The ocean is dark this morning under stormy skies. At the moment, the winds haven’t arrived, and so without further ado, we breached the comfort of shelter to venture into the potentially wet day. As always, when out on the Oregon coast, we are excited to see what comes next; at this point, we are just hoping for breakfast and a walk. I did get the order of things backward here because we stopped at Stonefield Beach to see the differences between yesterday’s low tide and the approaching high tide this morning.

The view was disorienting as things shifted so dramatically that the only certainty was our uncertainty regarding just where we’d been. There wasn’t a reflective beach or a thing signifying what we’d seen.

To our left on the south end of the beach, I find familiarity with that little cabin atop the cliff where, late yesterday, I snapped a photo of Caroline to the west of it out in what is now the ocean.

Standing between the cliffs and the sea, I try to decipher what is visible and wonder if there’s any opportunity to determine just where we are, but it all looks so foreign. It’s as though amnesia struck overnight, leaving us with only the name of the place we’d been while erasing most everything else. It also seems that even now, back in Arizona, while I’m trying to write about that morning, the ocean is still playing a game of amnesia with me, denying my imagination the words that might convey other aspects aside from the obvious.

Just like staying out here on the shore under uncertain circumstances regarding what the weather would bring, I’ll remain vigilant, sitting before these images and looking for that change in the situation that will inspire an interpretation of things no matter how difficult it may be.

With a tiny, nearly imperceptible amount of wind starting to pulse, it was time for the kid in this relationship to break out her kite that had been stowed away for such an opportunity. Running upon the rocks didn’t work out, so we headed back to the sandy part of the beach where Caroline could really give it a go.

For a full minute or two, the elation of flight took hold, as seen in her smile, but as the wind died, so did her hope until, once again, her invisible friend grabbed hold of the kite and tried pulling it high into the sky. Again, smiles climb upon her face as she starts to sense mastery over the one sport she might be good at.

Spotting this perfect cairn, we realized it was pointing us to breakfast, and so we accepted its guidance and headed into town. Yachats is a tiny outpost with barely 1,000 people living here, and yes, I wish we were two of them. Services are thin, although there are around a dozen restaurants that, at this time of year are not open at the same time. We had two options and went with the somewhat sad place we’ve eaten at before that will remain unnamed to help a business that’s likely not making anyone rich. It served its purpose. Sitting at the window, we watch as the wind kicks up and, with it, the rain racing northward. Our hopes of taking up a table at the Green Salmon Coffee House are dashed as they are closed today through Friday; the same goes for the Bread & Roses Bakery. The only thing left to do is go plant ourselves in the Nest if we don’t get distracted on the way back.

If you don’t think I got worried when Caroline voiced her desire to go fly her kite on our tiny deck sitting atop a steep cliff, you’d be wrong, as in my imagination, it wasn’t beyond impossible that a sharp wind would take her and that pocket kite aloft and drop her a couple of miles out to sea. I could only bite my nails and hope she’d know the right moment to let it go. Luckily, the wind was so strong that all the kite wanted to do was dive into the bushes to hide from the insane forces beating it into submission. Caroline, now equally beaten, conceded defeat and brought herself back into the warmth of our cabin overlooking the raging tempest.

Between staring mindlessly out the window and trying to write a thing or two, I tended to a pot of black-eyed peas that would certainly be the comfort food befitting a wet gray day.

On the far north side of our deluxe chateau, Caroline took to the Barcalounger (which happened to be invented in Buffalo, New York, where I was born) and with yarn from Cambria, California, (picked up recently on a trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium), she sat oceanside in front of a massive picture window with her cup of Heiße Liebe tea (Hot Love) to work on my newest pair of socks. Not that Hot Love tea is necessary for such moments but this looks like love to me.

Sitting before our window at the Shags Nest or sitting in a coffee shop, there are times when the mind would rather meditate. There’s a need in all of us at times to allow the lines to blur and let the uncertainty of what comes next take hold, to just kick back and listen to the full length of a favorite album or watch the surf roll in.

A lot of nothing has passed by though somehow we remained busy in that nothing. The black-eyed peas allowed us to stay in, enjoying one of our favorite comfort foods while not budging from our perch. As the day went on, it appeared that we might be able to start growing moss due to our near-total lack of activity.

But then the clouds started breaking up. Always in need of accumulating more steps on our path to walking into better health, we decided to go check out Bob Creek though I figured we’d quickly pack it in and return to Stonefield for more hopeful encounters with wild sea creatures temporarily living outside of the ocean.

Just then, the Eye of God looked down from the sky and commanded us to give good ‘ole Bob Creek a proper chance, and, well when God speaks, atheists listen.

Oh wow, tidepools featuring exotic lifeforms we’d never witnessed before! I thought this would sound better than saying we’re just seeing plain old mundane sea stuff we’ve seen a hundred other times, which wouldn’t be true either because neither Caroline nor I have ever seen a barnacle that wasn’t far more interesting than any Kardashian or wet noodle clinging to our colander.

Mussels with barnacles provide space for other barnacles. It turns out that mussels attach to other mussels using excreted stringy fibers called byssal threads. While working with adhesive threads is interesting enough, it is the barnacle that is truly amazing when it comes to attaching itself to things. You see, before it settles down, the baby barnacle is adrift looking for a suitable home; when it finds one, it uses body fat to clean and sterilize the surface. Once that is done, they deploy a mixture of six different proteins to glue themselves to their perch, be it on a whale, ship, rock, turtle, mussel, or another barnacle. This glue is said to be multiple times more adhesive than anything made by humans.

This obviously brings me to the size of the barnacle penis, which, Caroline informed me, is the largest in proportion to the body size of all species on Earth. A little bit of internet searching confirms this, but my imagination takes it to frightening lengths. First, I’m seriously intrigued that the lowly barnacle is able to change the size and shape of its penis to meet local conditions for mating, but it is the length that baffles the mind. I need to put this in perspective: the average American male is approximately 5 foot 9 inches tall or 175 centimeters. If we could whip out what barnacles can, there would be situations where our penis would be a respectable 552 inches long or about 46 feet in length (14 meters). At this point, I think our wieners would be weapons, and I, for one, wouldn’t appreciate the guy behind me in traffic on a summer day with my windows down casting his tool into my car, maybe even into my back seat, looking to mate. If penis length is the root of all intelligence and power, as many men believe them to be, then the barnacle should be the hero of any young man’s youth.

Comparatively, there are thousands of miles, possibly a million or more miles of penis before me.

As far as I know, and not that I’m willing to research information on this particular type of seaweed, there is nothing very peculiar that should be found or shared concerning this plant. Heck, I don’t even know the name of this seaweed, so I’ll call it Suzie.

There’s nothing left to tell you about anemones nor of my most obvious impressions of delight that are taken when seeing these meat eaters. Oh wait, there is that small detail about its mouth being its anus.

I think these anemones might have swallowed some raver’s glow sticks during a beach party.

Hi blue sky, nice of you to come out to see us! Might you be letting some sun through your veil in order to astonish us with another majestic sunset?

There’s something about these rocks that feel as if they’d been sculpted by fast-moving water like that running through a river. Was Bob Creek at one time a river bed?

Like sunburned skin, these rocks appear to be peeling. Upon closer inspection, it looks as though sheets of barnacles were removed, but after just learning about their superglue qualities, the question arises: how’d this happen so uniformly across areas?

While I can speculate about the various species temporarily exposed to our senses out here, and I can use the internet to learn more about them after I go home, I cannot really know where Caroline is when she stands before the ocean and examines the scene. If I ask her, the answer is likely to come back that she’s just looking at stuff, but what does she feel? What is offering her wow moments? Are we seeing the same things, or are our eyes focusing on absolutely different things?

While the sea stars capture my eyes first, it is the more than 50 anemones that got me thinking about how they decorate their body as they do. While they are curled up with their tentacles withdrawn, maybe the camouflage helps them avoid predatory crabs because at night, while the anemone sleeps, the nocturnal crab is out looking for food.

In an effort to demonstrate fair representation and give an example that I don’t have a bias for orange sea stars, I present you with no less than half a dozen purple sea stars, or are they burgundy in color?

In a pinch, sea stars will eat anemones, but what they are really interested in is the abundance of mussels that live here on the rocky shore.

I can’t say I’ve explicitly thought or expressed this before, but these excursions and the subsequent photo prep and writing requirements hold Caroline and me in these environments well after we’ve left a place we were visiting. The lingering begins as I bring photos in for cropping and color adjustments, and then I identify where each was taken. As one day is finished, Caroline joins me to whittle the selection down to the best representations and I guarantee you that there’d be a lot fewer images posted here if it were up to my ruthless wife. And then, if I have taken notes, those are transcribed from the notebook as I work to decipher my handwritten words. As those are matched to photos, there are huge gaps between images because there is no way to write in the field about specifics, and who knows which photos and impressions will find their way here? During what amounts to rewriting what’s in the notebooks, I also find inspiration to write about particular images due to something or other that’s striking me at that moment. Finally, I set down to fill the empty spaces. In the case of this post, it’s now 31 days after we stood at these tide pools, and we are still, in a sense, visiting the Oregon coast. One last thing: before this ever gets pushed to the public, Caroline applies her deft editing hand to bring (or at least attempt to bring) to clarity those things I found relevant, capturing memories we’ll hopefully return to in many years to come.

To belabor a point, I’m not playing video games, watching TV, or otherwise wasting my time with frivolous things as this adventure continues to travel within me during the weeks since we left the seashore. I find this luxury to be incredibly valuable: instead of impressions of vacation being made and quickly fading, I indulge in examining details over and again to possibly know more intimately what would otherwise be difficult to carry with me.

A moment arrives when I see glimmers of insight that I’m the foible; my desire for knowledge driven by curiosity is a weakness as it informs my disappointment that so many in our species do not truly share that quality. It is here at what amounts to a mussel farm that I see that many of these mussels will be sacrificed as food for birds, sea stars, fish, and even us humans. So, it behooves the local mussel population to just keep cranking out mussels as its evolutionary knowledge understands that the greater the number, the greater the chances of surviving all disasters or sacrifices. Why have I failed to see this behavior in people? I’m often crushed by human stupidity and don’t want to accept that it is our norm, but why should the average person be any smarter than a mussel? Their presence is to ensure there are seeds and eggs available tomorrow should something catastrophic befall us. In this sense, what I consider stupid is nothing more than the norm, and I the anomaly, an intolerant foible of our species’ presence who simply isn’t happy sitting on the rock attached to a million clones who don’t mind being part of the collective.

I am transfixed by this inky pool that rarely exists. It can only appear during negative tide situations while the rings are created by the water dripping from the mass of mussels hanging overhead. As surrounding rock is eroded by the motion of the sea, making what looks like toadstools above the ocean floor, the harder rocks obviously make for a great home if you are a mussel, barnacle, sea star, or anemone. The patterns that ripple across the surface are trance-inducing. If I had the proper equipment, a video might better allow me to experience them again, but instead, I prefer to rely on images and words to freeze what once captured my attention. I’m guessing the mussels around me give little care to the evolving aesthetics and only look forward to the comfort of the sea and returning to the place they know so well.

At this very moment, I was cultivating my inner barnacle and working on a new shape.

We walk below the sun, below the sky, and this late afternoon, we are offered the chance to walk below the surface of the sea that would typically cover this edge of the shore. There’s nothing easy about leaving here as long as there’s light that allows us to find our footing. We attempt to go further, hoping that more of the mysteries all around us are revealed.

We use art to bring impressions to people who are not able to witness the breadth of patterns for themselves. Those with the great fortune of seeing rare sights or having been able to cultivate great thoughts bring back approximations of what things look like or how they might be thought of. In this way, the anomalies of our species task themselves with bringing culture back to the tribe, possibly in order to elevate all of us from the ground we are fastened to.

A triptych by Mark Rothko could hardly compete but if it were the only possibility for a city dweller to see such a thing, I suppose the surrogate will have to do.

There’s no pussyfooting around this one, I saw a stone vagina fringed with bright green mold looking at this, and so it’s included. As a matter of fact, I think it compliments the vulvic impression I spotted while on a Mystery Valley hike near Monument Valley earlier this year. If you are interested, it’s the 36th image down on this post.

This might have been a rainy day where the comfort of a warm room and a pot of beans could have held us in cozy contentment, but instead, we were drawn by the potential that something might be happening and that we’d benefit from investigating that change. Our reward was not only trying to fly a kite in the windy rain and witnessing the temporary nature of a fragile and elegant cairn; we were allowed to gaze in on the secret lives of those who live outside of our view.

And so the curtain is being drawn shut, signaling us that time has arrived for us to depart.

I am back at the table I’d been writing at earlier in the day and on a previous visit. At night, there is no ocean to see, only my blurry reflection in the window that kind of looks like this guy. I hear the ocean but it’s a steady white noise, no collapsing wave sounds, just the hum of the shore machine down below.

Mostly, I’m here not writing, not reading, not really watching much of anything. Maybe this is more of a meditation, though that would be accidental as I’m simply here. Occasionally, it occurs to me that I could be doing something more specific, but I don’t want to expend the effort as nothing feels comfortable. Then a trigger of micro-panic attacks me that I’m missing the opportunity to explore a thing, a subject, a frame of space such as the gap between a barnacle and a mussel if one even exists. Time goes by.

Hey, let’s step outside. Nothing like a good rain to cleanse the air, opening the sky with a clear view of the Milky Way filled with as many stars as we might humanly be able to take in. With no moon in sight, the night is as dark as it can be