando nervous. Finally, when they walked out of earshot, he said, "Don't talk to them. Your Spanish is so bad, you're going to get the children taken away from us." In San...

Contribution of phosphorus to Georgian Bay from groundwater of a coastal beach town with decommissioned septic systems

Abstract Groundwater inputs of phosphorus (P) to the Laurentian Great Lakes are poorly known, but may contribute to eutrophication and algal bloom issues. This study's objective was to assess the contribution of P to Nottawasaga Bay from the surficial sand aquifer at Wasaga Beach, representing a coastal cottage area with decommissioned septic systems, and how this might change with time. The first part of the study involved site-scale groundwater sampling beside 4 provincial park public washrooms. Legacy P plumes were detected at two of these sites, with one being > 30 years since decommissioning. P transport calculations including sorption onto aquifer sediments indicate the majority of P plumes from the town's decommissioned septic systems have likely not yet reached the shoreline, > 50 years since installation, and will likely contribute P to the bay for many decades. The second part of the study consisted of broader-scale (town-wide) surveys of shallow beach groundwater. Dissolved P concentrations were ~ 50 μg/L for background groundwater (in town and reference area), which is similar to literature values. This P may have been sourced from degrading organic matter, bird droppings, or soil-aquifer minerals. Sporadic elevated concentrations up to 420 μg/L may be from legacy septic systems and/or natural sources. A rough calculation suggests groundwater P loading along Nottawasaga Bay's eastern shore (Wasaga Beach, 10-km; adjacent similar beaches, 40-km) is a few percent at most of that from the Nottawasaga River. Thus, it more likely affects localized periphyton and macrophyte growth rather than significantly affecting the Nottawasaga Bay P budget.

So Far

So Far Charlotte Pence (bio) and Adam Prince (bio) On her final evening in Cartagena, thirty-two-year-old Margaret Lockwood-Showenwaldt took a laminated invitation offering discount drinks and a free buffet from a man wearing a bandanna over his face like a Wild West bad guy. He stood in front of a crumbling colonial building with a neon sign reading Club de Las Mil Noches. She whispered a question, which he nodded to vigorously, then led her inside. He offered a grimy stool, though Margaret continued to stand. "Un momento," he said. "Momencito. Momelito." Then he rushed through a curtain behind the bar, which no one was tending. There were no men in the place at all, only a few women slurping stew from paper bowls on the opposite side of the room. They varied in age and dress, from eighteen to fifty, from cutoff jeans and a neon bikini top to a ruffled A-line that might have been worn by a Cape Cod bridesmaid. There was a dance floor behind them with a giant, rotating disco ball missing several of its tiny mirrors—dark, [End Page 506] pitted spaces, like missing teeth. A picnic table had been set up in the corner of the dance floor, on which lay Crock-Pots and mismatched serving bowls. Margaret fidgeted at the now-bare place on her ring finger, wondering how long a momencito might last. Then she took a breath and went to work with her Handi Wipes, cleaning first the sticky bar top, next one of the stools. Along with her disgust and fear, she felt a wild, heart-skipping excitement at how very authentic this place was, and pride at having come so far. For a little while, all of these emotions stood managed and arranged in a tense equilibrium. Then they collapsed into panic as she was overtaken by an urgent need to pee. ________ The back room of the Club de las Mil Noches was really more like a shabby vestibule, with a door to the alley standing at one side and a black curtain leading into the bar at the other. Between those two was space only for a filing cabinet, a lamp, and a school desk, at which sat club owner Lucho Alvarez de Moreno. But the curtain slid open now, and Lucho's young cousin edged himself in. "It's going to rain," the cousin said. "It is not going to rain," returned Lucho from his desk. "We're fucked if it rains." "It is not going to rain." A few months ago, Lucho had made the mistake of telling his cousin that the Mil Noches wasn't making enough money to stay open much longer, prompting this shy young man—who'd spent his adult life inside, watching telenovelas and American movies [End Page 507] because of a sensitivity about his harelip—to emerge from his apartment wearing that black bandanna. It had taken the young man only a single week to become friends with the street rats, who started calling him Bandito, as though he were some legendary criminal. Through this network, Bandito had learned that Colombia's president planned to build a beach house as a wedding gift to his daughter and son-in-law in the now-quiet beach town of Taganga. Without telling Lucho, Bandito had negotiated to trade the Mil Noches for a club up there. The two men had argued then, Lucho calling him a schemer with telenovela ideas, Bandito calling Lucho a bitter old man who'd given up on living. They needed to make the trade as soon as possible, the younger argued, before the gift was announced and everyone knew what property in Taganga was really worth. Bandito did have a point. And in the end, Lucho had given in. It wasn't a straight trade, but involved some money, too. They'd been running several promotions, but they were short. Still short. This was their last chance, the biggest promotion of all. They'd printed those laminated cards, included a buffet. Cena de Ensayo, they called it. Rehearsal Dinner. " We need five hundred U.S.," said Bandito. "Tonight." "I know...