Beginnings II

My head is spinning.

It is the beginning of a new year. It is just after 5:30 on a Monday evening and in 23 minutes I will have used the remainder of the time I have allotted myself for this blog. I had such grand ambitions of what this first post of the year would be. As the seconds tick away I watch these ambitions spin wildly, collide with reality, explode like overheated balloons.

In my head are two memories, their juxtaposition framing my dilemma. When I started this blog I wanted to at least pay homage to a sentiment of Edward Abbey at the beginning of Desert Solitaire: to try to talk about the real world. Not to anthropomorphize, as we are wont to do, but to describe nature as it is.

On New Year’s Eve LL and I find ourselves, improbably, boxing. She is Albert Einstein, I, Jackie Chan. It is not even a contest. Einstein over Chan, K-O.

This is the first memory. Is the memory of a virtual event—for we are playing on a Wii, owned by the host of our charmingly odd bed and breakfast—a virtual memory? While the experience may have been all in my head, so to speak, my arms are sure sore.

The second memory is more tangible, and, even apart from not (virtually) dying, much more pleasant. After checking out of the B&B the next morning, we drive a couple miles up the road, park the car, and step out into reality. I have yet to experience any part of the Oregon coast that is not awesome, but that morning it is particularly so. Awesome: inspiring awe.

The pavement slopes directly into a sandy beach. Huge waves pound the shore, carving away at dunes held up by bunchgrass. A salty wind whips seafoam into a beach cover several inches deep. Low clouds seamlessly become rain, but thankfully hold back to a light, albeit horizontal, drizzle. We step onto the beach, carefully selecting a moving target of clear sand between ocean, foam, dune and driftwood. At the north end of the beach a promontory of basalt and sandstone juts into the Pacific. We start up its steep incline, the wind now a gale pushing us onward.

At the crest of the huge dune forming the saddle of the promontory, we pause.

Around us the wind is sheets of sand. Where earth becomes sky is not clear; so too the line where ocean meets air is blurred. 500 feet below us fissures in the rock channel waves into enormous bursts of spray which over millennia have carved caves and channels into the shoreline. Scrub pine clings to the leeward side of the cliffs, its myriad trunks ever bending to the wind. Everything is sound and motion. We are part of it all, and we are alive.

The horizontal precipitation intensifies.

When Ed Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire his self-issued challenge was to be out in nature and describe it as it is. Now I find it enough of a challenge simply to be out there: to find wilderness. And this is not to say that everything human is outside of nature—in fact, far from it. Abbey himself returns to the city to work in soup kitchens and find community.

I do want, however, to be cautious about time spent in things which are further removed from the living, breathing earth. Which includes time spent here: it’s 6:37, and I still have to post. Until next week.