High Heels, Cigarettes, Selfies, and Dolphins

Today a couple left their car with an Arizona license plate to go down ahead of me from the parking lot to the narrow path through deep sand to the beach--a five or six minute walk. She caught my attention by her 4-inch heels.  She had taken them off by the time I got to the path to the beach, but 40 feet down they had both turned to face the parking lot. The male of the couple was taking selfies of them so that, if he ever got the angle right, the picture would show the ocean behind them, left an eighth of a mile behind on their arduous return hike to the parking lot. He was smoking, and of course the path, being a bit depressed below the shrub-covered banks, conducted the smoke right along to me, the man with extreme allergies. The photographer threw his cigarette down in the sand and lighted another one and I gave up and took the asphalt path south and cut in to the beach half a mile down. So I was delayed, but halfway back, going north along the beach, I began seeing dolphins and watched them for 15 minutes. There were maybe 15, maybe 20, and they were enormous. I looked on Google to identify them. Maybe the common bottle-nose dolphin, which can be 13 feet long. At first a few were one wave out, 100 feet or so. They they were between the first and second waves for a time, then beyond the second wave. Often they gathered in a group, six or eight, and at once dived down--like gigantic boys cannon-balling into a deep pool. They weren't intent on going south or north, just eating, and milling around, probably. So if that Arizonian son of a gun with early-stage lung cancer who used his selfies to fake a rugged trip to the beach had not been there blocking the way with cigarette smoke I would have gotten to my destination down south toward the Rock and started back earlier. Who knows? I might have seen a whale or 12 European tourists but this way I got to see dolphins.