BIRD WATCHING

 “Do nothing which is useless.”

-Miyamoto Musashi

Breathing In

Alexandra- Sometimes I called her Al, but more often I called her Alex. She was five-foot-six, short black hair with a slight curl to it (a bit more curl when wet), pierced ears, medium weight, a small beauty mole just above her lip on her right cheek.  Alex had a small tattoo of a dragon on the back of her left shoulder, straight white teeth, beautiful brown eyes, which hid behind silver wire-rimmed glasses, very sexy ears (she wore emerald stud earrings when we dressed-up to go out), and a good sense of humor. When Alex sat, she sat with a straight posture. Her walk, with feet just slightly turned out, was attentive and elegant. I loved to hear her laugh. She could play the piano fairly well,  a good singing voice, and always carried a sketch book, a packet of colored pencils, and a book with her.

Her father, as she told it, was a redneck from South Carolina who had been in the Air Force during the Vietnam War where he was some kind of “intelligence agent.” Her mom, Noriko, was from Okinawa. Alex used to joke that she was an “okie” through and through. She knew less and cared less (it seemed to me) about relations on her father’s side than her mother’s’ – “they seem so remote to me” she used to say. Alex had Ryukyu sensibilities, if that makes any sense.  She was born in Okinawa at her grandmother’s house in Naha not far from the Naminoue Shrine dedicated to nirai kanai, the mythical source of all life, and to the sea. Alex lived in Naha, learned Ryukyu ways, and spoke the Ryukyu Shuri dialect until she was six and later learned Japanese at the school in Naha. Her grandmother just called her musume – girl. Then her father “up and moved” the family to Tacoma near McChord Air Force Base. When Alex was fourteen her father thought she was “so unruly and defiant” that he shipped her back to her grandmother’s home in Naha where she lived for three years. Then she lived for two years in Kyoto at the home of her uncle Yoshi. Yoshi, was something of a firebrand. An itinerant radical who ended up in Kyoto running a small coffee shop that also sold books and magazines. He helped Okinawan ex-pats who had come north to the big city and worked against “the occupation” as he called it. In Kyoto Alex stayed with Yoshi and his girlfriend Midori and continued with school studying Japanese and sketching gardens and temples and “just hanging out in the coffee shop.”   Ryukyuan, Okinawan, Japanese, American – Alex once said to me that some people might think she was “lost in translation” but she really felt that she was “free in translation.”

Alex and I met in the fall of 1979 in Bellingham, Washington while attending college. We both had signed up for a class called “The Biology of Birds.” The course wasn’t all that interesting but what made it exceptional was that every Saturday morning the class would meet before sunrise to take the school van out on bird watching trips. The fall migration was on. We would pile into the van and head down Interstate-5 toward the Skagit, or Nooksack, or Fraser River deltas. We would zip down the highway doing 70 mph and someone would shout out that they just saw such-an-such species and the driver would slam on the brakes and throw the van into reverse so we could all catch the view. This caused everyone to scream wildly. Crazy dangerous to stop and reverse like complained. When that happened, Alex would grab my arm tightly and bury her head on my chest. Sometimes we would stop out in the middle of the farmlands of the Skagit Valley and set up a Celestron telescope and point it at birds we would spot sitting on top of telephone poles. I remember quite distinctly looking through it at the wonder of the detail of the plumage of a Common Snipe and an Osprey. By ten o’clock the show was over and we were looking for a place to stop to have coffee and talk about possible bird watching stops we would make on the trip back. Maybe someone knew a good spot to see Golden-Crowned Kinglets or Cedar Waxwings. There was always the Water Ouzel at Whatcom Falls, near the bridge, you can go there right now and see it, admire its river living skills.

The thing was that since the start of the class Alex always found a way to sit next to me. The first trip out I didn’t pay much attention to it. By the third trip out it was clear she was making a point of it. By the fifth trip out, I think that was the time we saw all those Snow Geese resting along Bellingham Bay on a cold foggy day, we finally went out on our first date; quite memorable, if only I could clearly remember it. We talked about books and movies and poetry and birds and going-camping and drank more than a few Heineken beers after which Alex ordered champagne as if we were celebrating something.  I am sure I was clueless what that something was exactly. I walked her home in a staggering sort of way and we kissed a good night kiss under the streetlight along the intersection of McKenzie and High Street.

After that we were rather inseparable. We even took classes together. My favorite class was the poetry class she dragged me to where I memorized the William Butler Yeats poem Politics.

“How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!”

I was young and was not missing anyone but I understood the sentiment and I liked the poem. “How can I, that girl, standing there, my attention fix…” Alex’s favorite class was the Russian History class that I dragged her to mostly because we sat around smoking cigarettes and talked about “the revolution” a lot. We must have walked across the campus a thousand times together. We were never seen there without each other. She was my best friend.

Alex owned a red 1973 Volkswagen station wagon which she purchased from money she had saved waiting tables, I though that was just about the most impressive thing imaginable. I did not have a car. I was 28 and did not even have a driver’s license. I got around on my ten-speed bike, walked, or took the bus. What I did have was a one-bedroom fifth floor apartment with wood floors, a large bathroom, and a decent kitchen up on Garden Street. The apartment faced toward Bellingham Bay and had fantastic views looking to the west and north. Alex loved it. We would sit on the couch for hours listening to music; everything from Johnny Cash to Shostakovich, and look out those windows over Bellingham Bay toward Lummi and Orcas Island. Toward the north on a clear day you could see the Canadian Coastal Range and the Lion’s Gate Mountain. At night the town was lit up. The Georgia Pacific factory smoked away below. A train would rumble by. The occasional freighter would pull into the city dock. We took it all in with smiles on our faces. We went to bed happy.

When I met her, she was sharing a house with two of her girlfriends in the Fairhaven District but after we met, she was mostly staying with me at the apartment. With every trip she made from the south side more and more of her things kept filling up the apartment until we decided the best thing to do was to have her move in. Actually, I do not remember deciding anything at all rather it happened by mutually understood default. Between the two of us, we did not own that much. Books, records, clothes, camping equipment. But her touch was like magic. The apartment sprouted flowers, and art, and a small Shinto shrine in one corner. Slips, bras, and silk blouses littered the bedroom. The refrigerator door got covered in her sketches. Camping gear filled up the closet. And finally (by default of course) we went out and bought a new large comfortable bed. The first night we slept in it Alex whispered to me, “this bed is a virgin, right?”

“Uh, right.”

“I mean it has never been used before, right? It’s new.”

“If it’s not new we didn’t get our money’s worth.”

“I’m a virgin too, ya? And so are you, right?”

Under the circumstances this was a conceit I admit I found agreeable even knowing that neither of us were virgins about almost anything. Only the bed could withstand that particular scrutiny. Still, this was the kind of lush romantic weirdness that I could get behind even as I saw the smile and glint in her eye that it was all half-a-joke.

“Right”, I said, pretending as if I had not caught on.

Neither of us cared for Christmas so we stayed home and celebrated my birthday instead which was on December 5th. Alex made dinner, we ate pie for desert, she sang “happy birthday” to me then handed me a carefully wrapped box topped by two origami cranes. I opened the box to find it contained a pair of Swarovski 8×32 binoculars. I was speechless. Alex said, “We’ll share them, ok?”

Much of that winter was dark, rainy, and miserable as it usually is in Bellingham but in January the sky cleared, the temperature dropped, and it snowed. A cold strong northerly wind blew for days and the sun on the snow and the clear blue sky was so bright you had to wear sunglasses to look out the apartment window without being blinded, which was just what we were doing when a pair Tundra Swans launched themselves by on-the-wing no more than five feet from the building and then disappeared in a flash on a gust of wind. Dressed in her pajamas and sunglasses Alex turned to me and simply said, “Remarkable.”

An understatement.

Crossing

It was high spring in a May full of lilacs, hyacinths, and daffodils, trees budding green, and birds making nests. There is nothing like it after a long winter of wind, damp rain, and cold. It is very much a sort of resurrection. A rush of returning life.

Alex and I were sitting on the couch looking out the window at such a beautiful spring morning that it nearly hurt to look at it.

“I know what you are thinking”, she said.

“You do?”

“Yes, I’m psychic you know.”

“Well, I though so. It’s obvious.”

She looked at me and smiled.

“I’ll be right back. In the mean time you get the camping gear in order and don’t forget my canvas rucksack, it’s all ready packed to go.”

She grabbed her wallet and the keys to her car and headed out the door.

I spent the next hour rummaging through the closet pulling out sleeping bags, a blue tarp, a small camp stove, pots, pans, hiking boots, a change of clothes, extra socks, two pairs of old tennis shoes, and Alex’s flower print bikini for good measure. I then went to the kitchen and filled two gallon jugs with water, grabbed the can opener and two sharp kitchen knives. I boiled up some eggs made four egg-salad sandwiches. By the time I was done poking around and shoving things in the backpack Alex was back with enough food  for three days out: two bottles of Chateau Saint Michelle Johannesburg Riesling wine, cheese, bread, rice, granola, a dozen eggs, a handful of Cadbury chocolate bars, a dozen oranges, pickled takuan, coffee, and whatever. The rest of our supplies were scrounged out of the kitchen cabinets and leftovers from the fridge.

“So, where are we going?” I asked.

“To visit the ocean, don’t you know?” Alex replied.

We packed up the car, stopped to top off the gas tank, and headed out on Chuckanut Drive toward Anacortes.

We rolled down the windows and oohed and awed at the scenery. Alex sang a couple of Joni Mitchell songs acapella. We looked for the fossil palm leaves in the sandstone cliffs along the road. Then out of the dark green forest in a great sweeping prehistoric gliding arc, a Pileated Woodpecker flew over the car and we both shouted at the same time “did you see that!”

Just before Anacortes we took a hard left past Lake Campbell toward Deception Pass then across the bridge to Whidbey Island, through Oak Harbor where the Naval Air Station sign reads “please forgive our noise it’s the sound of freedom” and finally arriving at the Keystone ferry which would take us across Admiralty Inlet to Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula.

At Keystone Alex parked the car in the line for the ferry and we got out and walked over to the bay: Golden-Eyes, Ruddy Ducks, Buffleheads, a Cinnamon Teal, and a half-dozen Great Blue Herons were patrolling the shallows.

“I forgot to mention something this morning Tommy”, Alex said.

No one else, not even my mom, called me Tommy.

“What’s that Alex?”

“I love you.”

“Ya? I love you too.”

She turned to look at Admiralty Inlet. There was a large flock a Caspian Terns making their way down toward Puget Sound.

Alex placed both hand on her hips, laughed and said, “I know. I’m psychic.”

The Drive

The name of the ferry was “Whatcom.”  We bought two coffees at the snack bar and ate egg-salad sandwiches. It was a rather uneventful trip across Admiralty Inlet but enough to scare up small rafts of Marbled Murrelets that took flight and skimmed across the water with rapid wing beats. Surf Scoters dived away in the strong current. The seagull tribe made its full appearance: Mews, and Glaucous, and Franklin’s and Bonaparte’s under full sail trailing aft along the wash of the ferry in a light wind as the Victorian styled homes of Port Townsend loomed up on the opposite shore.

Alex drove the car off the ferry ramp and then made a hard left turn onto the Olympic Peninsula and Highway 20. If felt like we had passed across to another realm or crossed the border into another country but without passports, customs, or baggage checks. That was the Olympic for you, cut off from the civilized east side of Puget Sound it was all about the wild backward frontier here.

“Tell me something Tommy, what is this place?” Alex asked.

She stretched back into the driver’s seat to get comfortable. There was nothing but a long stretch of road ahead.

“James Swan”, I said, looking at her hands on the steering wheel. Alex had beautiful hands, piano playing hands. She kept her finger-nails short and never painted them. For that matter she seldom wore any kind of makeup at all. A few tubes of neglected lipstick in the bath room, a barely used stick of eyeliner, a small bottle of Chanel No. 5, that was about it. She wore no jewelry except in her pierced ears and occasionally she would sew up from pieces of old silk she had saved from Okinawa her own omamori with Shinto prayers inside. I focused on her hands on the steering wheel. Determined hands. Hands that were driving us to the ocean.

“James Swan”, I began, “James Swan was something of a character. Back in the pioneer days he hunted oysters, worked for the government, lived with the Indians, hung out with the Makah, and Quileute, was an all-in-one school teacher-lawyer-judge, and promoted the railroad. I read his book called the NorthwestCoast. His fiefdom covered the entire coast of Washington from Cape Flattery to the Columbia River. There’s a hotel called “The Swan” in Port Townsend and some sort of museum with all the junk he collected you can visit. I’ve never been there.”

“Swan? Uh-huh. What else?”

“Ah, the town of Sequim. Supposed to be the driest place along the west coast north of San Diego; people store their musical instruments there, violins, cellos, guitars, whatever. There are oak trees about, prairies, and cactus. It’s the rain shadow effect or something like that. One of the driest places on the coast hard-by temperate rain forests and rain, rain, rain. They grown lavender there. Then there is the Makah, the Indians Swan hung out with, they hunted North Pacific gray whales from cedar canoes.  There is also a kind of cactus that grows out here in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. In fact the town of Sequim is the driest place on the west coast north of San Diego. Hard to believe it given the rainfall along the Hoh River. I heard musicians store their violins and cellos there. “

“Ummm.”

I kept watching her hands and took in the scenery now and then. Alex had the ocean in mind.

We arrived at the junction at Highway 20 and Highway 101 just below Discovery Bay where we turned right on to Highway 101. Highway 101 looped the Olympic. On Highway 101, you could drive all the way down the coast to Oregon then all the way through California past the redwoods and San Francisco and then all the way to Mexico if you liked and past that I had no idea where it went. It might go as far a Tierra del Fuego as far as I knew. And that would be something. I mentioned this to Alex and she smiled and then I thought the Volkswagen would probably survive it if we decided to make the leap to drive ourselves out of pavement somewhere on another continent.

I turned on the radio. Static. We looped around Sequim Bay and zipped through the town without a second thought then over the Dungeness River when it happened. I knew it would happen but was not sure when it would. Chekhov or someone once said that if you bring a gun on stage in the first act of a play by the third act it will be sure to go off, or it should go off if the playwright is any good.  So, you put two birdwatchers in a 1973 Volkswagen station wagon traveling down the highway at a relatively high-speed and the brakes will be slammed on.  It is a fact.  It is almost some kind of “bird watching law” if there were such a thing.  Slam on the brakes and backup which is just what Alex did. And there they were. I think we spotted them at the same time about 100 yards past the Dungeness River bridge sitting in a small Shore Pine about five feet tall  thirty-feet off the right shoulder of  the road in a scruffy looking “prairie” with a few scattered oaks about. The shore pine was laden in bright yellow it looked like some overdressed Christmas tree; you could barely tell it was a shore pine at all really. Then – one, two, and before three I turned and looked Alex directly in her eyes and saw reflected her glasses all that yellow bursting away like arrows shot from bows into a now scattered flock of American Goldfinches.  She lifted her foot off the brake, put the car into gear and headed down the long straight shot to Port Angeles, commenting, “Well, there you go.”  And there you go.

We were finally cruising through the Port of Angels when  mid-way  Alex broke from her driving-trance-combination-goldfinch-reverie and blurted out:

“Holy-Jesus-Tommy, look at that!”

Alex was right. It was nothing new really; we saw this kind of thing even from the apartment on Garden St. except here it carried its own peculiar monumental aspect. You couldn’t go far in the Pacific Northwest without running into (or smelling) a lumber mill or pulp mill; you couldn’t get away from it: Puget Sound Mill & Timber Co, Bloedel-Donovan, Washington Pulp and Paper Company, Paraffine and Crown Zellerbach, Weyerhauser, Boise Cascade, and a hundred others small and big. The mills went in and out of business, would resurrect themselves in new economic entities or form up in new manifestations backed with foreign capital. Here in Port Angeles it was the log yards of Rayonier (an entirely owned subsidiary of the ITT Corporation) and Simpson Lumber Company. They just didn’t cut trees down; they cut and removed entire forests.  For over a century, the axe and the chainsaw had cultivated a devil’s garden on the Olympic. People ran around the valleys and hills with dollar signs in their eyes. It was at its essence all about how fast and how much could they tear apart, rip out, sell off, and never look back.  Just cut, run, cut, and run again.  And there, along the waterfront of Port Angeles the logs were stacked high, laid out end-to-end and side-by-side under roiling smokestacks then fed one-by-one into the maw of the machine leaving behind shattered landscapes of stumps, landslides, destroyed streams and rivers. At Port Angeles it was all a set piece and simply off the scale.

As we cruised slowly out of out-of-town and set this behind us Alex sang her raspy version of the Hendrix song If 6 was 9:

“If the sun refused to shine,
I don’t mind, I don’t mind.

If the mountains fell in the sea,
Let it be, it ain’t me.
Got my own world to live through
And I ain’t gonna copy you.

Now, if 6 turned up to be 9,
I don’t mind, I don’t mind.
If all the hippies cut off their hair,
I don’t care, I don’t care.
Dig, ‘cos I got my own world to live through
And I ain’t gonna copy you…”

Finally, we exited out into the rolling farmlands west of Port Angeles where Alex gave up her final verdict, “what a messed up place.”

“Uh-ha”, I nodded.

Highway 101 unrolled itself past Lake Crescent, fully loaded logging trucks whipped by in groups of twos and threes at paced intervals shaking the Volkswagen with gusts of road wind until we arrived at the road junction at Sappho and turned off Highway 101 on to Highway 112 down through the Pysht River valley to Clallam Bay and Seiku and the fresh salt air of the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Not far past Seiku lay the last stretch of road along the Hoko River to Lake Ozette. We could almost smell the ocean.  We had the road and our thoughts to ourselves.

The pavement ended at the north end of Lake Ozette within the safety of the Olympic National Park. This section of the Park was a long narrow strip of coastline bracketed by the Quinault Indian Reservation in the south and the Makah Indian Reservation to the north where the Pacific coast terminated at Cape Flattery at the entrance to the Straits of Juan de Fuca. With a sense of relief and accomplishment, Alex pulled the car to a stop near the boat launch ramp where an information kiosk was located. We got out, stretched, and walked off the stiffness of a long drive. The Ranger Station was closed and no Park staff appeared to be around. There was only one vehicle parked near the boat launch ramp, a blue Ford Ranger pickup with a white canopy. Alex and I walked over to look at the lake. We saw a couple about our age paddling away from the shore in a canoe. Alex smiled and waved and they waved back. “They look like us”, Alex said.

We walked back to the kiosk and looked at the map. We were three miles from the ocean and from here had the choice of two trails; one ran through Booses Prairie to Cape Alava just to the south side of the Ozette Indian Reservation, the other ran from Ahlstroms Prairie to Sand Point. Just to the north, Alex pointed her finger at Manny’s Prairie and the Ozette River that she traced to its entrance at the ocean. Scouting around we walked out toward the trailhead and then noticed a dirt road leading north. “We should take that road”, Alex said. I agreed and we got back into Volkswagen and drove up the dirt track out of the Park and into an old clear-cut full of stumps, scruffy saplings of cedar, spruce, and hemlock, salmon berry, flowering red current, and vine maple. We drove along that road for a few miles until a junction where we turned left toward the ocean. That road ended about two miles out where we stopped, parked the car and got out. We could hear and smell the ocean. From here, we would hike the rest of the way. Alex grabbed her rucksack and a gallon jug of water and I carried the backpack, left the other jug of water in the car, and told Alex that I would come back for later.

It was a warm, bright and sunny afternoon in May.  Alex looked good in her jeans and the old Boy Scout shirt I had bought at the Salvation Army for two-dollars. The shirt was too small for me so she appropriated it for herself. There was still an old arm patch on it that read “Troop 39.” She had the Swarovskis slung over her neck. I was wearing my LA Dodgers baseball cap, Hawaiian Aloha shirt and jeans.  We both wore old beat up Danner hiking boots. “Leave your watch in the car Tommy, you won’t need it”, Alex said. I took it off and put it in the glove box and locked up the car.

We slung the packs over our shoulders and headed out.

The Ocean

We walked to the end of the road holding hands then stepped out into the clear-cut Alex leading ahead winding our way toward a stand of mixed larger cedar, hemlock, and stunted shore pine. You could see daylight through the trees about a hundred yards off. We scrambled up a short berm and looked out over the Pacific Ocean. We were on a high bluff and below was a wide sandy beach running in both directions. The tide was out exposing a rocky shore of tide pools punctuated with a few large boulders big enough to be capped with bonsai looking trees and ferns. Alex pointed over to a place in the bluff where an intermittent rill had formed a natural trail down to the beach; steep but negotiable. She headed down first. Alex was agile and beautiful to watch as she picked her way down the slope, hopping from rock to rock. I followed slowly behind stopping every few steps to make sure of the path and to look out over the water. Then I heard Alex let out a short scream and shout “damn!” simultaneously with the kak, kak, kak, loud rattling call of a Belted Kingfisher she had scared out of the burrow it was digging in the soft soil of the bluff. The bird had startled her, caught her off-balance with its unexpected presence. As the kingfisher flew off down the beach Alex called after it: “Sooorrrry!” Then we both caught the giggles and laughed ourselves to the bottom of the bluff and stood on the beach.

It was a warm afternoon; low bank of clouds on the farthest horizon with a few high clouds away to the north drifting up the straits. The sun reflected off the white beach, the bluff absorbed the sun’s heat and radiated it back. Alex reached around, opened her rucksack, and pulled out our sunglasses. She took off her glasses and placed them in their case, lashed down the pack and we walked on south down the beach with me wearing sunglasses looking like I was taking a stroll along Waikiki. We scanned the base of the bluff for a good campsite as she gathered small bundles of grass that she tied into knots.  About a mile later Alex found the perfect spot tucked into a slight curve of the bluff behind some large drift logs where there was a good supply of smaller pieces of driftwood we could collect to make a fire and small stones laying about to make a fire ring. We dropped the packs. She placed the knotted grass bundles at either end of the campsite as I unlashed the backpack to make camp.

I laid out the blue tarp on the ground and started sorting through the camping gear we brought. I was chattering on about how camping made you realize just how little you really needed, that you could carry only so much and that was that. “You have only what you can carry and you don’t miss the rest”, I was saying kneeling down at the edge of the tarp when next to me Alex plopped down a pile of neatly folded clothes: jeans, bra, Boy Scout shirt, tee, panties, socks, hiking books. When I turned to look up all I saw was a triangle of dark silky pubic hair. Alex moved her hips to thrust it in my face a little closer and said,

“Want some? Later…”

I had just enough time to notice the slight film of sweat on her hips and belly before I could reply “Ahhh” when she took off jogging down the beach naked except for her sunglasses and the omamori she had tied around her neck. I stood up and watched her chase through a flock of seagulls that had come to sun themselves and rest on the beach. They flew up and over her outstretched arms as she laughed splashing through the spent ocean waves.

I went back to the unpacking the order of things. Took our sleeping bags out of their stuff sacks, zipped them together, and laid them out, the change of clothes I wrapped in a plastic bag and sat to one side. I gathered up a few flat rocks and found a flat polished pieced of driftwood out of which I constructed a small kitchen behind one of the large logs fronting the camp where I set up the one-burned butane stove. I placed the gallon jug of water and the two bottles of wine close by. I laid the two pots and one pan along side. I carefully unpacked two hand-painted Okinawan ceramic rice bowls and sat them safely near the camp stove. For utensils, we had chopsticks and two sharp knives. There was a can opener but we had no cans. The oranges, coffee, rice, and the rest that Alex bought and what we grabbed out the fridge before we left I set at one end in no particular order. I pulled the old tennis shoes out of the pack and laid them side-by-side. There were two small pillows down in the bottom of the pack, a length of coiled rope, two blue-enamel coffee cups and paperless coffee filter, a small machete, a whisk broom, a first aid kit that Alex had added a needle and spool of thread, and a pack of fish hooks and a length of fishing line to. These last items lived in the pack always ready to go; along with a Silva Ranger compass, a notebook and pencil, a whistle, matches and a Bic lighter. I grabbed Alex’s canvas rucksack and set it to one side. That was it. That was home. It was what we hauled down the beach on our backs and as I looked it over it didn’t feel like there was anything missing. It was more than enough.

I took off my boots and put on my tennis shoes, grabbed the binoculars, and walked out to the beach where I saw Alex a fair distance off. I waved. She waved back. I pointed back up the beach and she nodded and waved again. I turned and walked up the beach heading back to the car for the other gallon of water; a task which also doubled as a stroll to take in the scenery. I scoured the drift wood and found a decent walking stick.

I walked to the sound of my own footsteps and the ocean surf, taking in the black rocks, blue sky, and the green of the forest above. I poked my stick at the occasional empty clamshell, looked into a few tide pools and watched hermit crabs scuttling about, checked out the rocky pitted bluff finally arriving at the King Fisher burrow where I noticed not one burrow but dozens scattered in a line. “Were they all occupied?” I thought, “Or were they the trial and error of just a pair of birds?” Careful not to disturb anyone’s home building activities I climbed back up the bluff. At the top, I stopped and turned to look out over the ocean. Same scene. Timeless.

I walked back along the path that Alex made on our way out and found myself back at the car in short time. I leaned my walking stick again the door, took off the binoculars and set them on the hood, and walked around to the back to pee and was almost finished when I heard the distinct growl of a very large cat. To hear such a thing along a dirt track surrounded by the spring growth of lush thick vegetation the reaction is one of immediate-total-unfiltered recognition. That growl seemed to come from every direction and no particular direction at all. Can the mind hold more than one thought at a time? It must. And it went something like this: freeze, sensation of an instant prickly sweat, cascade of adrenaline, finishing peeing and don’t wet yourself, Alex on the beach, heart beat, peeling off all the synonyms of Mountain Lion: Puma concolor, puma, mountain cat, catamount, panther, generally known here-abouts as cougar: a very capable stalk-and-ambush predator. I took a look around and didn’t see a thing, buttoned my fly, reached for the key to car, unlocked the door, and stepped into the driver’s seat, shook my head, and laughed out loud, and sat there feeling rather buzzed. After about twenty minutes, I finally reasoned that because I heard the growl I was still alive. If I had not heard it, I would be laying in the dirt track with bite marks in my neck. Then I thought about how lucky I was to have had this experience.  I felt a little wiser with the knowledge that something this wild was still prowling around in the devil’s garden. Cougar as insurgent. I grabbed the gallon water jug, an extra sweatshirt that I found in the back seat and stepped out of the car. Looked around, listened and heard nothing but the sound of distant ocean surf, grabbed the walking stick, slung the binoculars over my shoulder, and headed back toward the beach at a brisk walk.

I got to the edge of the bluff where I turned around to look, then set down, drank some water, and looked out over the ocean again. This time I spotted Alex down by the camp about a hundred yards out past the beach walking around a large rock. I took off my sunglasses, put the binoculars up to my eyes for a better look, and focused. I could now see that Alex was wearing her glasses, she had put on her flower print bikini and the Boy Scout shirt, and was carrying one of our pots. Occasionally she would stoop over a tide pool then get up and walk a bit more. Then she disappeared around behind the rock. As I was about to set the binoculars down I noticed something bright and orange darting around in the rocks; then a few more of those orange things moving about: Black Oyster Catchers. Stout ocean birds with stalky orange legs and feet tipped by stubby claws that could grip the rocks. Bright orange blunt ended beaks like a miniature pry-bar-combination-hammer, reddish-orange eyes with a black eye-ring and black iris set in the head of a bundle of black feathers the size of a robust chicken. They were bobbing over the rocks poking their beaks here and there. When Alex came around the rock, again they disappeared around the other side. When she disappeared around the other side, they emerged into view from the opposite side. I watched this dance for another ten minutes and then stood up, took one last look behind me, and scrambled back down to the beach.

Alex and I arrived at the camp almost at the same time. I set down the water and leaned my walking stick against a log. Alex breezed into camp seconds later carrying the pot in her left hand. She smiled and greeted me with her right hand raised in the shape of a cat’s paw and went “grrrrrrr.”

Ōhiru-menomuchi-no-kami

天照大神

I sat down on a log, took my hat off and looked at Alex.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing”, I said, as my heart beat just a little faster.

“Did you see them, Alex?”

“The Black Oyster Catchers?”

“Ya.”

“Uh-huh, crazy bird. Built for the ocean or the ocean built it – I’m going to start dinner Tommy.”

“Ok, sounds good.”

I walked around, gathered stones for a fire-ring, and then collected the driest pieces of driftwood I could find. Alex rattled pots and pans, washed the rice in the largest pan and poured in the water, lit the butane stove and set pan on the burner.

“Let’s have some wine Tommy.”

I got the blue enamel cups out and then looked for a corkscrew which I couldn’t find.

“Check in my rucksack. There’s a Swiss Army knife somewhere.”

I unlashed Alex’s rucksack and started digging around. I pulled out an extra sweatshirt and pair of socks, a bag with bar of unopened bar of Ivory soap and wash cloth, Alex’s glasses case, a bag full of colored pencils and pastels, sketch book, another bag which contained a harmonica, a deck of cards, a yo-yo, and a box of “emergency” candles, and a small rolled-up Japan Airlines blanket. I pulled out a well-worn copy Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a baggy of homegrown marijuana with a pack of orange Zig Zag rolling papers inside which Alex told me to set aside. At the bottom, I pulled out a three-month old copy of the Bellingham Herald newspaper and tossed it toward the fire-ring and finally I found the Swiss Army knife. I put everything back they way it came out except for the knife, the candles, the soap and washcloth, and the baggy of homegrown.

I held the baggy up and Alex said,

“Got that medicine from Nancy Qi, you know the Chinese girl who was in our Russian history class; she grew it in her backyard. I forgot I had it.”

I nodded.

“Roll us up two joints.”

I busied myself with that for a minute or two. Rolled two joints and dropped them into my shirt pocket. There was about enough marijuana left in the bag for another joint. I put the bag back into the rucksack and lashed it shut. Then I opened the wine, poured out two cups, and handed one to Alex.

“Look Tommy.”

Alex opened the pot she had carried back with her from the Oyster Catcher dance. Inside were two large blue mussels, eight small silver fish of an undetermined species, maybe trout or salmon, as bright as newly minted fifty-cent pieces about four inches long, a large purple sea urchin, and strands of a delicate light-green seaweed.

“How did you catch those fish?”

Alex held out her hands palms up.

“With these.”

Alex turned to look at the sun. It was going down, maybe two hours left of daylight.

“It’s all in the timing”, she answered to my unasked question.

Alex took the sea urchin and flipped it over and cracked it in two with the back side of a knife and washed it out then scooped out the yellow roe and placed it in a fresh bowl of water. From the food bag we brought materialized one tube of wasabi, shoyu, and a bottle of sesame oil. From the same bag, she took a stalk of broccoli that she sliced thin. Back to the stove, she checked the rice then slipped the large blue mussels in on either side of the pot. She glanced up at the sun again. On top of the rice, she placed the broccoli, the fish went in whole, and everything then topped by the seaweed she had gathered. Alex turned the burner up as high as it would go then placed the lid back on the pot, waited thirty seconds, took the pot off the burner then placed a large rock on the lid, wrapped the pot in a sweatshirt, set it aside, stepped back and took a sip of wine. This was done as if it had been practiced dozens of times, the choreography of food. Dinner. All in the timing.

“What is the smallest increment of time?” I thought to my self, “How is that measured? With what it is measured? Time sliced so finely that it is infinite.” I surveyed the camp and noticed a small shrine just off the northeast corner of the tarp I laid down. Mussel, clam, and oyster shells and feathers neatly arranged. Scattered, random fragments of the beach rearranged into meaning. I turned back to Alex and she was holding an orange in her outstretched hand.

“Look.”

The orange was glowing. Alex pointed down the beach and the entire bluff was glowing with a light that contained no shadows. Like a sweeping daytime vision of a dream every rock, piece of wood, blade of grass stood out in relief. Every pine, spruce, and cedar on the top of the bluff sharply outlined throwing back colors of green that had no name. Here was a world in which every part contained the whole; even in a grain of sand, changing in infinite increments of time.

Alex warmed a pan of water and we rubbed ourselves down taking the days sweat off with a warmed washcloth and a little soap. It was a small luxury which refreshed and revived. She took my hand and we walked down the ocean’s edge.

“Everything is spirit,” Alex said.

“Everything is spirit – kami. The sun, mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks, all are spirit. The birds and animals and the ancestors: kunitsu-kami, are the gods of the earth.

The sun, just now sitting on the horizon was an enormous ball of orange. You could look directly at it. Shades of blue colored the sky edging into violets and greens.

“When people disconnect from capacity for awe, they feel homeless. And we are not homeless here, Tommy. You and I will never be homeless.”

Alex looked to the sun. You could see it moving, dropping behind the horizon, its width expanded and distorted through the lens of the atmosphere.

“We say, Ōhiru-menomuchi-no-kami, the sun-goddess, she who illuminates heaven. She is all life – with out her we are nothing.”

Alex looked at me and smiled.

“Put your feet together, like this.”

I followed her instructions placing both feet close together.

“Put your arms to your side and bow. Bow from the waist.”

She clasped her hands and we both bowed a long and deep bow. We rose.

“Again.”

We bowed again and rose.

Alex looked at the sun. It was falling rapidly, distending itself and filling across the horizon an orange glow. The distant clouds parted. Three Pelagic Cormorants skimmed the water flying north with rapid wing beats.

“Now say a prayer, Tommy.”

“What could I pray for?” I thought. My mind raced with all the images of the day. What could I account for? For what did I count? I prayed for peace.

“Now, clap your hands twice and send the prayer to heaven.”

We clapped and sent our prayers to heaven.

“Bow.”

The sun was now a bright thick orange line rapidly shrinking. “It’s all in the timing”, she said. At the last moment of the day, just as the sun dipped out of sight, in the length of two heartbeats, in the last glimpse, the horizon flashed a wink of translucent emerald green.

I turned to look at Alex. My heart ached. She stepped toward me and placed one arm around my waist; one hand reached up and held the back of my neck. I felt her breasts on my chest, felt her heart beat, her breathing; she held me close, wrapped one leg around my leg, and we kissed a long, long kiss. This was home.

“What is the largest increment of time?” I thought to my self, “How is that measured? With what is it measured? Time so extended that it is eternity.”

“Dinner is ready”, Alex said.

We walked back to the camp and Alex took the rock off the lid of the pot dinner had steamed in. I took the sweatshirt and laid it out on the sand to use as a tablecloth, retrieved the ceramic bowls and chopsticks, our blue enamel cups which I refilled from the bottle of wine. Alex opened the pot and we looked in to see that the blue mussels had opened, the broccoli nicely glistened, and the seaweed was warm and steaming. It all gave off the aroma of the ocean. Alex gave a slight bow and waved her hands quickly over it all then retrieved the sea urchin roe, the wasabi, and shoyu. We sat facing one another and ate. We did not realize how hungry we were. Much of the day had been taken up by the drive and what remained of the late afternoon was spent hiking down to the beach and making camp and running around taking it all in and the prickly sweat the growl of a mountain lion can break you into. We ate in grateful silence and washed it down with good white wine.

“You know Tommy”, Alex said, “If we had a fifty pound bag of rice we could stay here for sixth months.”

“Ya, think so?”

“I do.”

“Maybe we should try it some time.”

“My grandmother would love this place. She is a “blue-domer” you know. I remember walking with her down the road near the beach at Naha and she asked me, “Musume, where is the shrine?” I pointed toward the direction of the shrine near the house and she smiled. “No, musume, look, the shrine is here.” And she pointed to the blue ocean and raised her hand up to the blue sky. What a character she is. The only real sadness in her life that I ever heard was when she spoke of one of her older brother’s death; I guess that would make him my great-uncle. He was killed during the Second World War on Tarawa. His body was never returned home.”

“Tarawa? I am sorry to hear of it.”

“I suppose it’s just a remote piece of history. The connections I have with it seem strange to me at times. Anyway, my grandmother really would know what to do with a fifty-pound bag rice here.”

I smiled at that.

I could feel the food working its ocean magic. My body taking it all in; I felt revived and relaxed. I refilled our cups with the rest of the wine. Alex sat the lid back on the pot that contained what remained of the rice and set aside and picked up out empty bowls and took them down to the nearest tide pool to clean them with sand rinse them out. I went over to the fire ring, arranged a few small pieces of wood over the newspaper and lit it, not so much for warmth but to cast some light. The fire took quickly. Alex returned and lit two candles; put the kitchen in order.

“The tide is coming in.”

“I have been watching it”, I replied.

“Do you think it will wash in to camp?”

“I’m not sure.”

We walked out to the beach and look in both directions for a possible escape route. Finally, we walked to the base of the bluff and looked up along a possible path to take off the beach if we were run off by the tide.

“Here Tommy, we can go up this way. We’ll just throw everything on the blue tarp, tie it off and drag it up behind us.”

“Sounds like a plan which I hope we don’t have to do”, I said.

We walked back toward the fire, placed a few more pieces of wood on the flames. Alex reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out one of the joints I had rolled earlier. I had nearly forgotten she had asked me to do that. She held it to the flames of the fire until it was lit, took a puff, and handed it back to me. We looked out toward to the ocean and watched the stars appear one by one by one. She took one more drag off the joint, changed into a clean t-shirt, and crawled into the sleeping bag. I stood by the fire, took another two puffs, and then walked out from camp ten paces where I stuck my walking stick firmly in the sand as a marker to measure the incoming tide. By the time I crawled in next to Alex she was asleep.

I had no idea what time it was. I opened my eyes wide and listened to gentle surf for a few minutes. The night was warm. I finally got up and walked over to look at the walking stick. Gentle waves were washing about five feet in front of it. A perfect crescent moon had appeared in the sky. I must have set there for an hour my attention divided between the progress of the tide and the crescent moon. The tide appeared to have reached its height that was something of a relief. The crescent moon was setting and the more it descended toward the horizon the more unusual it looked until I found my entire attention was directed toward it. The moon’s perfect silver crescent was bending, distorting at its ends, and the color changed from bright silver to a dusky brown. The more I watched it the steepening arc of the stars the more the crescent moon changed. I watched the moon until it sat on horizon. It was shaped like a boomerang and its color was blood red. Now my attention was directed north where I could see just a faint glimmer of light. Slowly distinct shafts of light appeared until I realized the sun was about to rise and that what I was seeing was light bending over the entrance to the Straits of Juan de Fuca.

The morning brightened enough to the point where I could just distinguish colors. I walked out in my striped boxer shorts, grabbed my walking stick, and headed north up the beach. The tide was going out and it promised to be another warm day. I could feel the earth coming alive. I ambled down the beach stopping occasionally to take deep breathes of ocean air, examine sand dollars, watch ghost crabs scurry into their holes. I imagined that what I was looking at looked the very same way as it did a thousand years ago. The outside world, if there was one, was far beyond and gone from this thin slip of coast.

I was scanning the bluff when I noticed an unusual black looking tree. With out the binoculars I could not make out what it was I was exactly seeing. I started walking toward it. “Yes, a curious black looking tree of some sort”, I kept asking myself, “What is it?” The closer I got the more curious it became until “whatever it was” took up my attention with every step. I finally stood beneath it looking up at the edge of the bluff where maybe fifty-feet above me stood a large dead Sitka Spruce. The tree stood maybe another towering ninety-feet tall, poised in the scene like some freakish antenna. The tree had dropped all of its needles; only the stoutest branches of the top thirty-feet remained, and on those branches sat crows. Crows. Crows gathered so thickly you could not count them. Crows on every branch where a crow could fit, all lined up and facing out together in the same direction branch by branch. I stood looking at this scene trying to calculate what it this all meant, if it meant anything at all, when my eyes finally rested on the very top branch on which sat, much to my amazement, an American Bald Eagle. Nothing moved. Not a feather stirred. Two things came to mind. One was what a strange gift this morning has concocted for me and the other was that the eagle sitting at the top most branch of this ninety-foot tall dead Sitka Spruce at the edge of this high bluff at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, which was covered in hundreds of crows, was not going anywhere. So… so, I figured this was some sort of peculiar stand-off? Crows versus eagle. I waited to see what would happen next and just as I had anticipated, nothing happened. Nothing stirred. Not a feather flinched. I only heard the sound of gentle and persistent surf along the distant receding tide line. I leaned on my walking stick and stared. Turned to look out over the ocean and then turned back to the tree to see if anything had changed. Nothing. I walked a short distance further up the beach and turned to look again. The same. I finally became aware of a slight change in the brightening morning light and started my walk back toward camp. I turned to look back at the tree a few more times. Still nothing. About a hundred yards out I finally heard in the distance a single “caw!” That was it. My last look back was near where I had first spotted the black tree in the distance. Nothing had changed. I turned and walked back to camp.

As I came into camp Alex was just finishing making coffee. I could smell it brewing.

“The crow’s caw was OK, but a woman is enlightenment. Want some coffee Tommy?

“What?”

Coffee. Want some?”

“Absolutely”, I replied.

The River

Alex and I sat together facing the ocean on the drift log with hot cups of coffee in our hands. The only sound was the ever present and gentle surf pushing through the rocky tide pools; a bank of white puffy clouds on the distant horizon. Three Pelagic Cormorants appeared necks outstretched with rapid wing beats flying low heading south. Maybe the same three we saw at sunset yesterday.

We sipped the coffee, inhaled tangy ocean air, and admired the wildness here pushed to the edge of the ocean along this thin slip of beach as if the entire rest of the world had simply vanished.

“Let’s walk to the river”, Alex said.

“River?”

“Yes, you remember the map at the lake? There is a river, the Ozette River, south from here, not far. All we have to do is follow those cormorants.”

“That sounds great.”

We got dressed. Alex slipped her jeans over her bikini and put on her sunglasses. I put on my pants and shirt and grabbed my hat and walking stick. Alex made up a lunch of oranges and chocolate and rice balls from the left-over rice, urchin roe, and seaweed. We threw in the half-full water jug and put everything into the canvas rucksack and walked barefoot south along the beach.

“I have a haiku.”

OK, let’s hear it”, I said.

“It goes like this,

on a withered branch

a crow settles

Spring morning

What do you think?”

“Good, but haven’t I heard this one before? Doesn’t it go…

on a withered branch

a crow settles

Autumn evening?”

“OK, I stole it from Basho, but it’s not an “autumn evening” now it’s a spring morning. Basho wouldn’t mind.”

“Indeed it is a spring morning my dear. And what’s up with the crows anyway?, it’s the second time you have mentioned them.”

“Hmm, I don’t know. I have not seen a crow since we’ve gotten here. Quite unusual I think. OK, now it is your turn. What is your haiku?

I thought for a moment. “OK, I’ve got one,

on the river bank

eating oysters

a long way to come

what do you think?”

Alex laughed, “Oysters? I haven’t seen any oysters here either. That’s a funny haiku, Tommy.”

“Well, I am sure there are some around and I know for a fact there are crows about.”

“Uh-huh. I thought I might have heard one call this morning.”

“OK, Alex, here’s another haiku, just for you,

on the wing

ten-thousand haiku

in your eyes

Here the beach widened broad and gently sloping nearly flat we walked along the water’s edge. Alex took my walking stick and started tracing images in the wet sand.

“This is hiragana, the old style writing of Japan, from just after the time when Chinese kanji was introduced. Anyway, watch how I write.”

I watched Alex work the sand with the walking stick.

“Here is the hiragana for tamashii – spirit.” たましい

She took three steps.

“Here is the hiragana for seimei – life.” せいめい

Three more steps.

“Ai – love.”  あい

“Otoko – man.” おとこ

“Onna- woman.”  おんな

“Kodomo – child.” こども

Eighteen steps total between words looking back up the beach at the hiragana Alex had scrawled into the sand. Her footprints looked like quotation marks bracketing each word.

“Do you think you can remember these?”

“I would need more practice.”

“I will teach you.”

“I will learn.”

Alex nodded, “For now your mantra is tamashii, seimei, ai, otoko, onna, kodomo. Say it.”

“Tamashii, seimei, ai, otoko, onna, kodomo”, I repeated.

“Good- again.”

“Tamashii, seimei, ai, otoko, onna, kodomo.”

I walked along the tide-line repeating my new mantra to myself and Alex drifted off toward the bluff poking at rocks and drift-wood with my walking stick.

I looked up the beach. The bluff was lowering; gap appearing. In the distance drift-logs bleached white like old bones scattered across the beach. A flock of large gulls some dirty gray others bright white with black wing tips stood gathered on the sand; the day sunny, bright, and warm; a soft breeze.

We were pulled into that scene as if it had been waiting for us.

The gulls did not stir as we approached. Alex dropped the rucksack, looked at the slow-moving river flowing into the ocean and leaned her head on my shoulder.

“Are there words for such a place?” she asked.

I listened in silence for a reply, the sound of moving river water mixed with the hiss of a gentle surf breaking against its current. I picked up the rucksack.

“Let’s walk up-river, toward those shore pines.”

We found a place to rest and sit in soft dry pine needles cast over a deep green moss mat just near the bank of the river overlooking a deep pool with a short back eddy where we drank some water and shared an orange and ate some chocolate.  A loud sudden buzz appeared and materialized itself as a Ruby-throated Hummingbird stopped a few inches from Alex’s right ear hovered a moment and flew off in a fast black line up-river.

“Tamashii”, I said.

“Yes, the place is overflowing with it.”

Alex stood and took a few steps to the river bank and turned back tossed me her glasses which I put in her glasses case and stripped off her clothes.

“Come on.”

I stood up and looked, stripped off my clothes. She grabbed my hand and we jumped into the river. The water was cold and bracing I came up catching my breath hearing Alex yell, “YA!” The current carried us down stream until we were caught in the back eddy where we splashed out on to the bank, ran up the slope, and jumped in again to drift down stream splash out and repeat it again.

“I feel riven”, Alex shouted to me in the current.

“Riven?”

“Torn apart, ripped to pieces, purified and put back together all in one shot.”

“Riven at the river.”

“Something like that.”

We climbed out dripping cold water and ran back up to the rucksack where I retrieved the Japan Airlines blanket and spread it out over the pines needles and moss. Alex folded our clothes to make pillows out of them and we lay down on our backs next to each other facing the ocean in the sun. I closed my eyes, took a breath of pine-scented air, and retrieved the sound of river and surf.  I lost track of time. There was no time. Alex whispered in my ear.

“Relax.”

“Easy.”

“Don’t open your eyes. Keeps your eyes closed.”

I nodded.

She took my hands and placed them over my head, her breasts lightly brushed chest and with her hand she began to trace lines on my stomach.

“You know this?”

“Ai – love.”

“Yes, good.”

“How about this?” she traced.

“Umm, otoko – man?”

“Good guess.”

Alex moved her hand over my stomach and reached down and with a few gentle tugs, I became erect.

“Relax. Don’t forget to breathe.”

I nodded.

Alex put her mouth on my penis her tongue was soft and wrapped itself around me. She straddled my body and kissed me; placed one hand on my shoulder and used the other to slip me inside of her. It felt like I was drawn into hot wet silk. She tucked her feet beneath my legs, arched her back, and slowly rotated her hips. I felt like I was about to come.

“Wait. Not yet. Breathe.”

As she slowly moved, I could feel something working its way out of her into me. Something I had never felt before in all the other times we had made love. Whatever it was I could only describe it as something essential and true. It was something you cannot live with out.

“Open your eyes.”

I opened my eyes, looked into her eyes, and felt her come. I came. I raised my arms, pulled her down on top of me, and kissed her. Now I understood the meaning of “riven”. I felt disintegrated, merged, and reassembled as images of this place flashed like a movie in my mind.

Alex rolled over on her back looked up through the branches of the shore pine took my hand and smiled.

“The Buddha had it wrong.”

“Wrong?” I asked.

“Yes. Oh, I know what he was getting at. Nothing is perfect. Nothing lasts. We get sick, there is pain, death. We attach ourselves to impermanent things that cause us to suffer. Even our happiest moments are transient. But why should we not attach ourselves to those things; like this place, love, how we experience the world, what it means. With out attachments we have no stories to tell, nothing to say. This place and this time we need to remember Tommy. We need to hold it in our heart, protect it, and remember it, even defend it.”

“So now you’re going to take on the Buddha?”

“Well, sort of.”

Alex stood up, grabbed my hand, and pulled me to my feet. I looked out toward the beach. The gulls were gone. I had not even seen them leave. Alex jumped back in to the river and I followed. The water was fresh and alive. I let myself drift with the current. Back on the blanket I raised Alex’s legs over my shoulders caressed her warm and wet vagina with my hand then kneeling down moved my tongue gently over her clitoris until she came. She pulled me up by the arms to lie on top of her reached down and placed me inside of her. I could feel her heart beat, her tongue in my mouth, and I came.

“You’re right”, I said, “so much for the Buddha. We are the world in which we walk.”

We held each other close. I don’t know for how long until moved by a cool breeze coming off the ocean. We stood up and got dressed. I shook the pine needles and sand off the blanket and folded it up as Alex got the rice balls she made and another orange out of the rucksack. We sat on a bleached white log and ate in silence looking out over the ocean. Together we shared a heightened sense of awareness. The food was more the delicious almost a sacrament. A large bank of clouds was moving in. We packed up and Alex took the walking stick in hand and motioned up-river with it. We walked along the riverbank until we heard the familiar buzz of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. He was feeding on the last remaining flowers of a large bunch of Salmonberries. Magenta petals littered the ground and we picked and ate the first ripe fruits with Alex having her ear buzzed from time to time.

We walked back down to the beach.

“Look!” Alex said pointing with the walking stick, “tracks!”

“Those are our tracks Alex.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I think so”, I said looking around.

“Are you sure we’re the same people leaving who came here this morning?”

I had to admit I was not sure of that at all.

Breathing Out

“Tamashii, seimei, ai, otoko, onna, kodomo”, I repeated.

We walked back to the hirgana Alex had inscribed in the sand. This time in reverse order it was kodomo, onna, otoko, ai, seimei, tamashii – child, woman, man, love, life spirit. I repeated the mantra in reverse. A gust of wind blew off the ocean as the clouds obscured the sun. You could feel the moisture rise in the air.

“Rain”, Alex said.

“I think so.”

The day was changing. The white clouds now were shaded in their underside with gray. Over the ocean in the distance rain streaked squalls. As we came up to camp a single crow cawed and flew off.

“There’s your crow Alex.”

“Uh-huh. And look at all this.”

Alex pointed to dozens of bird prints in the sand around the camp.

“Looks like some kind of crow convention was held here while we were gone.”

Alex fired up the stove and busied herself with making coffee and rice and I walked down to the ocean. In my shirt pocket I found that unsmoked joint a bit smashed up but serviceable.  I reached into my pocket for the bic lighter and lit it up took a few puffs, waited, watched the clouds, and listened to the surf. I looked back at Alex and realized how much I was in love with her. I was in love with her the first time I saw her. But what did that mean? What was love after all? Did I have any real idea of what that was or meant? Alex was right, this place and this time we need to remember. We need to hold it in our heart, protect it, and remember it, even defend it.  Maybe that was it. Time is like a kaleidoscope. Turn it one way and there is one view, turn it another way and there is another view. It is full of enchanted color and surprises. Time changes time as a flowing river. What is memory but attachment? What is attachment but relationship?  We live in a world I had more questions than answers but I was prepared to defend the questions. That much I knew.

I walked back up to camp and handed the joint to Alex and she took one large puff and handed it back.  I took one last drag and tossed it away. I watched her make fried-rice with the rice and eggs and the last of the broccoli. She filled the ceramic bowls and handed me a pair of chops sticks and a cup of hot coffee.

“It’s going to rain”, Alex said.

“I think so.”

The entire horizon was closed off by clouds. Cool, moist, gusts of wind blew off the ocean. Alex and I gathered up the dishes, took them down to the ocean edge to clean up, and then walked back to camp as the fist rain drops fell in the late afternoon.

“Let’s go”, we both said at once.

The horizon line disappeared. The sun obscured by gray clouds scudding overhead.  Gusts of wind picked up beach sand and blew it across the camp. Rain fell and stopped. Alex and I packed up in reverse order the kitchen space of pots, pans, stove, and food. I stuffed the sleeping bags into the pack and folded up the blue tarp. The small shrine of shells and feathers we returned to the elements from which it came. I kicked the rocks out of the fire ring and scattered the charcoal. We did all of this in silence and with quick if not precise efficiency. We put our boots back on and donned sweatshirts in the darkening late after noon. I grabbed my walking stick and took the pack and Alex picked up the water and her rucksack.  We headed down the beach back to the base of the high bluff and the trail to the car where we stopped and turned to look. Sanderlings running at full tilt across the gray mist beach against outgoing waves.

“This is good, domo arigato“, Alex said and bowed.

Then up the bluff to the forest edge and through wet brush. I didn’t look back.

I unlocked the car, we threw our packs in, and we drank some water. Alex took the keys started up the car, turned on the lights and windshield wipers and reversed out to the dirt road that led back the Lake Ozette past the boat launch and the information kiosk and onto pavement. No one around.

“How would you feel about being pregnant, Tommy?” Alex asked.

“Pregnant? What do you mean? Wouldn’t that be rather difficult for me?”

“That’s not what I mean really.”

“Uh-huh?”

“I mean we’re pregnant. I’m pregnant.”

I watched the pavement in the car lights speed away back up the Hoko River to Seiku. Somewhere out in the darkness was the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Alex was pregnant.

“Well, how do you know?” It was just about the dumbest question I could ask. Alex laughed.

“Intuition, I suppose. I just know. We’re going to have a daughter- Miko.”

“Miko?”

“Yes, Miko.”

The Volkswagen hummed up Highway 112  through the Pysht River valley to back to Sappho and Highway 101 where Alex pulled to a stop and signaled left toward Port Angeles, then hesitated a moment, and then she signaled right and took off down the quiet and dark highway.

“Tierra del Fuego?”

“Of course, I wouldn’t miss it for anything”,  was my answer.

2005

Alex and I returned from Bellingham late in the evening. She had been invited by the university to speak to faculty and students and her talk was on “women and ecology in the Ryukyu social order.”   At our house on Queen Anne  Hill in Seattle I was now laying on the futon in our bedroom beneath a dark blue quilt with a printed design of white swirls, iridescent spirals, stars that reminded me of the Milky Way Galaxy.  I was thinking a million things at once. I was thinking what a long strange trip it has been. And I was feeling strange and strangely satisfied all at the same time.

Miko was born in January, 1980. Bright, intelligent, green eyes but looking very much like her mother. I couldn’t believe it. It made me laugh. I was trying to count how many jobs I had over the last twenty-five years: forklift driver, librarian, commercial salmon fisherman, factory worker, bricklayer, carpenter, a strange and unpleasant few months stint working at the ARCO oil refinery out at Cherry Point, a few seasons with the U.S. Forest Service, gardener, and whatever else I could come up with to keep everything moving forward and all the while Alex and I were busy with Miko and all at the same time Alex was working her way through her Master’s degree in the East Asian Studies program at Western and then her doctorate at the University of Washington.

Alex mostly spoke Japanese and I spoke English to Miko so she grew up somewhat bilingual. In Seattle we made friends with other students and faculty who had connections to Japan and collaborated with baby sitting, day care, home schooling. It was a strange mix of Montessori, sometimes the overly neurotic ideas pedagogy of academics and young parents, and various strains of cultural mixing but it worked and was sometimes a lot a fun – mostly. Alex’s mom Noriko was a frequent houseguest and a great help.

We never made it to Tierra del Fuego. We drove around Puget Sound the long way and ended up at Alex’s parents in time for breakfast. We just showed up unannounced, in our grubby clothes smelling like the ocean and barged in. It wasn’t all that crazy actually and since her mom and dad had not seen her for awhile they seemed rather happy about it. Her dad, Barry, was not half that bad though he seemed spent at times, as if he was trying to work something through. I didn’t ask. You could tell he loved his wife and daughter so that was enough for me.

When Miko was eleven her great-grandmother in Naha passed away. So Alex and I and Miko flew to Japan and met up with uncle Yoshi and his girlfriend Midori in Kyoto and then we all traveled together to Okinawa by train and ferry to pay our respects. On the trip Miko’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head and she couldn’t quit talking in her American-Japanese. She asked questions to everyone about everything. She yakked it up  complete strangers and we met a lot of interesting people that way.  Later Yoshi took up the house in Naha and grandmother, as it turned out, left Alex some money and with that and some help from her parents we bought the old two-story four bedroom house on Queen Anne Hill that we now call home and filled it up with futons and quilts and a few tatami mats, books, and colorful sketches by Miko and Alex.  Alex is now a tenured professor in the Asia Studies department at the University of Washington.  Miko graduated from Huxley College of the Environment and is  a graduate student at the University of the Ryukyus where she studies oceanography. She lives with uncle Yoshi and Midori at grandmother’s house where together they conspire and organize protests against the occupation at Futenma and other U.S. military bases .

I was thinking that the world was really nothing but an ever evolving network of relationship. We see at a distance and at once near and what is sacred is the mystery of it all and what bridges the mystery is our imaginative capacity to see through to the other side. To know who you are is to know where you are.

I have never been so in love.

Alex walked out of the bathroom in her short dark-blue kimono jacket embroidered with Japanese cranes. She smiled at me.

“Hey, what are you thinking?”, she asked.

“I am thinking about that Summer Tanager we saw on Sehome Hill today.”

“Ya, that was pretty cool. Are you jealous?”

“Jealous? No. Amazed – yes.”

Before her lecture, Alex and I took a walk along the trail on Sehome Hill that ran behind the university. It was another warm summery spring morning and we walked in the deep shade of Douglas Fir and Big Leaf Maple. I saw the bird first. A flash of yellow high in the canopy. I didn’t know what it was at first. Though they are about it is not that common to see Western Tanagers, in fact I had never seen one until then. So we stopped and looked as the bird flitted above us in the Big Leaf Maple. Then Alex tried to whistle it in closer.

“Watch this”, Alex said.

She gave a few short sharp whistles, the bird flitted again, I saw its read head. A male Western Tanager. Alex slowly raised her arm and at the same time, the bird fell through the shady space and descended squarely on her wrist.  The bird cocked its head, looked around as if to ask, “What am I doing here?” and flew down the trail as if it was all routine.

Alex crawled under the Milky Way Galaxy quilt and snuggled up next to me, loosened her kimono top, kissed me.

“Close your eyes Tommy. Relax. Don’t forget to breathe.”