Nature’s Rx for the blues: a dog, a ball, and a beach. The soul’s recipe for positive pathways: water, sand, rock. The mind’s menu for clear mental skies: wind, leaves, rain.
In Manzanita, Oregon – a coastal town wedged between the Pacific and the forested brim of Nehalem Bay – we chased a memory. Precarious, chasing those, as Time is an excellent but impatient potter, always shaping and shaving and chipping away at the same clay. The key is grabbing a new mug. You can swig from familiar views, love how a place feels in the hands of memory, but you gotta be up for a new brew.
After being stuck three days in a Wyoming blizzard (which was kind of fun and definitely impressive in a holy-shit-this-is-some-crazy-winter-mayhem way), John and I were finally reunited with our wonderful Lulu in Oregon. Oh, Lulu. Our resident life-eater and world explorer, freshly back on American soil after a year in South Korea. I hugged her so hard I practically absorbed her back into my womb. And then Zelda arrived for the reunion, all the way from NYC. The view from our rustic little shanty was golden: a sacred sunset and eight to ten tiers of white frothy waves unfurling towards a wide dog-kite-human pocked beach. But having the family together to share it? Nothing better. Plus, Alex, Lu’s lovable boyfriend, was with us. Alex is like a bowl of cocoa: warm, sweet, and silky-souled. So with the five of us on the Oregon coast in the first shy peeps of Spring…. next level heart stuff. The last time we were in Manzanita was during the height of the pandemic, when Z, John and I roamed in an RV while shooting Hellbender, and Lu would visit and camp outside. We’d carved out some formidable memories back then, biking and hiking and digging all the happy dogs on the beach by day and dodging moon-lit jellyfish by night. So this time we opened wide and just let the coast and good company shove all its everything into us.
Once you hit the Pacific Northwest, you’re really asking for it, the whole opera of sea life, sky life, the amphitheater of mountain and forest. John and I were all in, so we left the girls and ferried to Vancouver Island, British Columbia – fulfilling a personal dream. We drove to the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, which is the land of the Nuu-chah-nulth; is west of the glacial Strathcona peaks, and flanked by two wonderful towns, Ucluelet and Tofino. Ucluelet is smaller, and I would live there in a hummingbird heartbeat. It’s the kind of place little kids run around freely, taking classes down on the beach; everyone is out, rain or shine, on feet or two wheels or accompanied by dogs dogs dogs everywhere dogs! And whichever way you bob and weave, you’re just getting smacked left and right by the prettiness of it all: emerald coves, ancient cedars, trails a shimmery disco with trees all shagged out in mossy lime catsuits. In the air, a riveting scene of eagles, gulls and herons. And in the ocean…. ah, the ocean, that mysterious friend you can never truly know. At low tide my favorite thing to do is to gingerly creep onto the rocks and peek into all the dark crevices where orange and purple ochre starfish hide. It’s either highly romantic or deeply possessive, the devotion of their clasping, their long, slow, go-steady attachment. “Never let me go!” (But woe to the bivalve that crosses their path. The stars will use their suctioning feet to pry open the shells and insert their stomach inside. “Have stomach, will travel!”) I have another creature I’m geeking out on, too: the tunicate. First I found a small colony of bright orange “salps” – aka sea squirts, sea pork, and sea tulips! – clinging underneath a rock. Tunicates are called such because it’s like these tubular creatures are wearing a rubbery tunic with built in ventilation – like wearing a dress with two big arm holes and nuthin’ underneath, yahoo! When you see a certain species of tunicate on the beach, you easily mistake them for jellyfish: clear, gelatinous, deflated like a balloon, with a small hard red chunk inside, which is the guts. Sometimes they attach to each other in a massive long conga line that allows them to snake through the water. Under the same rock where the sea squirts were hanging out, I also identified a breadcrumb sponge, which looks like spilt thin white paint that defies gravity. The patience of sea life is epic, so much hanging and clinging as the water washes by.
Of course, death is always on the prowl, too. On that same rock, a romp of otters left a massacre of mussel shells, and I watched one otter grab a fish. A. The slimy green-purple-pink anemones bask in the sun until the tide tucks them in and their pretty frilly mouths sting and capture prey. Sea cucumbers will eviscerate their own organs if doom is a done deal. When I’m lucky enough to be saturated by Nature, I find the balance comforting. Life and Death; some of the loveliest sights a marriage of the two. On the beaches, massive sitka spruce and cedars wash up, all wave-whipped smooth like a carrot, and eventually the sun bleaches them grey, their bones stacked in curly knots where birds rest and nest. In the forest the Spring rains are lacquering the trees that drink the soil that eats Winter’s waste. Flowers peak then fade, while the tiny young leaves open and stay, fine with themselves, with their stamina, with their gentle grading through the greens.
Am I feeling wistful? Yup. Sentimental? You bet your bottom sand dollar, I am. I’m feeling lucky, too – to live and work on the road for a while, with the one I love, visiting the ones I love, and loving where we find ourselves in the Pacific Northwest. I even love the cold waters that burn and numb my body; they make me feel alive. And I’m thinking of death, sure, because friends are beginning to slip away at a steadier pace. It’s kind of like looking at the ocean: You figure you’ll see a seal or dolphin, maybe a whale; you just never know when; and it’s always a meaningful encounter when you do. It’s a reminder to look, see, and feel. That when you look out your window at a phantom mist swooping down a breakneck chasm of conifers onto a vibrating sea sheltering all the chaos and colors we cannot see…. Well, you just say, Okay..
