Saturday and Sunday came on with a speed of wow as the sun catapulted Caroline and me into near-constant motion. With expected rain replaced by delightful blue skies, we used every moment to wander in the good fortune raining down upon our shoulders. After a weekend of this warm embrace by Oregon, we let ourselves celebrate that if this were the totality of our vacation we’d be satisfied by what we’ve already had. We also know that come next Sunday, after we’ve been out here for nine days, we’ll be lamenting that it’s already over.

Today we face a chance of rain, except we’ll never let it put a damper on our enthusiasm. We come to Oregon at this time of year by choice with the full knowledge we are flirting with the encounter of what others would call bad weather. We see this as offering us a full break from the oppressive nature of our Arizona summer while satisfying our need for winter.

The only problem that can really impact our time out here is that we are too busy and consequently too tired to tend to our respective crafting objectives. Caroline is always ready with the knitting needles, and me with a pen and paper or the virtual version which utilizes the keyboard I’m writing with right now.

Heavier clouds are trading places with the bit of sun that moments ago was still smiling on us through the windows of where we were having breakfast. We need to put getting caught up with this side of our vacation on pause and leave the comfort of the great indoors for the adventure of the great outdoors.

Our attempt at finding something to do started with Bolon Island, which wasn’t very well marked, so after a short drive up the river, we turned around and tested fate by driving the nearly 30 miles south to the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve in Charleston. With a 70% chance of rain today, we figured that no matter what we did, we’d be in our raincoats, but the weather held for our drive.

The Seven Devils Road that passes the slough has been driven by us more than a few times, but never did we put things together that up in this mountainous terrain, a path would cut through the forest, taking us down to sea level. There are a number of different trails that take us out to the slough, and with the threat of looming heavy clouds offshore, we choose an out-and-back trail that, if the weather proves too inclement, we can see a small corner of the wetlands and head back to the trailhead.

Down the often steep trail, the forest is dripping on us more than the sky. Another vibrant green magical environment has been discovered enchanting us with our first encounter. The path has been cut through a hillside that verges on a cliffside where the growth is so thick there are patches that look as though it’s the evening in there. Deeper we venture.

We cross a few bridges and, along the way, see some of the densest mushroom groves we’ve ever seen, veritable forests of mushrooms. Ferns, mosses, rotting multicolored leaves, barren branches, and evergreens are seen in every direction.

It dawns on me that had Bolon Island been better marked, we may have spent the morning there, and while on some future visit, we might still learn that we missed something grand there, we are astonished in being here. That word, astonishment, is likely used a bit too frequently here on my blog, just as beauty, love, wonderment, and a few more that lend themselves to extolling the sense of wow are also used more than I might wish.

Do you think these mushrooms make my blog look fat?

Let me beat a drum I’ve played on with many a previous blog entry where I’ve had to fawn over the people who cut these trails, built boardwalks, hauled steel and concrete into remote and difficult-to-access corners of our country so that on some random weekend people from all walks of life and a multitude of countries can take a leisurely stroll in nature.

How many people who live in western Oregon would question what is so appealing about this environment blanketed in luscious green moss? If they came to the Arizona Desert would their own poor vocabulary be reduced to a few superlatives used to exclaim their surprise at the contrast to what they know from back home? Then again, they may be part of the majority who travel over our planet and fail to see the intrinsic beauty to be found in every corner, even in the humble tumbleweed.

It’s not until we are approaching sea level and an overlook of the estuary that the rain starts to come down, and for a minute, it really comes down, but only for a minute. That one-minute cloud burst was nearly it, though we’d have one more moment of drizzle before we made the decision regarding which trail we’d take to return to our car.

Before that, we have plenty more to explore down here, where saltwater pushes deep inland to mix with fresh water. Much to our surprise, considering we feel like we are in the mountains or at least tall hills, we can hear the ocean from here. It makes sense when one considers this being an estuary and all, but it feels seriously far from the ocean.

There are remnants of an old rail line down here that was used for logging back long ago when all of the Redwoods were being removed from the coast. It’s as though our ancestors might have thought those trees were an ugly blight on the landscape that required clearing away for some faster-growing trees that could help create a thriving land-rape economy. That was back when fishing, too, was a lucrative business here on the coast. As long as greed was able to function, the rape continued unabated until depletion set it. Of course, depletion is just code for government intervention and control from Washington D.C. at the expense of jobs for hard-working people. If you think about this for a moment, if we are going to rape the land, why would we not want to rape the sea too? And seeing that our oceans are so much bigger, we’ve been able to do a lot more raping.

Maybe you are thinking that the smiling face of the guy in the red handknitted cap can’t be all that grumpy to talk in such dire terms about how we treat the land and sea? I am, after all, an aging white guy, born in upstate New York, married to a German (and we all know about their history), so I must be part and parcel of the herd of idiots who interpret everything through the filter of conspiracy and that the “man” is trying to keep down the righteous working man, right? Fucking wrong. I’m a tree-hugging (cactus, too) liberal bent on giving away everyone else’s hard-earned money to welcome the illegal alien zombie apocalypse onto our shores with free university and health care for ALL their babies as long as the trees and trails are kept clean by their children who are stealing all of our janitorial jobs.

Can you recognize the smoke coloring the reflection of the clouds in the water? That smoke is from the piles of unwanted tree-shit that are being burned to ash across the way where they are clear-cutting my soul. The haze of obfuscation created by lies might be another apt description.

This is the end of our trail as it has tipped over, taking our path with it. All of a sudden, I start to have images of the narrow spit of land we are walking on doing the same, and I have to fight the urge to flee.

Caroline, on the other hand, took off running. No, she didn’t, but that’s about the extent of the humor I can bring to this part of the story.

About now, I start thinking, even asking myself, why am I including so many photos that I’ll feel compelled to write about? The answer is easy: I have to because if I were reading my blog and saw these photos, I’d start to recognize that these moments are just one small part of a single day. If all of these beautiful images represent approximately nine late-fall/early-winter hours of this couple’s day on the coast, then imagine what a person could experience if they were out on the Oregon Coast on a summer day when visitors receive nearly 16 hours of daylight!

Not only would this visitor be able to explore the coast nearly every waking moment, but they’d typically do so in the effervescent brilliance of sunlight instead of the muted tones of an overcast day. So why don’t we see that luxury? Because we also understand this wetland would be infested with mosquitoes and overrun by families and pets screaming and shitting on every surface, meaning the soundscape and the trail my boots must go. At this time of year, the earth is primordial and apparently inhospitable to those who only find comfort in front of a television or smartphone. The earth is thus given over to Caroline and me alone.

We opted for the long way back. Enjoying each and every sight and smell down here, we could have stayed all day, though we felt we were still racing against the rain that would return. The rain never materialized after that earlier quick soaking; good thing we stopped the night before to pick up a raincoat for me just in case.

Some might see this scene as inanimate, but I see the person at home as having less life than plants. I’ve heard the stories that people cannot afford to travel like we do, that we are especially lucky. I can hardly believe that, though, seeing we are a high school graduate and a high school dropout. We didn’t inherit money, nor do we live off a trust fund, and yet this is our 211th venture away from home in the past 20 years. I simply think that people do not want to have a life outside of their convenient excuses used for why they can’t afford anything. The truth is they desire the bitterness of being a victim because of the lack of discipline to get what they want from life. Without an imagination fueled by reading and learning, their mind’s eye withers into a myopic cyclopean deformity stuck in the tunnel vision of repetition.

I feel like I’ve gone off-trail, and I’m ranting as I’m apt to do when I can’t leave well enough alone and rely on some flowery language to describe the oohs and aahs of delight found by my sappy side that would be well adorned with flowers in my hair. This is one of the pleasures of blogging for nobody but myself as, in my view, nobody ever reads these missives anyway, so I could just as well write blah blah and get the same response. Someday though, when I’m old and no longer able to put myself in these situations where we’re exploring nature or I’m looking down my nose at the masses, I’ll have Caroline or my newest smartphone reading this crap back to me so I can relish how pretentious I was in my mid-50’s.

Hmmm, pretentiousness is kind of like the road to nowhere in that it will not bring your soul to happiness, just as the road to nowhere will not take you to a place. But what if the road to the unknown is painted in golden and silvery light? I suppose the destination can only be deciphered by what you’ve brought with you in your head that can be used to interpret what you’ve seen.

The metaphors across the landscape keep coming, but how will I use this bridge to help fill the story of this third day exploring the coast? How about I give it a break and let you know that this bridge is being posted for no other reason than it is one of Caroline’s all-time favorite bridges as far as iron structure, color, form, and placement between land areas are concerned.

This photo right here would have been a great finish to the day with a kind of Eye of Horus look of things, but we weren’t done with using every ounce of daylight that was offering us different perspectives of the universe around us.

A portal or bay window on our spaceship is showing us the horizon of a distant planet. Instead of finding these views on the movie screen, we have opted to find them in reality.

That’s rain in the distance with the approaching storm blotting out our sun and our hope of seeing the stars. There’s a silver lining here (or gold in our case): if it rains, it’ll make our last night here at Umpqua Lighthouse all the better as the patter of raindrops on a canvas yurt is the elixir of sleep.