At Tony's suggestion, we did not stay in Jardim, but up the mountain, at an inn in a seventeenth-century quinta. The inn had a small pool that looked out on the ocean. Mollie, almost two, called the ocean "big pool" Driving down into Jardim with a board on my car, I felt people turning away from me in the praça. I imagined they were ashamed. Or maybe they just hated surfers now.
The devastation along the shoreline was hard to comprehend, even while standing beside it. I had said it would be impossible to build a walk-way, but that was because I lacked imagination. Vast quantities of rock and dirt had been trucked in and dumped along the waterfront, right around the headland. The job was not complete, but it was already clear that, with enough landfill, they could build an eight-lane freeway along the coast if they chose. Huge yellow earthmovers were roaring back and forth on the landfill, which was not yet paved. In a plume extending from Jardim, the ocean was milky brown with mud. And between the half-built roadway and the water was the most hideous seawall I had ever seen-featureless and yet painful to the eyes. The blocks looked like thousands of angrily discarded coffins. This was the new shoreline. Brown wavelets lapped against the blocks.
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