My Transcendent Vision at Netarts Bay

My brother Fred, Lance the authentic outdoorsman, Eric (expert at interpreting Boston accents), and I stood in the sand at the edge of Netarts Bay. Across the bay, the Netarts peninsula gleamed enticingly through the cool, hazy exhalation of the ocean. We had heard that the peninsula (a spit really) was a promised land of clams and crabs and we all carried shell fish licenses, shovels, rakes and collectively, a crab pot.

Standing on the shore, we could feel the ocean in the act of respiration, breathing in and out with great twelve hour breaths. It had been breathing in all morning, filling its great watery lung to capacity, and now at last the ebbing tide slackened, was quiet and still, and began changing direction. We set out into the rising tide having deduced a statistically improved chance of not being swept out to sea by doing so.



Well…we almost all set out. The inflatable raft which was meant to carry supplies that wouldn’t ordinarily fit into a kayak turned out to have a hole in it so big that I wasn’t even able to finish filling it with air. Fortunately, I remembered there was a patch kit in the pouch that held my air mattress. Would the patch kit be compatible with the rubber in the raft? Would the glue be robust enough to work in a matter of minutes without extended curing time? Was there more than one hole? A wiser man would have determined the answers to these questions before setting sail (but this shouldn’t be taken as subtle foreshadowing regardless of how it sounds... I promise).




What looked like low cloud cover revealed itself to be the moist breath of the Pacific spilling back toward the shore, kissing us with fishy halitosis no worse than a chowder house kitchen. It gently descended ever lower until our sphere of vision was limited to what might as well be the underside of a finite white soup bowl. The peninsula disappeared and we were left to feel our way through a maze of anonymous sandbars.

Photo Credit: Eric Meyers copyright 2009

This is usually the point in a Twilight Zone episode where the subjects of the story unwittingly enter some anomalous time/space portal and land on an unexpected shore, perhaps infested with giant intelligent crabs (but this isn’t an example of foreshadowing either).

Photo Credit: Eric Meyers copyright 2009

Landing on some undisclosed shore, the expedition secured the watercraft and set about acquiring dinner. Earlier that morning Lance the authentic outdoorsman had, with an egg-in-a-muffin fast-food sandwich in hand, vowed to live off the land for the duration of the adventure, eating only those things he would be able to catch with his own cunning. It was therefore important, for his sake, to discover where the clams were hiding (and to classify beer as a liquid and not a food).

In the above picture, Fred (at left) asks Lance (at right) to check our location on GPS to determine if we are in the legal shell fish collection zone. Lance answers, I don’t know about that, but I have a location on those Netarts hookers I tagged (meaning the application of radio transmitters) last time. Eric (in the middle) says I hope they’re not dawgs.

Lance was piloting something called an aqua-pod.

I think it was invented by Archimedes and may be the original prototype. It proved to be a remarkably stable platform from which Lance felt completely comfortable wearing hip boots (O.K… that last sentence may very well be subtle foreshadowing).

We started out feeling like we should stick together, just in case anything should go wrong. But like children with attention deficit disorder, we quickly began drifting off (literally).

Photo Credit: Eric Meyers copyright 2009

Lance: [Exasperated (and growing hungry)] That’s the third time I’ve pulled the crab-pot up empty and this time the bait has been replaced with a giant sea-lion turd.

Scott: (Only half paying attention) Have you noticed everyone else is simply marking their crab pots with unmanned Styrofoam buoys?

Lance: (Killing another beer) The thing that puzzles me is how they manage to open and close the door.

Scott: (Joining the others on shore) What? I can’t hear you!

Sea Lion: (quietly giggling)

With the crab bait exhausted, Fred valiantly attempted to catch perch to restock the crab-pot. I remember getting this crazy idea that maybe, if Fred did catch perch, we could actually eat the perch. I wondered if Lance would eat perch or if he had his heart set on crab, but before I could ask, we all happened to notice that Lance (formerly on the aqua-pod) had, through some miscalculation of over-confidence, fallen overboard.

I suppose with the hip boots on, he never really had a chance. Looking at the bright side, we were able to solve the bait situation by pinning Lance’s lifeless body to the crab-pot with an old piece of rebar. I think Lance would have wanted it that way.

If Fred seemed unsuccessful at fishing, it wasn’t because there were no fish.

Other fisher-species seemed to be doing very well.

Back in Portland, people were sweltering in triple digit temperatures, but we were swaddled in a cool ephemeral blanket of fog.

We could hear the ocean waves crashing on the shore, but couldn’t see them.

Lance demonstrates the Claw position

Before the advent of hydrogen bombs, primitive man had to defend himself with somewhat less sophisticated weaponry. Sticks and stones naturally lent themselves to offensive purposes. However, in mankind’s ongoing evolutionary arms-race, dominance is sometimes achieved through the development of strategic martial arts that utilize items at hand in unexpected ways. Crab-Fu is one such art form.

Lance achieves dominance, even though his crab is considerably smaller.

When thrown correctly, tossed crabs will travel in a long elliptical path back to their starting point.

A crab beginning to realize the implications of a pot of boiling water.

One of the things I’m really beginning to appreciate about expensive restaurants is the care that is taken with ambiance and presentation.

Not accustomed to heavy drinking, I none-the-less had been sampling from a bottle of rum for the better portion of the day, and as darkness surrounded the bonfire, other exotic beverages began to be passed around. While I had been careful, generally, to dilute the rum with large volumes of cola, the custom introduced around the fire was to take straight slugs from bottles.

Soon, everything was funny. Everyone became wise and profound. Everyone was my best friend. I stopped worrying about work. I thought maybe the world would be O.K.

I sat with my back against a driftwood log and watched the fire dance and spark and listened to the stories and jokes and the teasing and the warm laughter and felt like I belonged and thought maybe I would be O.K. too…until I stood up, teetered dangerously, realized that I could no longer balance, and plopped over into the sand just short of the glowing coals.

It took all my concentration to keep the beach from tilting back and forth, so much so that I found I was no longer able to meaningfully participate in the late night conversation. I stumbled outside the ring of fire-light into the cold darkness, looking for my kayak. My mind seemed somehow compartmentalized from my body and merely noted that tough beach grass grabbed at my legs and hid various scrubby brush things that bloodied my shins when I stepped into them. My brain was none to fastidious about recording these events, but fortunately, had also quit bothering to send pain signals. When I finally found the kayak, I sensed that assembling the tent was not in the realm of possibility for me so I settled for a blanket and tipped over into the deflated life raft and don’t remember anything else.

Where do we go in dreamless sleep?

I’m uncomfortable I think. My cheek is lying on a gritty air mattress (but shouldn’t an air mattress have air in it?). It’s sand. It’s gritty sand on the air mattress. I can taste it. I can feel it on my teeth. And my glasses… they’ve bent onto my face and dug into the side of my nose. I’m wrapped in a flannel blanket that’s soaked with sparkling globes of cold condensate. The air mattress has walls, like a tub. So it isn’t an air mattress, it’s a life raft. It’s puzzling but it’s also dark and cold. Go back to sleep. Figure it out in the morning.

Gears start turning in a sluggish brain. “You’ve just wakened from unconsciousness in a life raft.” It informs me, “You ought to be curious about that.”

Was there a plane crash? Am I in a survival situation? The gears start turning faster. I stand up but nothing makes sense.

The raft is afloat on a sea of grass and rivers of water are flowing through the sky. Stars, the size of basketballs, shine radiantly in the night. It is a magnificent panorama that can be seen nowhere on Earth…

…oh.

…well. The first thing I felt was relief. I wouldn’t have to go to work on Monday. The next thing I felt was curiosity. What next? And finally I felt excitement. I was going to find out answers.

But then the next thing I felt after that was the old familiar sensation of having to pee real bad. Looking around, I noticed my kayak and the kayaks belonging to the others. That’s right I remembered, we were going to go camping. Then that would make this the sand spit, and the last thing I remember was the bonfire…

Instantly, the alien landscape snapped back into perspective. The rivers in the sky morphed into silver streams of receding tide water trailing off into the distance. The unnatural stars became the windows of the houses shining through the mist across the bay.

…not a transcendent moment at all.

Just drunk…

WASHINGTON ROADTRIP / ONLY TWO CDs

A plaintive yodel emerges from static on the radio as my car crests another hill. I think it could be Hank Williams and marvel that a human voice in a scratchy recording can cross time, defy death, and thereby interact with the living. I snatch snippets of song from the static like moments of sunlight streaming through the dappled shade of an immense oak. The road descends into a valley and the static roars and the strident condemnation of some holy faker (adopting the cadences of a Martin Luther King speech) overwhelms simple beauty with bankrupt religiosity (apparently content doesn’t matter as long as it’s punctuated with plenty of ‘Jesuses).

I punch the console and switch to one of only two CDs I find in the newspaper, maps and camping miscellaneously slowly growing in the unoccupied passenger seat. Regina Spektor sings:
“He stumbled into faith and thought,
‘God, this is all there is?’”



This lyric out of context launches a cascade of fledgling responses.

He stumbled into a scientific world view and thought, the world is full of mysteries, and we can’t even adequately define life…time to think of an experiment.

Or

Later that night after parking at Palouse State Park, I set out the sleeping bag in the bed of my pickup and lay there looking up at a shockingly incandescent Milky Way (there being no nearby hub of light pollution). It’s just a portion of an arm of our own spiral galaxy in a universe of such galaxies and overwhelmed, I quietly asked, ‘God, this is all there is?’ and enjoyed the irony of it and fell asleep smiling for a change.




Some time ago, I went to a lecture/presentation at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center (in The Dalles) that dealt with Ice Age Floods. It gave Bruce Bjornstad, author of On the Trail of the ICE AGE FLOODS, a promising venue to peddle his book. Evidently, back at the end of the last Ice Age, when huge prehistoric ice beavers roamed the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, substantial glacial lakes formed behind their poorly engineered ice dams. When the dams failed, walls of water so tall that you’d think Mr. Bjornstad was just making crap up would rush across Washington and carve unique river canyons along tectonic faults in the layered basalts of the Mid-Columbia Basin. Palouse Falls and its canyon are said to be artifacts of this dynamic process.

Plumber’s Crack National Monument
(An example of a fault)

You’d think a story like that would draw big crowds of voluptuous geology coeds but most of the people at the lecture were evidently on some field trip from an old folk’s home and were under the mistaken impression that they had entered the cafeteria. When Mr. Bjornstad opened the floor for discussion, the first question he got was from a cranky old man who demanded to know why the chairs had been rearranged. That spurred a little bewildered blue haired lady, craning her head up and down to peer through massive bifocals, to ask where the tables had gone, what were they to do with their plates when they got them, and speaking of plates, when were they going to be served.




Ice dams failed so often and so completely that the prehistoric beavers who depended on them eventually became extinct. Even so, gnawed basalt sculptures stand in mute testimony to the giant rodent’s resilient front teeth.

Hikers in the Columbia Gorge are often coddled by trails that have about as much to do with getting in touch with the wilderness as does an amusement park ride for very stupid children.

This is not so much the case in Podunk Washington where ill defined trail systems tend to weed out outdoorsmen who can’t tell the difference between an established path and a marmot trail.

Following a marmot trail back around a ridge to the top of the falls, I found myself in a zigzag canyon that tended to support the idea that opportunistic descending water long ago took advantage of faults and other weaknesses in stacked basalt layers to pursue a path of least resistance.

Still, if something half of the size of Lake Michigan scoured out this landscape as it poured to the ocean in a cataclysmic flood, the scarred cliffs have since been busy methodically hiding the evidence by tossing down rocks now and then to soften the harsh edges.

This I imagine is part of god’s great plan to lure evolving hominids back into proximity of life sustaining water and fertile valleys where new cities and cultures can take root and grow up for the next great cycle of apocalypses.

Regina Spektor lyrics arc from synapse to synapse,
“God can be funny… … when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini

Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus"

“…God can be so hilarious”

Regina Spektor

“The pictures in his mind arose

And began to breathe

And all the gods and all the worlds

Began colliding on a backdrop of blue…”

Regina Spektor

Today, we sit atop windblown dunes of silt and dust and clay (loess) that with a little prodding have become some of the most productive agricultural lands the world has ever seen.

This also is the fruit of the last Ice Age, when the glaciers descended from the north, chewing and regurgitating the mountains in their paths – tenderizing stone.

…processing the layers of lava and crust laid down from the beginning…

…so that in an instant of time - a blink in the history of a universe - life dances across the surface of a rock hurtling through the vastness of space...

I stumbled into Washtucna seeing miracles in every direction.

Stars collapse and explode, comets slam into Jupiter and whiz past our orbit, volcanoes detonate, the earth quakes and folds…

… floods periodically scour the land…

…the pattern of decomposition is written in the crystals of formation…

…and the first replicator’s imperative to multiply and be fruitful is passed on in an unbroken line, encoded and kept safe in the heart of every living cell.