Right in front of you, the world could have changed, but how would you know? Do you think it will be obvious? At first, everything looks like it’s in its place, and you have no reason to doubt that things are as they should be. Maybe you should go have a closer look.

The anemones are where they should be. They look healthy, pretty even. Maybe you wonder why there are no sea stars here or mussels? Have they ever been here on this beach?

Look ashore; things look dandy over there, even inviting, but this part of the walk has us walking next to the surf. There are clues to something afoot. I took a photo of it and was oblivious to what was in the frame. We kept heading south, walking along on our way as though it was just another day.

We stop to wonder why these blue spots are on a nearby rock exposed by the low tide. It only took a second to deduce that there had been barnacles attached there. We try to figure out why the point of contact would be blue but we never thought for a second that maybe there’d been barnacles living here in greater numbers just recently.

As we strolled along, I noticed a hole in the rock well before Caroline, and even after pointing it out, it took her a while to notice the parallax occurring with the background behind the hole. There it was, right in front of us. We’d walked the length of the beach to get here, and now we could approach it to see what was on the other side.

Our view was of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse. I searched the internet looking for someone else who might have snapped this photo, too, but I came up with nothing. Has no one else seen this yet, or is it simply not compelling enough?

A clam fossil looking mighty old embedded in the rock. But how old is it? Is it really a clam, or could it be a Panopea Abrupta, which is an extinct cousin of the geoduck? There are many fossils all around us at the end of the beach, which I should point out is only the end of the beach because the surf is high enough not to allow us to navigate around the cliffside with the hole in it.

There are many fragments, but of course, it’s the more intact and recognizable pieces that draw me in. I can look right past the white flecks of broken pieces because I’m going to see what I want to see. But what if those small remnants were part of something really amazing? I can’t know that, as I’m not trained to see that type of detail. It’s kind of like Donald Johanson walking in the desert of Ethiopia when he spots a bone fragment among the rocks and discovers Australopithecus afarensis, better known as Lucy. I’m under no illusion we’ll find something that important, especially because these fossils are said to be about 18 million years old and are from the sea, but the point is, I wouldn’t know what I was looking at even if I was staring right at it.

This particular shell is bigger than my hand and makes me wonder why we never see shells this size here onshore. Are there mollusks this size right here in the ocean? Which one of the 85,000 mollusk types is this one? The snarky answer is obvious: it’s a dead one. With a bit of research after we left the beach, it turns out that this might be a member of the Pectinidae family, otherwise known as a scallop.

Then it finally dawns on me after being out here for well over an hour; there’s been a serious landslide here recently. How did I miss this? We’ve been walking along the ocean only 60 feet away, and I didn’t notice this. There are fallen trees in that photo of the cliffside eight photos ago that totally slipped by me. Only on our way back up the coast did I notice them, as I was by then studying all the signs that some land here was slipping towards the sea. Was this due to the recent king tides and heavy rains? Later, I asked at our front desk, but the clerk hadn’t even heard about landslides just down the beach from her.

Between taking an inventory of areas that I’m assuming plunged recently, I continued to be momentarily transfixed by so many easily accessible fossils being on display. I started searching my memory of our visit back in 2018 and can only remember the various hues of clay and the sculpted cliffsides that drew my focus into them, but fossils were not part of the landscape. Are these widely scattered signs of the earth’s past only on display because of a recent major disruption in the fabric of the coast?

Buried in the sand was a shell that Caroline believed was a recent one that washed in on the current. She grabbed at it only to find it attached to something below the sand; it is now part of rock along with another mollusk shell, keeping its petrified cousin company across the millennia.

This entanglement of seaweed is here not as evidence of earth movement or ocean history but is featured because Caroline is enchanted by these displays of sea spaghetti.

The stuff I was photographing back in 2018 is mostly covered like this. Why shouldn’t the coast be radically different two years after our initial visit to this beach? That our return is not the same as it was should come as no surprise, and in some ways, it’s not, what’s more surprising is that we were just over at the water’s edge and weren’t noticing any of this. While I may not want to mix politics and vacation, I can’t help but think how many people close to a particular conservative persuasion are failing to see a drift to the extreme right when it’s right in front of them.

We see murky bluish water nearby and then walk past this huge rusty cavern of water emerging from a slice in the cliffside. While we can clearly see the rust-colored staining going on, we can’t offer anything else on why it’s happening or where its origins are. We can note it but are lost in interpreting it. I wish we had a geologist with us right now. The damned thing is, we met a guy, also named John, further down the beach, who is a geologist and told us the story about the Astoria Formation that these fossils are located in and that they here are about 18 million years old. Sadly, we couldn’t keep him with us as a guide to interpret every little thing we are seeing.

Sea-bleached wood rubbed smooth after being tossed against cliffs and abraded with sand is turned into art over time. Dragging something back to Arizona, unfortunately, is not possible as the most beautiful pieces probably weigh close to a thousand pounds or more.

Images such as this are similar to what I shot a couple of years ago. I stand in astonishment that clay can rehydrate after being locked away for thousands and possibly millions of years. Don’t quote me on that, but this is my observation, considering where the clay is and where the fossils are. Even when you want to accurately interpret reality, and the information is out there somewhere, it’s not always easy to have much more than an opinion. And opinions are not facts.

We are getting closer to our motel up the cliffside, and it is precisely this view that enamored my senses on our first visit and seemed to be prevalent then. Are there still many other sights like this one down the coast but buried under landslides, or is my memory not particularly accurate?

This is not the work of some Coastal Banksy character who graffitis local cliffsides to trick visitors into thinking their weed has them hallucinating. Now that I’m in my room writing about this, I wonder why we didn’t dig some of this blue clay out of the beach to take home and make something from it. Maybe tomorrow we’ll do some harvesting?

There was supposed to be a wildly enthusiastic video of Caroline digging in for the first bite of our 8-pound SUPER ULTIMATE MONSTER BURGER! For my readers outside the United States, this burger weighs in at 3.7kg. This epic creation from Newport Cafe down the road really is as wide as my wife and twice as big as her head. Why is there no video? As I started filming, I was wondering why Caroline’s eyes started twitching, except that was no twitch; she was blinking in Morse code for someone to save her from her idiot husband, who thought it was a good idea to go fetch this $36 thing. So I asked for an enthusiastic smile; instead, her retort was something like this, “You got me to share that ridiculous 4-pound Ultimate Monster back in 2012, then a few years later, in 2015, we did it again. In 2017, I successfully talked you out of the 8-pounder with the concession that we’d share a 4-pound Ultimate Monster; yet again, I thought we were done that time. By 2019, I thought we were making progress when we got the puny 3-pound Monster burger, and now you go and spring this on me? I may like their burgers, but what’s next, a 16-pound Double Ultimate Monster Burger?”

Thanksgiving 2021 holds promise for new culinary adventures, and I can thank my enthusiastic wife for her brilliant ideas and for giving in to my slightly outrageous whims.

It was get out and walk in the rain or pass out till Wednesday. How much of that 8-pound behemoth did we manage to eat? It looks like finches pecked at it there’s so much left. We’ll try folding some of it into an egg scramble in the morning if we can face it. Okay, maybe I’m lying, as you can probably see in my smile that I ate the whole thing. A lot of walking was needed to shake the lethargy brought on by our crazy indulgence, so enough about gluttony and down the beach we go.

There’s no one else out here, and the tide is on its way up. While there’ll be no sunset in this gray soup of fog and rain, we are still mesmerized by the entire experience. To walk along the ocean is a luxury we cherish.

It was a short walk, really, as our path took us north due to our going south in the morning. We reached a stream we were not comfortable crossing, so we turned around to hit the part of the beach we’d trekked earlier. Is anyone interested in buying 6 pounds of leftover burger?