Home for Spring Break

Tides weren’t all that extreme at the coast. But before the sun broke over a sparsely wooded ridge to the east, long flats of sand spread in dull gray glimmer toward the lip of small lapping waves too lazy to make a run up the beach.

The sun slept in, as did teens in the trailer. Dogs were with me, exploring smells left by an ocean that gives up dead things to the sand. The water now could reach no closer than a few hundred yards from where it had touched our driftwood fire of the night before, hot dogs and smores.

In the mornings with dogs and waves, the beach offers noisy solitude.

Later we ran into a pair of locals clamming along the beach, they were nice enough about the bounding pack, the happy husky/shepherd siblings Halo and Eclipse, the long-legged mutt Molly, the pedigreed and ancient bird dog Elfie who somehow lives up to her name. I can only imagine that pads pounding the sand leaving prints everywhere must have sent the clams into hiding, if clams can hide.

The dogs defined this trip to the beach. At home the Huskies would run, make their escape and not be seen for hours. Here, with so much new and so much room, they wanted to know where we were and came obediently when called.

The clamming couple wasn’t having much luck right then but had picked up seven Razors the day before. They had a recipe I will try, two different layers of breading. I was glad Razors could be found on this sandy beach miles from any town, miles from bays where industry and houses might have filled mollusk meat with stuff I don’t want to eat.

I have always identified myself as an Oregon boy, and being at the coast reminds me again of who and what and why. Growing up in a suburb of Portland, playing in old mine shafts on Iron Mountain, making forts of wet boughs of Doug Fir, waiting tables at the Ringside and Jake's after years of college and wandering the world, a home now among the juniper and pine of the high desert.

Oregon nurtured me, Oregon sustains me.

Somehow in this Spring of the year and Fall of my life this all comes back to me as waves push feathers of foam timelessly up the beach in a broken rhythm that is just beyond my ability to understand, that demands only to be accepted.