Bethany Beach, Delaware
I drove south past Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach and kept going until I found Bethany, which was quiet in the way a beach town is quiet in November — the boardwalk empty, the hotels at off-season rates, the ocean doing what it does regardless of the month. I checked in, opened the window toward the water, and went back out to look around.
Forty-seven degrees. Full moon.
The Wildlife Area
A short drive from Bethany sits a stretch of protected land that the state has left more or less as nature intended. I climbed a wooden platform in the middle of a marsh and stood there surrounded by ducks going about their business, the light going flat, and nobody else around for as far as I could see. The action cam was in low-light mode. I was testing it. The image looked decent on the small screen. Whether it holds up at full size is a question I always answer later.
On the way out I passed a couple of carloads of hunters in blaze orange. First day of deer season. I stopped and asked how they’d done.
Nothing. Getting bad around here, he said.
I did not mention that I’d just spent twenty minutes among the ducks without any difficulty. I wished them luck and drove back toward the coast.
What November Looks Like Here
One of the things I noticed driving around the south Delaware coast in November was how much of it appeared to be asleep. Rows of nice homes — condos, villas, the kind of development that gets built for people who own a second place near the beach — sitting completely empty. Streets with no cars. Whole neighborhoods without a light on.
It’s not a surprise that a beach destination is seasonal. But there’s something slightly unnerving about the scale of it — all this infrastructure, all this investment, just sitting dark and waiting for summer. The businesses that need warm-weather foot traffic to survive close in the off-season, which means the people who work those businesses have to live somewhere else or do something else for five months. The whole economic chain runs on a seasonal clock, and in November you can see the machine stopped.
I made a note of it and moved on.
The Drone, the Moon, and Dinner
I took the Mini 4 Pro up briefly. Too windy. The drone went up, looked unhappy about the decision, and came back down. Some conditions aren’t worth the risk to the equipment, and I’ve learned to recognize that faster than I used to.
The full moon was doing something good over the water. I pointed the action cam at it long enough to get a couple of frames worth keeping, noted that the surveillance cameras on the boardwalk would have caught me if I’d chosen to fly the drone there, and went to find dinner.
Mexican place. Good food. Three women at the bar next to me having the kind of time that people have at a beach town bar in November when they’ve got the whole place to themselves. Loud, genuinely happy, laughing until they couldn’t breathe. Since I stopped drinking, I notice the volume more than I used to. But I also notice the joy in it more clearly. I sat there eating and listening and smiling at the table by myself, which is either a healthy perspective or the saddest thing in the world, depending on how you look at it.
I went back to the room. The window was still open. The ocean was still there.
Onward to Virginia
Chincoteague, Virginia next. Wild horses. Restricted airspace for reasons I couldn’t figure out from the apps. Drone probably staying in the bag.
Eighty-three episodes in. Still not entirely sure who these videos are for. Still making them.
Virginia next.
