A beach at the end of the world
High tide was the gentlest time on the island. This was especially true in summer, when the evenings were purple and warm. The tide would lap at the shore looking sun-battered and proud as if coming home from a long day at work. The whole beach sung and breathed. There were little crabs, marooned jellyfish, geoducks beneath the surface of the muck, orca whales, starfish, and sea lions. My little brother and I were castaway sailors stranded on a beach that was cold and unforgiving, angular but alive.
The puget sound looks like a river. Even as a child, I knew to take offense when my grandmother, fresh from France, took one look at Pickering Passage and said “Looks like a river to me.”
We’d been to the real ocean a few times, Florida and Hawaii and maybe Southern California, but that felt like something reserved for other people. The puget sound was the water that was there, the blue gaps between guardrails and gas stations and Douglas fir trees. It blurred into a modest teal; grey sky, stubby waves with soft edges and brown foam, unassuming and quiet.
If you took a boat down the passage you might compare it to a country road. Houses and marinas made little vignettes along the rugged coastline, appearing in equal hierarchy with fallen trees, boulders, and lagoons carved out of the forest as it met the sea. The little alleyways of the puget sound were sometimes only a quarter-mile wide, briefly opening up into these large pockets where the islands broke and you could start to imagine how you might make it out into the real vastness of the pacific.
In the early mornings, my Dad and I would take the little fiberglass Boston Whaler around Harstine Island. If you beat the other boats to it (easy to do in sleepy Mason County) you could glide perfectly over the dewdrop water, cutting through the heavy Pacific Northwest air like an eagle. On that whaler we were explorers, the first of our kind and cunning, navigating the sound’s twists and turns with ease, observing the wildlife and getting our faces wet with the first creation of wake.
My memories of the puget sound are overwhelmingly quiet. The sounds and colors of it all coagulating into a grey-teal mush that I can pack together in my hands and observe. I loved to swim in the cold water when the temperature of the air was about the same. In the soft rain of the late Spring I’d doggy-paddle out far enough to where my feet couldn’t touch and let my body float in the space between the water and the sky. It wasn’t cold once you submitted yourself to it, looking down at your feet, watching a crab make its way, it was okay.
Harstine was where I learned to love solace of the maritime variety. Empty space is already enticing, make it an empty stretch of coastline and it feels like an experience reserved for Gods. Even now, I cannot believe it is possible to be completely alone and on the water — Master of the world.
Hope Island was a little dollhouse of creation. A state park, undeveloped and overshadowed by nearby Native-American-owned Squaxin Island, Hope was shaded and secret. If you walked the perimeter (maybe two miles) you’d come across these framed pockets of activity. It reminded me of a museum, a little waterfall encircled by lichen and driftwood, a beautiful beached red jellyfish perfectly composed and perfectly still. I’d swim to the next break in the land, climb over the boulderous gateway to some new organic disarray, spellbound.
Sometimes I feel like the point of being alive is to be alone outside. A rather basic revelation I had maybe a decade ago was that throughout human history, going outside has remained more or less the same. When you’re standing in a field at dusk, looking at the moon, it could be 1850 or 1990 and it’d feel pretty much the same (My conception of history is rather short because I live in California).
When I think about Harstine or Hope Island, those moments feel radically untethered to time in a way that I like. It’s nice to think base-level thoughts about swimming or rocks or dirt and to do it alone in your own head where time isn’t as regimented. There’s a certain level of reality creation that becomes possible when it is you on the shore looking out at land that appears to be empty, a horizon you can believe yourself to own. In the puget sound’s perfect stillness it was at last possible for to lose my body while still feeling tied to the dirt.
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