The Mists of Oregon
Lookout. Cannon.
Cape Lookout
My father and I stayed close to where the ocean had wet the sand enough to make for easy walking. The ground was soft, but solid. Low tide pulled the sand out to sea as we made our way down the beach at Cape Lookout.
At one point he turned to me, “you want to keep walking?”
I’d stopped next to a small depression filled with imperfectly arranged stones, half a shattered sand dollar, and a small puddle of water too fearful to run out with the tide.
“Yes,” I replied, looking up from the stones at my feet. “I want to see what’s down there.”
I pointed south. Mossy crags curved into the sea at the other end of the beach. Something glittered on the walls there and I wanted to see it.
The waterfall was not conventionally majestic.
No raging river threw itself from the clifftop, there was no thunderous splash to deafen me as I approached. Instead, a small stream flowed over the precipice, trickling down the rocks. The moss softened the stream’s tiny bits of thunder into a subtle susurus. The murmuring water dripped down to the sand and seeped lazily out to the sea.
As I looked up the wall, standing where an angrier fall would have crushed me, I noticed a cloud cutting through the trees at the top. Sunbeams pushed it off the cliff. The cloud leapt into the cerulean sky and dissipated.
I grasped wildly at the wisps but caught none.
Cannon Beach
The remnants of an ancient volcanic lava flow jut up from the sands of Cannon Beach. The sea, having pulled itself away from the rocks for a few hours, was beginning to return when my father and I arrived.
Someone named the largest of the monoliths Haystack Rock, an undignified appellation for such a grand sight.
Hundreds of pilgrims gathered around the base. They stepped between the tidal pools and peered into the puddles. Some of the people pulled insolent children back from tapping starfish and kicking crabs. Others just watched, amused by the capricious cruelty of their offspring.
The starfish, latched lazily onto mussels and rock, were surrounded by retracted sea anemones. I couldn't quite blame the children for wanting to touch them. All of the starfish were either orange or purple. It seemed meaningful, but I’m not entirely sure how.
I felt the eyes of the park rangers on me when I squatted down to get the perfect angle on a pair of starfish clinging to the underside of a rock. My camera was nearly in the wet sand, almost in the water. They stopped watching me after a few moments and turned their attention to the children nearby splashing in puddles inhabited by fragile sea creatures.
Eventually, I tired of the children and the crowd. Looking down the beach away from Haystack Rock, I saw a few smaller monoliths in the distance.
Then I noticed the fog.
Mist crept onto the shore further down the beach, borne in by the tide. My father and I started walking, picking our way carefully around the growing pools. A few times we had to pause and plot a route between the shrinking sandbars. The sea, which always seems slow in rolling in and out, was quicker than we were. By the time it had come in, we were still very far from the rocks at the other end of Cannon Beach.
The fog thickened, bunching up beyond the rocks. It looked like it both fell off the hills and floated in from the ocean, ethereal and disturbing. I could imagine disappearing into the fog at the same time I fully believed that if I managed to reach it I would never go any further.
Eventually, we stopped walking.
