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A similar mood prevailed the next morning. Everyone was happy and singing the songs from the night before, or simply humming the melodies. And who needed a campfire, this time? Better things lay before us.
The sun was already high over the horizon when Sylvia and I got up. We both felt great. Tony seemed to have been up for some time already. He sat at the edge of the cliff, his feet dangling into the void. He waved when he saw us and came back to the camp. As he did, he mentioning the word, "breakfast."
I think we were too exited not to feel great that morning, even before breakfast. Soon the griddle was sizzling with frying eggs and bacon. After all, we had made having breakfast a priority this time. It was made a rule that breakfast would come first before we would be thinking about going to the beach. In fact, we tried to make breakfast last as long as we could, because going to the beach meant building a trail down to it. There existed no ready-made path.
I wasn't surprised that morning when I turned the radio on that I nearly missed the morning news. As expected the financial commentator reported heavy trading once again on the New York Stock Exchange, and that prices were said to be firming up. Everything that he said confirmed what Steve had predicted. The world had become 'normal' once more. I turned to a music station.
With nothing else to worry about, the only item on the agenda that morning, apart from washing the dishes, was the task that wouldn't go away, of building the trail to our beach. The trail was needed to serve as our lifeline, our passageway to the only spring of fresh water that we had found on the property previously.
Initially we had thought that we might camp right on the beach itself, near the spring, but building a trail to it seemed easier than getting the truck down on the ancient washed-out road that we had found at the far side of the beach. As I recalled, the road seemed 'steep' in some places. Building a foot trail seemed to be definitely a better choice, even if it involved some hard work cutting across dense vegetation and some extensive efforts in gathering rocks for stairs. It was hard work though. We had brought axes and shovels along, and a chain saw that was mostly useless on the spindly shrubs.
On Tony's urging we started to dig and hack and saw right after breakfast. Tony called himself our "logistics officer" when he proudly laid the first steps by planting two flat rocks that he had "imported" from a weathered outcropping further along the cliff.
For lunchtime, of course, we all climbed back up to the camp. We ate under a group of trees near the inland edge of our high platform. The view from there was just as wide and magnificent in the other direction. When standing on top of the truck the view extended across a sea of treetops towards the highway, and in the other direction across the deep blue of the open Atlantic. To the right, behind the cliff the terrain gave way to a gully that we used as our gateway down, both to the spring and to the beach.
At lunch that day we listened to the radio once more. We listened to a pop music station, but even that had its hourly news clip with brief financial report that was no different than I had expected. Stock prices had fallen sharply. Trading volume had increased. The announcer called it a day of profit taking. The world hadn't changed at all. I turned the radio off again.
Steve had predicted this kind of uncertainty in a system that he felt was bound to fail eventually. I wondered though, if it was possible that he might have misread the signs. Were we facing the final collapse of the system already, rather than in ten or twenty years, as Steve had predicted? Would the world be facing another stock market crash while we were serenely languishing at the beach? As stock prices had evaporated that infamous day in 1929, many banks had lost their assets that they had used up in loans against stock securities that had become worthless. The entire credit system had begun to fail that day. Industries had lost their financing, people had lost faith in the system, production had dropped off, unemployment had skyrocketed, money had became scarce, and after that the infamous bread lines had emerged as the Great Depression unfolded. Would the coming crash be worse than the great crash in 1929 that had brought the whole country to its knees, opening the gate to infamous Hoover Depression, a depression brought on by idiotic policy measures? The nation didn't recover from this horrid depression until many years later Franklin Delanor Roosevelt came onto the scene with his massive "new deal" of infrastructure development projects and social support programs. Hoover had promised a chicken in every pot, an empty promise after three years of nothing. Roosevelt, in total contrast, had offered a whole New World, and he did deliver.
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