Cornbread And Sunset
Those are the things that defined this day. I ended up giving Ecola State Park a miss and camping at an RV park in Cannon Beach, mainly because the latter has showers. A shower wasn't important at the beginning of the day; at the end of the day, it was. I had my first climb today - modest, up to about 400 feet and then back down. There will be many more of those in the days to come.
I also spent about an hour and half on the beach at Seaside, deploying the solar panels to charge my cell phone and put a bit of juice back in the laptop. It'll be interesting to see whether I can actually make the whole solar-powered thing work...I really didn't get much of a chance to in Virginia and Kentucky, mainly because I was near an electrical outlet more often than not. I've almost depleted the smaller of my two laptop batteries, so I'll need to put some sun juice into it soon.
Cannon Beach is dominated to the south by Haystack Rock, and less dominated by the numerous small sand replcias of Haystack Rock I kept coming across. I have no idea how far the Rock is from where I started, but after a fine meal of skillet cornbread, rib-eye, mashed potato, veggies, and a local ale, I walked nearly all the way to it, and back again. Earlier in the day, at Seaside, I had a brief flare of "What will I do with my day?" anxiety when I realized I'd get to the campsite early...but then there were more miles than I expected and, once I got here, the obvious thing to do was to go to the beach and do beach-style things. This involved the wetting of the feet, the walking of the sands, and the watching of the sunset.
Once again, I am content, and thinking mellow thoughts about how the interaction of all the particles of sand with each other in the tumult of the thin sheets of incoming tide produces an assortment of intricate patterns once the water recedes. The various types of patterns are not identical, but they're similar - I've seen the same ones at three beaches now. So, there must be some commonality to the sand-water interaction, some principle that's the same wherever sand and water meet.
The last time I ended up by myself on a beach was in 1994, at Zipolite on the Pacific coast of Mexico. It was another Pivotal Moment in my life, in vaguely similar circumstances. Back then, there were great piles of locally grown pot and mushrooms. Not so much, now, which is a good thing, because I can look at the waves and the sand with unstoned eyes and contemplate the similarities between the interactions of sand and water and the interactions of people. In my life, of course, the commonality, the "principle that's the same," is me. And so it is that once again I end up by myself on a beach watching the waves and thinking about whatever it is that might come next in my life. Although, I must admit: I'm much happier on this 2006 beach than I was on that 1994 beach. Which is good, because I have many more weeks of beaches ahead of me.
