My eyes tell me I’m somewhere else…

June 9, 2010

…

The woods led us onto the beach.  From here, we would walk about 12 miles of just flat beach.  I don’t think I’ve ever walked along the shore of any body of water for that long.  For most of the time, it was just me and my dad.  We were alone in this complex yet simple set of ecosystems converging together at one place.  The pacific ocean, the expanses of which stretch over a thousand times our limited vision of the horizon, to the far reaches of Asia, hugs the shores to our right with its constant and unrelenting crashing of waves.  On our left are tall, thick and lush green trees rising up and down along the edges of the mountains in which they are rooted.  In between the trees and ocean, we walk on mounds and mounds of dark brown sand, wet and shimmering and reflecting an overcast sky with its hidden yellow sun.  All the elements of this landscape are huge, overwhelming, colorful, and loud.  And somehow, we, human beings with our opposable thumbs and big heads walk this earth step by step.

…

June 11, 2010

I’ve never walked this much in my life.  Yesterday, we walked about 20 miles of mostly flat beach.  What goes on in our minds when we’re doing all this walking?  I’m not sure about my dad.  I sometimes half seriously believe that all that is going on in his mind is a goal and thoughts of ways to execute that goal.  Even if it’s just walking, he’ll be thinking, for example:

Okay, you see that rock 100 feet away?  Walk to it.  Walk to it completely.  Do it perfectly if you can.  Nothing else matters right now. 

Rock.  Walk. 

Granted, he has been a father and husband for 30 years and is probably habituated to feel the need to make sure everything is in place, everything is taken care of—to be responsible.  Perhaps a kind of point and shoot, plan and execute mentality has settled in. 

As for me, my mind pretty much wanders directionless as it normally does even when I’m not walking 450 miles along the beautiful coast of Oregon.  What is different of course, is what I see.  Today the tide was so low and the beach so wide that with just a slight effort of imagination, it was like we were walking along the deserts of Saudi Arabia.  A colder Saudi Arabia.  I’ve never been to Saudi Arabia.

I see pieces of seashells, both broken and whole, shoveled in a thousand places in the sand.  They are mostly white but sometimes green, red, or yellow and I think it’s litter.  Twice I’ve seen washed out sea lions lying on the beach as dry as death, covered in sand and cooked from the sun.  One was still barely alive.  It arched its head up and down as if to move its body along back into survival, but its body is too fat and heavy to go anywhere without floating in water.  I felt bad for it and kept walking. 

We also saw a huge isolated oak trunk standing about 10 feet in the middle of the beach.  I didn’t notice what it was, even two feet behind it, until my dad pointed it out.  I guess I’m not accustomed to seeing dead oak trees standing alone on the beach.

Another thing I’m not accustomed to seeing on the beach are half naked girls.  I saw one today and good thing I wasn’t with my dad.  An awkward moment happily escaped.  She was climbing the wall of a cliff with her back against the ocean and I couldn’t help but notice, from the angle of where I was in relation to her, that she might possibly be without a top piece.  She was far enough that I couldn’t exactly tell.  I could make out the well defined lines of a muscular pair of legs and assumed that she must be wearing a kind of skin colored thin top that camouflages itself.  But when I turned around to head back to our campgrounds, I saw her picking up her shirt and walking my way.  Well, she ended up not putting her shirt on and unleashed before my eyes a medium to large set of boobs.

Mile after mile we walked, never feeling the building impact in our legs and feet until we’ve stopped for a break and suddenly feel like hell.  We continue on, the pain goes away but continues to build only to be felt with a stronger force when we stop again.  Last night, in my sleeping bag, after all that walking, my feet felt like a rusty old, stiff antique.  I could crack and pop it in a hundred different points.  My feet were pulsating.  I didn’t feel sick or anything serious; just complete, wholly satisfying, deep sleep inducing exhaustion.

~ by sohndave on June 13, 2010.