Posts From the Coast

When I'm out West, I see the signs of past earthquakes. but I do not fear them. I dream of tsunamis.

Spending summers at the ocean as a child, I experienced more than one. The worst, Good Friday in 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America, at 9.2 magnitude, struck Anchorage, Alaska. Shifting tectonic plates displaced billions of tons of ocean water and sent tsunami waves rushing at the speed of a jetliner down the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The waves that rolled southward from the quakes epicenter were only three meters high when they crashed into Cannon Beach, where my family had a small cottage, and obliterated the town's highway bridge. Miraculously, only four people died. We were safely indoors, and I was ever so small, but I remember.

We always were taught never to turn our back on the ocean. I remember one rogue wave that hit while I was out looking for agates with my Mom. I saw her look up at the ocean and she looked at me and said "run!". The look dictated no argument, and we ran for our life up into the dunes, as a rogue wave several feet high crashed into the beach. No one was hurt, all things considered it wasn't a huge wave, but that adrenalin rush is still with me.

These giant waves came in my dreams for years after that. It was always the same. We're at the beach cottage and I see the water pull away from the shore, then the build up on the horizon in a wall of water. Water as tall as a building, poised to strike. And I run, and run and run.

Yet I'm not afraid of the ocean, and its shores, for it's where I came into myself, cleansed in ocean waters and formed by the winds that danced in tune with the waves.

Waves are part of life, the cadence of your day. The tides rise on average about nine feet, the edge of the sea sparkles like a fresh cut gemstone, open to possibility as far as you could see. The beach where I grew up is formed of glacial drift and sand, the small stones that you can still hold in the palm of your hand are worn to their element.

Too much trash is found, remnants of the fast paced, throw away life of man. Bottle caps and plastic bags, Styrofoam packing peanuts, and a bottle of Nehi soda. Yet among the trash some treasures area found, shells in varying degrees of purity, whelks and periwinkles and moon snails, jellyfish, starfish and sand dabs, bits of the oceans shimmering universe speckled with sand.

Once in 1970 a whale washed up, dead. It lay out there a stark reminder of its once mighty form, no longer able to return to the garden of the sea. Once it was hungry and strong and it swam, through the blue bottleneck of the deep, crashing up out of the water into the nets of the wind , into warm fields of sea spray only to be simply dark trash of the deep, it's empty form perfect and terrible.

We used to fly over pods of whales in my little Piper when I was doing cross country flight instruction while going to college in Portland. . Doing "turns about a point" over a moving mass of creatures took more skill than doing one over a tree, but I was careful so not to go so low as to alarm them, merely enough to say hello. Perhaps I think too much, but watching those whales felt like a lessor form of what I felt in looking at the world, the drive to know the consciousness of it, my growing humanness as I left my teen years to be a grown woman, the thoughts that were always sifting in my head, turning the power and a yoke of a small aircraft into winged swopes of grace. Turning towards my future, slowly and with deliberation, not charging away from it in fear. Following a different path.

Whales, as well, have followed a different path from ours, starting on land and then going to the deep waters, one of the great predators of the Eocene - archeocetes, huge crocodiley monsters with huge teeth, before mellowing into these great toothless mammals that live in social groups and nurture their young. Researchers have found that humpback whales have a type of brain cell seen only in humans, the great apes, and other cetaceans such as dolphins. The finding may help explain some of the behaviors seen in whales, the formation of alliances, cooperation, cultural transmission and of course the intricate communications. They vocalize about many things, food, danger, mating, through a complex system of sounds with lovely names like hauntings and trumpets. They whistle, they click, they sing; in multi toned themes that build toward sound to our world both complex and primeval, wrenched from the ocean floor.



Musical sound that speaks what can't be articulated.

The orca pods that live up near my brother R's home have individual dialects, and one pod member is charged with the task of teaching the young of the group how to vocalize. Whales species that like to sing have whales in each group that sing more than others, more accomplished, the rest listen more, the group composed of audience and performer. Humpback sounds when speeded up somewhat, sound almost like human music. What Scientist Donald Friggin at Harvard called "musical intelligence".

On those bright coastal days of discovery, I would fly over them, listening for their sounds, flying in accompaniment to music that only we could hear. As I watched them surface, I could see, if I used my binoculars with one hand, the crust of barnacles on their backs, the swooping air raids of birds that lived off the smaller lives the whales carry on them, kelp and bladderwort tangled on their form. They're like a small solitary moving planet, so whole and different they absorb our projections the way stars do.

As middle age rears it's ugly head, I've been reading about metabolism, the timing of our bodies, blood flows and heartbeats by which we learn to time the world around us. Our body's tempo is the measure that invents us. What's faster than our body rhythms, like a comet streaking across the sky, is fast, what's slower is slow. I learn in my studies that to the whales, with their slow metabolism, humans must appear speeded up. What do they think as they see us waving and jumping at the shore in greeting to them? Can they hear us, the too fast bird chirps of humans crying to one another on the shore? Can they listen to us, when in our rush of words we often don't even listen to one another. To them, if they can see us standing on the sand watching them, perched on the tiny granular remnants of the only world they know, man must appear to be too frantic and nervous to enjoy life. Too much movement, rushing here and there, running from waves, running from ourselves.

For myself, no matter what tsunami dreams bring me, I'm not longer running. When I see the whales, from above or from the shore, I hum along to the pod. They are so much of what I am right now, they could write my symphony. Solitary yet social, moving in the great waves of the sky, diving up and exhaling my lungs in a great burst of life, then swooping back down towards the dark blue, reveling in freedom, apologizing to no one.