The Narrative Image

The Columbia spanning bridge at Astoria Well…just about one holiday ago, with my kayak strapped to my car, I headed back to Willapa Bay. This time I was determined to successfully use a tide table to help me safely cross over to Long Island while there was still actually water in the bay. However, once the weekend started in earnest, so did the rain. I don’t mind cool weather and a little bit of rain, but this spring’s prolonged rainfall, and the increasingly foreboding incidence of animal pairs traveling towards a single large boat in the Middle East made me reconsider my plan to maroon myself on an island. I wandered in and around the Long Beach peninsula for the better part of a day…but there was none of the frenzied clam killing that I witnessed the last time I visited. …just a long beach. I wasn’t very impressed with Jake, the Alligator Man, who resides at Marsh’s Free Museum. (I wonder if this is what Aldous Huxley meant when he used the word ‘pneu...

My friends who hunt with bows and arrows sometimes speak almost in poetic terms about the contest of wits between their ‘game’ and them. Unfortunately, a time honored tradition among hunters states that, “What happens in Elk Camp stays in Elk Camp” (unless Cousin Joe starts drinking too much and starts blabbing), so I’m a little sketchy on all the details. It is hard to imagine that bringing human weapons technology (state of the art carbon fiber compound bows, GPS positioning devices, two-way radios, house-size 4-wheel drive pickups and generous aliquots of ‘synthetic?’ elk urine) to bear on grazing herbivores can be considered a fair contest. However, once, while in my canoe, I surprised a herd of elk coming to get water at the side of a lake and I’m pretty sure I caught the members of that highly organized gang “talking” to each other. The elk sentries, who hadn’t expected a threat to appear from the water, bugled a short series of commands in an efficient battle language, and sud...