At our family cottage twenty minutes from the store, watching the rising tide and seeing pumpkin rock is a daily tradition. A mysterious phenomenon of time and tide, as the tide reaches the nine foot mark, the dry high spot on the rock shows water closing in from all sides forming a dry pumpkin shape.

Sunlight glitters like diamonds around the perimeter. Seaweed drifts by. The tide rises, the pumpkin shrinks, then suddenly, poof! It’s gone.

The video is two minutes, eleven seconds long. What shows beneath the dry surface are what the kids call the little orange pumpkins. On days of 10 and 11 foot tides, periwinkles, crabs and schools of baby fish swim through. Two tides a day, 730 times a year, pumpkin rock puts on a show as the sun and moon spin about the earth. This was recorded on a rising tide, June 8, 2019 at 3:23PM.