White Sand, Baldwin Beach
Sprawl upon one of Maui’s white-sand beaches with your nose to the dune, and you may have a Horton Hears a Who revelation. The more closely you look, the more the sands open kaleidoscopically to your eyes. Calcium carbonate seashells, casings and carapaces, coral-reef fragments and sprigs of hard, calcareous algae—these sift themselves at the whim of swells and tides, and bank against our shores, looking innocently homogenous at a distance of a few feet.
Peering intently, you see that you are not on a uniform pile of white whatever; you lie prone on amber globules, itsy emeralds, lumpy fragments of red and black rock, crumbles of crimson crab, lavender urchin spikes, and a host of white bits of calcium-based, organic architecture snapped off the living city of the reef. It’s this calcium that helps “white” to be the coolest of our sands—reflective, light and porous.
The continent’s white sand is the shavings of rock, much of it carried to the coasts by rivers. Under a microscope it is a lovely amalgam of microgems, glitzy quartz, and mineral particles. In Hawaii, however, our sands sing of the sea, offering up as evidence the candy-cane twist of a sea snail’s home, the royal purple nubbins of a lobster’s legs, or all those little fragments of once-proud coral heads, white as can be and crinkled, porous, striated, laddered, or rubbed as perfectly round as your inquisitive eyes.
Very interesting as are all of the articles, I read your magazine from cover to cover!
always good and interesting info