It’s fun walking along the beach, looking for shells and hearing the waves wash the sand. It’s a great break from just sitting on a beach lounger in the shade and drinking beer; you never know what you are going to find. Normally I’d find half eaten shells, or smooth coloured pebbles, but this find was extremely strange. There, on the firm beach, below the high tide mark were these strange concentric circle markings, about a foot in diameter.
My first thought was that this was like a crop circle, maybe some extra-terrestrial intelligence was leaving calling cards on the beach. I always have strange first thoughts. I enjoy letting my mind run free, juxtaposing similar but completely unrelated ideas. The result is non-linear creativity, Its like idea calculus. With this idea, I can extrapolate a story of a poor castaway hermit crab from outer space, who’s ship has crashed on the beach and now he/she/it is trying to communicate home.
That idea was fun, but not really satisfying. Ideas on their own are cheap and easy to produce but don’t satisfy real curiosity. Curiosity wants solid, interconnected facts that stand up to analysis; so now I need to begin to satisfy my curiosity by looking carefully. Each ball of sand in the pattern looks like it is created right there. The balls of sand form a pattern around a centre hole, but do not seem to be a path leading directly to it, rather it looks more like a maze. The centre hole looks like a crab hole, you often see crabs running across the beach and hiding down holes like these.
My next thought is that this could be used to trap food for the crab, but that doesn’t seem likely because the maze layout is not an efficient trapping method.
My last theory is that it’s a structure to attract a mate. There are so many weird and non-productive things males do to attract a mate; peacocks grow these huge tails, Birds of Paradise have these complex and intricate dances, and some fish create elaborate nests of stones hoping to entice a female fish to lay her eggs there. This could be a plausible theory, but like any theory, it begs for proof; so, I think it should become my life’s work. I think I need to spend as many years as it takes to decipher these mysterious beach structures. I think I need go back to Kuta Beach, this January.