Erin and I were walking Kino down by the superfund site yesterday and we met a band of Roma. Okay, not ethnically Romani, but a band of gypsies nonetheless. And I don't mean the kind fronted by Jimi Hendrix. No, wait, I guess I do mean that kind.

We walked down to the beach, after pausing to pick some blackberries (Mary once told us they were an invasive plant and not native to the area, to which Erin replied "Invasively delicious!") and there literally stumbled onto a strange scene. Perhaps one culled from the pages of something written by Anne Rice back when she was a bit cooler/saner.

A group of ten or twelve people of mixed age we encamped on the beach, all clad in black. Some with dreadlocks and bells on their sashes, some as prim and dapper as a new victorian nano-engineer. Dogs fought and frolicked in the middle ground around a stack of logs the people had been sleeping on and under. I noticed then that by our feet, curled in the brush, some few were still sleeping.

Though we had walked this way several times, a strange sense of ownership seemed to travel with this group, as if they had been staying here for many days, though clearly they had only been a night. We greeted each other shortly. A young guy picked up his collar-less dog and carried it away on his shoulders.

We walked away, down the beach to the bridges, deciding to return by way of the railroad track as we had not been that way before.

We walked a ways along the tracks but not too long before we saw another of that group by the beach, a young woman, again all clad in black and silver with long dark hair, and she walking, balancing on the rail and carrying some several sacks, accompanied by a man on a bicycle whom I at first mistook for some kind of security guard but later saw was just some guy, dressed in upper-middle-class wear, who had decided for some reason to ride his bike along the deserted railroad tracks that day.

They travelled along in the opposite direction and didn't seem to notice us, although aside from a few South Africans waving to us from atop the cliff we were the only other folks around. At the superfund site. Along the abandoned railroad tracks.

It was a strange sort of meeting.

And then we ate some more blackberries and went home.