Dunes Beach
Nehalem Bay State Park is on a narrow spit of land with - as one might imagine - bay on one side and ocean on the other. My first view of it was near the top of the first truly significant climb of the past three days which, although long, was nowhere near as bad as what I repeatedly hauled my sorry ass up and over in Kentucky. The soaring views helped, as did the moderate temperature and the near-constant wind at my back. I did arrive at camp in somewhat of a funk, which turned out to be blood sugar-related. I misjudged what I needed to eat for the climb, but remedied the situation with a roast beef sandwich, a mess of pasta salad, a mess of fruit salad, a quart of Powerade, and a Sprite. Thus fortified, I hit the beach.
A constant wind flows down from the north, around Cape Falcon, and sweeps all of the sand on the beach into a flat, rippled surface that shimmers with a scrim of fine particles in motion. Nothing is constant: footprints began to soften and turn into vague shapes as soon as they're made, and all objects, from gull feathers to driftwood logs, are surrounded by wind-carved depressions that conform to their shapes.
It's an environment that lends itself to thoughts of impermanence and of legacies. Any attempt to make a mark upon this landscape fails, as the forces that sweep across it instantly set about erasing it. At one point, I picked the label from a bottle of water out of the sand and released it, watching as it scurried downwind from me like a thing alive, making little paper footprints that vanished within a few seconds. I traced its bright white course for fifty yards or more, as the wind pushed it down into gullies behind driftwood and around hillocks of dune grass. Each time I thought it was done with its travels, the scrap of refuse would reappear, heading pell-mell for the high dunes, until it finally fetched up against the grasses there and fluttered at me, as though wanting me to come set it on its way again. The course of the scrap followed the contours sculpted by the wind, but it gave the illusion of self-direction.
The rest of the metaphor is left as an exercise for the reader.
There are eight other people here at the campsite - two young fellows from England, fresh from college, a couple fron San Francisco, headed north, a couple I haven't met yet, and another couple who are the first hikers I've seen so far. Today was the first day I've ridden with the solar panels deployed, to charge the laptop battery. Between shady road shoulders, things coming unplugged, and switches in the wrong position, I was expecting to see 20% battery capacity. I told myself, when I fired up the computer, that if it was 40% or better, I'd share the sun's bounty and let the hikers use my EVDO connection to send e-mail if they needed to. It was at 99%, and Davis and Anna were most grateful. Looks like this solar doohickey might actually do the job.
This is all so different from the travails of the South. People complain about the traffic on Route 101, but I've ridden worse roads, with no shoulders. The climbs, so far, do not equal those of the Appalachians. The weather is perfect for riding, the scenery is astounding, and the lack of pressure to put in the big miles has made this into what I had hoped my journey would be. Tonight, I will sleep with the soothing white noise of surf filling my tent.
