Zooming into the Future (March 15)

You walk the seashore and come upon ancient ruins. No people are left. The only evidence is their structures standing in windblown, sea-girt isolation. They'd been there. Where did they go? What was on their mind? The standard modern interpretation is "worship of the unknowable," but who really knows the mind of the disappeared sculptor?

Several times, walking Venice Beach, I'd come upon massive (truly) structures of heaped sand. Sometimes there was writing on smoothed areas around the base. Often there was a log on top. These could be seen from a long way off, in their splendid isolation on the morning beach. I approached, looked, found no clue in the footprints.

The 24-70 F/4 zoom I bought recently is said to have close-focus capability. I used to use a 60mm "Compact Macro" as my main walkaround lens. For the 8-megapixel 1D Mark II, it was fine. The 30-megapixel 5D Mark IV soon showed the lens' weakness, so I replaced it with the 100mm F/2.8 macro L. Magnificent lens, that one, and the stabilizer enables hand-held macro photography. Good reach, but hard to get a wider view, hence the new 24-70. But how good would it be? Let's go for a walk and find out.

I wouldn't know how well it performed until I got home. I'd read reviews and looked at samples. For years, while dithering on what to do.

The tide was low. There'd been flow out of the Rose Avenue major storm drain. I love the patterns left in sand by the flow of water, and the morning light produced great color and shadows.

 And then... I came up over the isthmus behind the Venice Breakwater and saw the megalith on the south curve below the big storm berm. Not only that, but there was someone moving around it, seeming to be centered on the towering mound.

No longer just an artifact left in mystery, it could be seen now as one man with a shovel bringing forth a vision with muscles and thought. There is an art to the use of a shovel. Use it well and your project goes up. Use it clumsily and your body fights you every step of the way. Like watching a good runner, watching a skilled shovel-user is fascinating. Every motion just so, with just enough energy to accomplish that little part of the task. You don't run a marathon as if it's a sprint. Turning a few shovelfuls in a garden isn't anything like moving three cubic yards of sand by hand.

And so I met Timothy, who comes to the beach just about every day to work on his project. Each day starts with the remnants of the day before and goes on from there.

This would be the last day for this particular build, he told me. The bulldozers were coming in the next week to level the storm berm. He was right; farther south the 'dozers were roaring in defiance of the sea as they did in hours what Neptune can do in minutes. A few days later I walked through Venice and saw them at work flattening the beach, pushing their puny blade-loads of sand. A tractor with a Fresno scraper smoothed out the grouser prints.

And Timothy was there, although I missed him that day. Farther north, defying the power of diesel and steel, standing against gravity and Beaches and Harbors with a shovel.

I went on my way south until the blather of bulldozers at the Venice Pier turned me back. There were more lovely patterns in the sand. Before too much longer I would see Timothy again, and worlds would collide. Megalithic determination met NASA-style engineering and, perhaps surprisingly, proved to get along just fine while others cowered indoors, watching the battlements for the viral invader.