Back in the summer, VR (an online friend in Manitoba) assigned me to get some salt water photos. Then I didn't hear from her for a long time, and worried. Well we are both still here, if barely, and happy to be reminded that we had the ocean when we had it.
While this blog was hiding under a rock, I went twice to the outer coast. Was trying out doing it as an overnight trip with motel, instead of a daytrip, to get around my energy problem. It works.
Trip #1: So it took me 5 hours to get out of the house on October 13, then finally I'm rolling determinedly toward Rialto Beach and three miles short of the beach
guess what
Roadblock.
Rialto Beach is in the PARK. At not one single moment in the five days that I had been planning this did it cross my mind that the #shutdown I had been following obsessively had SHUT DOWN MY PARK.
Easy enough to re-direct. First Beach is on the Quileute Rez, under tribal control (not the Park). So I went to La Push. Very warm. Very quiet ocean. I put on my water shoes for a little while. Not THAT warm. Put back on the boots and socks. Read for a while.
Sat in the car on the point overlooking First Beach. Tide coming in, ever so peaceably. Just a few pelicans cruised out towards James Island. Still reading. As IJ reminded me, I can read anywhere. Have often used that fact to get me on the road to Rialto in the past. Wouldn't I rather read to the sound of waves? Yes of course I would.
Hadn't been able to get a reservation in the motel in La Push, so eventually I adjourned to the Pacific Inn Motel in Forks. Supper in the diner. Later I wanted a snack and wandered on down the street looking for the convenience store I thought was there. [Not; that was a floating bit of crosswired memory: in Socorro, NM, the same configuration: motel and diner on the west side of a street in a town at convenient run-away distance from home and near someplace beautiful that I really wanted to be. No little convenience store a block or two down-highway from the Pacific Inn in Forks...]
In the morning, back out to La Push, to First Beach. It was even more blue, and just as peaceable. Watched the tribal fishermen working their nets in the river mouth for a long time. Then wandered home.
As pictures go, very much always-the-same-place. First Beach always looks like First Beach. But each occasion is its own self. Today's shirt-pocket full of small smooth pebbles are different from all the others, have their own parking place on the desk. Today's photos of the Quileute Needles are not the same as last fall's or next month's, even when they are the same.
Trip #2: For October 27 I did have a reservation in La Push: second floor, ocean view, thank you very much. The weather was beyond perfect blue. I myself wasn't feeling too crisp, but off I went to Rialto Beach. All I really wanted to do was read my book so I wandered not very far to the south from the parking lot, and sat by a log, and read.
When it got cold sitting there, even in the sun, I drove around to La Push and checked into the Thunderbird. Room 112. Upstairs. Opened the curtains. Opened the sliding door to the little deck outside the room. I had a bed, a couch, a kitchenette, books to read, a deck, and the entire Pacific Ocean. And I thought I might just move in permanently. Never leave. It's been a long time since I had such an upsweep of delight.
There was not much swell, through the night with the windows closed I could hear only the occasional larger waves. Thump-boom-swoosh reaching in through the glass. In the morning, a soft and subtle sunrise, a perfect blue horizon. The sunlight arrived on the sea stacks and on James Island.
Still not feeling very well, I just hung around sipping coffee and looking out the windows until checkout time, watching the waves break peaceably on the shore of First Beach.
Then I headed home without even going down to the beach, while I still had as much fresh energy and focus as there is available on a zombie day. Do you see? I can go be at the ocean even when I don't really feel well. This is epic.
Thanks to Olympic National Park, for Rialto Beach, and to the Quileute tribe for room 112.
According to the photos in the camera, the following things happened since I last posted:
July 21, evening, SA arrived from Northeast Nowhere. She'd come to watch Canoe Journey land on the 23rd. We went straight from the airport out to Ediz Hook to watch the Sunday night flock of cruise ships pass. Setting the theme immediately: journeys, and water. Forgot to take pictures, but anyway you've already seen many pictures of cruise ships steaming past.
July 22 we did important local things like go to the Goodwill to get her some warmer clothes, go to the library and the post office, and eat at Toga's Soup House. All major adventures for someone from Northeast Nowhere. We went out to the tribal library to try to get a clue what time the canoes would leave Jamestown the next morning, what time the landing might begin, and spent a long time talking books and libraries with TH. I introduced SA to everyone as my first library boss, and the person who taught me what kind of librarian I wanted to be.
July 23rd, we had breakfast with JL at Smugglers' Landing, and then went down onto the beach to watch the canoes land. But word was that a canoe had overturned in heavy fog and 4-foot swells, and they had all returned to Jamestown. Arrival time entirely uncertain. So we went to the T-Pier to watch the logship Selinda begin loading, it had come in overnight. Back to the beach. It was a false rumor that the canoes had all turned back, only some had. The rest of the canoes began coming in. Five hours later it had gone on all afternoon and there were 30 of them. This will get its own blog post. (I hope. My impulse to communicate is still uncertain.)
VB and ML had arrived in town also on the 23rd. They came down to watch the canoes, heard how uncertain we were about what would happen when; so went up into the Olympics to Hurricane Hill (wildflowers!); then when I called them to say the canoes were coming in, hustled back down the mountain to watch.
July 24th, the four of us went out to Rialto Beach, so they could see a wild beach on the Outer Coast.
July 28/29: Portland again. Thankyou AngelFlight.
Right along, and especially the past two weeks, I've been spending a lot of time at the tribal library, and dropping in at the college library a bit though I don't work in summer quarter. My library peeps are my support system.
Also I spend a lot of time telephoning Florida, or procrastinating telephoning Florida. Family's woes continue. My cell phone is always in my pocket, and I always know what time it is there.
Which brings us to yesterday, June 9: I went to the ocean.
IJ asked for pictures of elk. No elk by the highway on Beaver Prairie. I drove via the side loop past Quillayute airport. No elk on Quillayute Prairie either. Only once have I seen them out on the prairies in the summer. Don't know where they go...
Except for one eagle sitting in the river, the only wildlife at all at all were the itty bitty flitty birds singing in the woods behind the beach. Never saw a one of them, but they were rocking out all afternoon. The only little birds I know by ear are white-crowned sparrows and canyon wrens, and it wasn't them. Even had I seen the little dudes, I'd probably not have been able to identify them. Happy enough just to be an ear tourist.
There was a lot of kelp on the beach, each big mound a single plant— but brown kelp are not plants, they are in the Kingdom Chromista (1)(2)— torn loose and bundled up onto the shore. Wonder just where, out there, the kelp beds are. Plenty of nice waves. The tide was coming in. I thought I didn't have the energy to run away from the waves outbound, or scramble through the drift on the return; so I turned back from my walk after a while, and sat on a log and read. Got so absorbed, a wave sneaked up and washed up my legs and into my hiking boots. Eeek.
Later I decided, oh I might as well go home; but when I got to the parking lot I realized, 'I can't leave now, the ocean is still making the sound of waves.' On this silly thought I went back out onto the beach in the other direction, and sat on another log. Pretty soon it occurred to me that if I can't leave while the ocean is making the sound of waves, I'd get to stay there forever. Oh, well, maybe that won't work, huh...
The whole train of thought was so entertaining and silly it made me smile, and pretty soon I was smiling and feeling quite contented. I slid down off the log and sat in the sand and among the smooth stones, since the tide should by then be going out. A wave washed really rather close, however, and looking REALLY close since I was down at eye level with it.
Eventually I did come home. I presume the ocean is still making the sound of waves.
Shout-out to @shinyinfo , usually in urban Michigan, right now in California for a librarian convention and Seeing the Ocean while she's there. She inspired the act of will that got me on the road, late late late but hey I got there. Also: thankyou, Olympic National Park.
Did went. I decided the whales either were at La Push, or not; and that I was happy to have seen one a month ago, and happy to know I could go look again. But really I needed a long listen to the sound of waves. So I went to Rialto Beach, and had the nicest time in months. Sea stars, anemones, black oystercatchers, gray sky turned blue etc.
I ambled out
toward Hole-in-the-Wall,
beginning an hour before a not-very-low low tide. Maybe there wouldn't be any tidepool critters with the tide at this level, I thought, but yes there were.
Bird nerds will be happy to know I don't only greet cetaceans (and other charismatic megafauna, rivers, or stray sweeps of landscape). I also talk to birds. When I heard oystercatchers whistling and saw a pair circle past, all flappity flap, I too flapped my arms. 'Hi,' I told them, 'Hi darlings.'
Full confession. Later I had this guy nearby on a rock and I started edging closer to get a better picture. Bad me. After a while he squawked indignantly and flew away. No cheerful sounding whistles that time. 'Sorry, sweetie,' I told him.
Eagles in the forest trees behind the beach. On the way home, an eagle sitting in the Quileute River from the pullout behind the beach.
I kept looking back along the beach, unable to understand how it can still be so beautiful when we know we have spoiled the world. It's done. See what we have lost.
Not a single panoramic still in the camera. All the little videos I took for soundscapes have mostly only the sound of the wind blowing across the camera. But they are where the panorama of waves sweeping up the beach are.
Shoutout to @7shores for putting me in mind to go listen to the waves. Thankyou, Olympic National Park.
Beached bird survey in Clallam Bay, COASST beach segments Slip Point and Middle Point. Friday, April 26. E. and I tagged along to keep JL company. There are just about never any dead birds on any of the Strait beaches: you drive out there, you walk the beach, you find nothing, you come back. Though in fact JL found a cormorant on the Slip Point beach earlier this year.
Westbound we took WA112 the whole way. There were elk by the highway.
We traipsed across the footbridge over the Clallam River, out on to the beach; and headed east towards Slip Point. You could see snow up on the hills on the Vancouver Island side of the Strait. (At Clallam Bay on the Washington side you are perhaps straight across from Jordan River along the West Coast Road on the Canadian side.)
JL mentioned we had just missed a 2-foot minus tide. There is supposed to be great tidepooling at Slip Point. Since it was a weekday and one of the best tides of the year, I was a bit surprised that the tidepool end of the beach was not aswarm with middle school students, waving checklists of invertebrates. But it was quiet. We had the beach to ourselves. At Slip Point just the old lightkeeper's house remains; the lighthouse itself and the boardwalk out to it are gone. This beach is really the community beach for the town of Clallam Bay. You are definitely not in the wilderness. The houses on Salt Air Street sit right behind the berm. :-)
JL had trouble getting me to turn around once we reached the outlying rocks of the tidepools. Just on the first bits of rock there were carpets of aggregating anemones, and limpets and chitons and barnacles, oh my. Sea urchins were calling to me further out on the point. I was sure they were there, we had seen broken sea urchin tests in the wrack. But this was JL's expedition. We had another beach to walk, and a lunch plan, and she needed to be home for dinner guests. No time for making my way out to the sea urchins' pools.
Then we quickly moved to the tiny beach segment called Middle Point—no dead birds there either, though more trash to pick up—and then adjourned as is JL's practice to the Breakwater Diner, before the drive home. We took WA113 and US 101 on the way home. No elk, no eagles either. We were home by 3PM.
Charismatic megafauna FTW! Sunday the 21st headed for the outer coast, to look for gray whales at First Beach. There were elk by the highway at Beaver Prairie, but I had rapture-of-the-road and did not stop for a photo, allowed nothing to interfere with my pre-determined program: to get out there and See a Whale.
Out on the point in La Push, there was a woman with binoculars sitting on a log, looking over First Beach. "I don't suppose you've seen any whales," I said. "Oh, yes, right... right there, see it, see the sun gleaming on his wet back??"
Yes YES. I waved my arms in giant semaphore circles, and hooted gleefully: primate greeting cetacean. Woooo!
For the next while, the one gray whale (some of the watchers thought they saw two, close together; in which case it was likely a cow/calf pair) worked the area at the nearby end of First Beach. Watchers arrived, watched. You could tell where the whale had most recently surfaced by seeing which direction the watchers were looking.
The sea surface was calm, the tide low; it was gray to the south, more blue to the west.
Here's the thing: you can only see them when they are there. If they are there. There's 19,000 or however many gray whales on the move right now, but to see one from the shore at La Push, there has to BE one hanging around to be seen.
I think it (she?) was feeding, all that back-and-forth, perhaps glimpses of a flipper as she tilted on her side in the low-tide water to scoop up a mouthful of mud and amphipods. Mysterious parts appearing, anyway. Which was always pleasing, but the blows are the best part. Whoosh! There it is, the air that they breathe...
I set the camera on burst and took many many pix of empty ocean right where the whale last was.
Then gone, and all the watchers too. Time for part two of the day's plan: wet feet, and a sloshy progress to the south end of the beach to get a photo back towards The School at the Edge of the World, one of my most favorite views on all the earth. Seeing the whales goes better with even a tiny bit of elevation, so I couldn't go down onto the beach itself until the whale was gone.
Oh, did I mention the sea lions? Sea lions working the river (what fish are running?), and intermittently barking up a storm. There were lots of eagles. The truly gigantic piece of driftwood was still there (a year later ), still attracting climbers. (Note the woman on top of the top of the roots, for scale.) The Quileute tribal school presented the hoped-for photo opportunity, blue roof with blue water and blue sky. Towards the southwest, it had gotten very dark, it was plainly pouring rain out there. I was 5-layers-warm on top as I sloshed along inside the edge of the ocean, but my feet were freezing. It was actually warmer in the water than on the sand with wind blowing on wet skin.
On the drive home, the elk were no longer out on Beaver Prairie. It poured down rain twice along the way. Then I was home. Shoutout to IJ and @helgagrace for encouragements, and @vcmcguire for the wet feet.
The weekend was stormy, but Monday the 8th it was sunny here in town, so off I went to First Beach to look for whales. It was not sunny out there, but blue-y grey. There was mist and a bit of wind and some raindrops, and a certain amount of whitecaps. Had there been any gray whale blows, I'd have had trouble seeing them. So maybe there were there, and maybe not, you know?
Whale Watching Week on the Oregon coast was March 23-30; and the Quileute Tribal School in La Push had its Welcome the Whales Ceremony on Wednesday April 10th, two days after I was out there; so the time could have been right. But it's the mothers and babies who hug the shore at First Beach, and according to the observation sites along the way, the cow/calf pairs have not yet been seen this far north. So perhaps I was too early. Or perhaps this will be the third year in a row that ten thousand or so (or more) gray whales migrate north up the coast and I never see any...
Expedition to the Outer Coast in vile weather. Actually JL wanted to take me up showshoeing on Hurricane Ridge, but forecast was for weather continuing to be windy and the temperature above freezing days, frozen crust at night. So we went to the ocean instead. I called the elk at all three potential elk spots. "He-e-e-er-r-r-e elky elky elky." No elk. It rained all the way west, sometimes hard. JL tried the technique of speaking optimisitcally about sunshine. Didn't work. I tried being firm, addressed a remark to the sky, "OK, that's enough, just turn it off now." That didn't work either.
So there we were on Rialto Beach in our rainsuits, the wind blowing the rain at us. The beach was clean (JL picked up the only piece of marine debris we saw, a plastic bag), lots of changes in where the logs are and the distribution of sand and gravel on the surface. The camera spent most of the day zipped inside my clothes two layers down. Occasionally I turned my back to the wind and tried to get a picture of, um, not a whole lot. Some people were walking with umbrellas. Should have done.
There was so much rainfall a temporary creek was running across the beach, difficult to behave as it it were real water. Got my boots wet crossing it. We walked as far as Ellen Creek, then turned around. Ellen Creek was running really full, certainly not crossable unless you were going to wet-log-walk at the back of the beach. There were lots of gulls, and we each glimpsed an eagle who emerged from the clouds and then back in again.
We decided to go around to La Push for lunch, but found the restaurant not open; so we sat for a while on the point overlooking First Beach where you can see the whales when the whales are there to see, long about April. Heard sea lions barking, but didn't see them. It was still raining.
The weather slowly lightened as we drove back east. It was still gray and the streets very wet when we got back to Port Angeles, but a couple of hours later it looked like this out the window:
Thank you anyway, Olympic National Park.
