Water Movement
Through the magic of my Black Box, I am able to write to you from my tent here at Fort Stevens State Park. It's after dark now, and the campsite is mostly quiet...distant voices from the RV side of town, and the buzzing of rattle-winged insects against my tent's nylon, desperate to become intimate with my headlamp. In keeping with the Way of Relaxed Touring, I'm staying up later to do this, because I'm not planning on going very far tomorrow, and won't be getting up very early. No more waking up at 6 AM, rushing around under pressure of the impending heat of the day. That's how I like it.
Once I arrived at the park and set up camp, I unhitched the trailer and rode the unencumbered trike less than a mile to the shore of the Pacific. After finding a place to lock up, I wandered down to the beach with bare feet, there to soak them, and to take pictures of the Peter Iredale, a four-masted steel vessel that wrecked there in 1906. A century of water and wind have reduced the 2000-ton ship to a small assemblage of rusted-through steel plates clinging to encrusted iron bones.
After awhile, it seemed like the best thing to do was to unlock the trike, drag it to the top of the high dune at the edge of the parking lot, and sit in it there, watching the ocean. I got a book out, but only the wind turned its pages. At the far edge of the view to the north and south, rocky crags projected seaward, reminding me of the beach in Zipolite, Mexico, on a much more massive scale. There were kites flying, making me regret that I hadn't brought one of my parafoils...but only for a little while. The endless white curls of surf did their thing, filling the air with a white noise that drew my fear from me. I buried my feet in the warm sand beneath the fairing, finally content.
Back at the campsite, I met Josh, a dude from Michigan who's making his own way up the coast, travelling cheap and light. He'll end up in Portland, crashing with some friends of his while he looks for work in the building trades. At one point later on in the evening, during a boisterous exchange of road stories, he burst out: "You and I have smoked way too much pot in our lives!" "Yes!" I agreed. "We don't need it anymore!" We were carrying on and exchanging tales and images in that high-energy way that happens with good stoned friends, even though we had just met and were quite sober.
There are no fewer than seven touring cyclists staying here tonight, not including myself. The Oregon State Park system sets aside $4 Hiker/Biker campsites, and I'll be able to stay at such parks all the way down the coast, which should help make up for my Motel Tour of Virginia and Kentucky. For the first time, I've become aware of the community aspect of this thing I'm doing...until now, I've been fairly isolated, both by accident and by design. But the west coast is already feeling different, and I suspect I'll meet up with more and more people as I head south. It turns out that this really is the prime touring season, so the route will be well-populated. A few folks came over to chat, drawn by the trike...among them Jason Perry, a mellow Texas cyclist who's doing a summer tour along the coast and elsewhere.
Seeing the ocean - the full-on, horizon-filling ocean, as opposed to the ocean beyond the mouth of the Columbia River - has done good things to me. I believe that my goal on this journey will be to keep it in sight as often as possible.
Tomorrow, another short ride, to another state park, where I'll find a place with an ocean view, and sit there until it's time to not sit there anymore.
