Aztec merchandise

It is ancient and modern and crowded and mysterious, all at the same time. Outside the city is Teotihuacan, a complex of pyramids and outbuildings built of volcanic cobblestones, founded in 200 BC and reaching the height of its power about 400 AD.

Pyramid of the Sun.

The Sun Pyramid is half the size of Egypt’s, built from 2.5 million tons of stone. We know very little about its creators or people, except that they were artists and traders, and were less violent than the Aztecs were, at least until they destroyed and abandoned  their  city in 650 AD. It still looks pretty good.

Pyramid of the Moon.

  They had no metal, so they made incredible stone carvings with obsidian tools: black, sharpened volcanic rocks.

Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent.

I love Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, so much, I had to buy a little terracotta likeness of his  snake head and stick it on the side of my house. I need at least 100 more.

Quetzalcoatl head shots.

The Aztecs discovered the ruins of the city and gave it the name Teotihuacan, “The place where men become gods.” From their findings there, they gathered ideas about pyramid construction, sacred animals like jaguars and coyotes, stone carving, and especially the use of obsidian knives .

Hello, kitty.

At art school, if you didn’t know what to say about someone’s work, you could dazzle your colleagues and still say nothing by saying, “I’d like to see it taken further.”

So I picture the Aztecs having a critique about human sacrifice, which the ancient pyramid-builders seem to have done every now and again. Some clown says that, and next thing you know, the Aztecs are making necklaces out of jawbones, beads out of baby craniums, setting stones in the teeth of skulls, sacrificing 2,000 of their own warriors in a single day and tossing them down the pyramid steps. The jaguar symbolizes the thunder that precedes rain, and this one is hollowed out for handy storage of human hearts.

Yard art at Frida Kahlo's.

I think this must contribute to the Mexican sense of levity, even playfulness, about death, that I find startling but refreshing, and I want to learn from this. What if the inevitable is a celebration?

You want fries with that?

So it’s a little weird to walk around a place that’s lasted for 2,000 years, and then go to Washaway Beach, where, in three weeks time, two houses have completely disappeared and two more are in the last stages.

A-frame B-gone.

What if it were a celebration? I try and break my bad and recurring habit of worrying about things over which I have no control, and which are inevitable. But what I feel is impending fear and grief. The water is getting closer, disturbingly so.

Roberta and Dave's place B. Next.

The foundation from Willie Washaway’s house has been repurposed into a lounge for stylish hipsters.

Road closed.

My friend Joan, who died a few years ago, had a great sense of humor and sense of Washaway. I have a windup toy she got me of a little house. You pull on the chimney and the thing goes running across the table and falls off the edge.

The box for the toy has a quote from Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros: “The snail is a house that walks.”

The red house, you will recall, fell off the bank on Thanksgiving Day. For a good two weeks it still looked like a house.

12/9/11

Someone had begun to salvage the siding, but the interior was still a stew of insulation, lumber, mattresses, playing cards and a  paperback self-help book about Relationships.

12/10/11

A week later almost all the debris was gone. Was it salvaged, or did it wash away? The resulting spaces were inviting in their openness and emptiness, still conveying some warmth even if you had to turn your head sideways to feel it.

12/17/11

In art school, back in the prehistoric Post-Modern era, the art babble would flow floriferously about the Hand of Man, usually applied to pictures of strip mining, strip malls and the like. (Also known as: Rape of The Land.) I still wince recalling some of that chatter.  At Washaway, it is the Hand of Man that seems fragile.

12/ 24 /11

By Christmas eve, the red house was starting to flatten out.

Christmas weekend brought some of the highest tides of the year, or “King” tides, 10.4, and the following day, a 10.2.

12/ 25 /11

I read a book called Wisdom Sits In Places that was about the Native Americans naming places for what happened there: Medicine Creek, Dead Man’s Canyon, Snake River, and such. To say the name of the place was to keep alive the stories and feel a connectedness to the people that came before you.

So I find myself wandering around, taking pictures and talking to myself, saying, “This used to be here, this used to be here, this used to be here, remember?”  trying to talk the beach into permanence.

12/ 31 /11

By New Year’s Eve, only a few concrete pier blocks remained where the red house had been.

Did I mention the weather’s been super nice? The light was the color of an opal.

A luminous sunset over the wind-swept beach closed like a curtain on that has-been old year.

He says in March people will be running in the street with guns. They were not AK-47s, but had numbers and letters like that, and he was specific about the model number.

Thieves and vandals will be shot on the inside.

I told him that at my job as a gardener, where I rake leaves and pull weeds of fancy people who live by the lake in Seattle, I have recently noticed unusually high numbers of eagles zipping around, and two hawks, one living, one dead.

Dead hawk.

“Yes,” he said. “The animals will tell us.”

So then I told him about an article I read about the “Go-Bags of the Rich and Famous.” What’s in the bag you run with for the apocalypse? Designer Betsey Johnson has a special Ralph Lauren belt with a pink rabbit’s foot, Jennifer Aniston’s real estate agent has meditation beads, someone else has a pen from Hunter S. Thompson that can write upside-down. Only photographers have any sense. A Vogue freelancer known as Mr. Street Peepers said he’d bring a carton of cigarettes and Slim Jims. “I’ve seen enough prison movies to know you can trade these for anything if it really goes down.”

Like the weather forecasters of the Pacific Northwest, he can predict the worst and I love it when he’s wrong. Nonetheless, I thought I better stock up. The problem with emergency food supplies is they should be tasty enough that you could eat them if you had to, but not so delicious that you consume them immediately. (See also: Apocalypse Booze Challenges.)

So I went to Merlino’s in Westport to stock up on their canned tuna belly, known as Ventresca. $7.50 can seem like a lot for a can of tuna until you have tried it. The guy said supplies were low, that he’d have to go in the back to get it. I said, “Get me six!”

Nowadays I strive for Spartan minimalism, but at one point I was an avid practitioner of junk collecting. So, it seems, were the people who previously owned my beach property, Roy and Gloria, aka Rowdy and Glo. They alluded they might “clean up a little,” but I inherited a museum of rust just the same.

So I started frequenting Joe’s Perpetual Yard Sale in Grayland, bringing him junk, specifically metal, in trade for water from his hose. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But, boy, they were characters. He, his wife Malissa, and daughter Katrina kept a menagerie of birds that anyone would deem unusual.

There were domesticated crows that you could kiss on the mouth, if you were so inclined, that would eat pelletized dog food from your hand. First there were Snow and Bubba. When the third crow showed up, his health was uncertain, but his name was not.

“Whether he lives or dies tonight,” Joe declared, “his name is John Boy.”

Jesus and Loverboy.

There was a parrot named Loverboy who, to my way of thinking, was a disincentive to keep parrots. Sure he was beautiful, and I suppose he was formidably intelligent, as they are, and he could speak, but only his name, delivered in a menacing, I-want-to-kill-you holler. “LOVERBOY!”

The problem with collecting is people start collecting for you. Word gets out that you’re the Bird People and then folks start showing up at your door with baby screech owls.

One day there was a trailer for sale in Joe’s lot. It had great architectural style, but serious interior design challenges. Carpet squished underfoot, vents were open to rain, and it had a distinctive aroma of cat pee. Joe said “Seven hundred.”

Very, very sweetly I asked, “Would you respectfully consider five?” and he said that he would, that that was the scrap-metal price he could get for it. I said I’d think about it and started to walk away. His Hungarian-French-Canadian pirate brogue came booming across the parking lot. “Errryhhkaaa, four bills and it’s yours.”

Sold!

Arrangements were made. Me, my ex, Will, and this guy Ned known for Demo skills would show up, gut the trailer, offer its contents to Joe for resale appraisal, then put it in his Dumpster. We all had our jobs. Mine was carting the junk on a hand truck out of the trailer up to Joe and the Dumpster. His daughter Katrina, who was ten, wanted to be my helper. Little girls think big girls are cool. For a second I perceived her as a pest, then remembered idolizing my babysitters, ’70s cool in their Dr. Scholl sandals.

Katrina is her father’s daughter, a knowledgeable, seasoned junker. I made a bad call separating salvage from garbage. “Copper pipe, always valuable!” she scolded.

Malissa was telling the guys an elaborate tale, to which I was not paying much attention, except to overhear something about human urine eventually beginning to smell like cats. When the cabinet of dried beans, canned soup and mac and cheese was unearthed, I couldn’t understand why Joe wanted it all put in the Dumpster.

“Well, I like mac and cheese,” I said.

“Put it in the Dumpster!” Will screamed. “DON’T EAT THE DEAD BOY’S FOOD!”

For Malissa had told them the story of a troubled young man. “They don’t know how he died.” Ensuing cleanup had unearthed antidepressants and a card from a girl that said, “Dear Dave, Hope it all works out for the best.”

Later that evening, Ned, who is from San Francisco, started getting all spooked and woo-woo and insisted we “perform a ceremony.” So we did, putting the Dear Dave letter in a bottle and sending it out to the open sea.

So, Vincent Ferris, one of the first friends I made out here, has jumped. Seattle was “like living on a couch in Mom’s basement,” he told me. So he moved 3,000 miles AWAY FROM HERE (?!?) to New York City, to share a house with seven “anarchists.” The fridge is full of food found in Dumpsters. They’re “freegans.” Several have court dates for Occupy-related activities. Vincent was literally breathless with excitement. Panting.

   “I just want to, you know how you grow up with pictures of New York. I’m having this dream of walking around New York, taking pictures. Stuff one would have daydreamed about, I’m making it happen. Imagine, like, Robert Frank or William Klein, shooting these marches. I feel connected with this movement. I’ll ask questions later. To say ‘These people need a shower’, to have a point and a concise argument, that is so left-brain. It’s emotion that would make someone occupy a park and stay there. This is: you’re not gonna eat your vegetables, and you’re gonna stay at the table until you don’t have to eat your vegetables anymore.”

But enough about Art. The reader is interested in train wrecks. ‘Tis the season!

Stanley on the undercut.

When I first got my beach property, my neighbor Stanley told me to go get a tide book, and if the tides are ever 9 or 10, to come here and watch them from a ringside seat. It is sound advice, observed by many, and so you will see the trucks of Watchers convening around the destruction at the appointed hour, a 10.5 tide at 12:33 p.m., for instance.

Red house, 10/28/11

This was a cute place, the people were nice, and were connected to the aforementioned, excellently crafted, departed fort.

November 24, 2011.

It fell in on Thanksgiving day. It is a lonely, frightening feeling, to come across a body. I can’t get used to it, can’t get over it. I am one of these people who pay to get on a rollercoaster, then close my eyes.

There were still bowls of pieces of uncompleted puzzles by the window. They weren’t finished!

Unlike a natural disaster, it happens here more or less on schedule, so you can put your boots on and stroll down the street to see some doom from a safe distance and snap some photos.

It’s a social occasion. Hip cats are strolling around, out for a walkabout, raising the bar of Washaway fashions, working the room in a Gore-Tex cape, soon to be seen on runways in Milan.

But it’s a wake, too. Like an Irish wake. There’s some laughing and joking and who knows what beverages in the coffee cups. Pictures fail, and words do, too. There is no way to capture the roiling white water, rolling around giant trees you could never budge.

The sound is terrible. The wind howls, and the crash and crack of a house breaking IS heartbreaking. Somebody loved this.

“Boy, that’s somethin’ else.” “The power of nature.” “At least it wasn’t their primary home.” “Still sad, though.” “That’s somethin’ else, to see that water.”  “Yep.”

Looking inside is vertigo-inducing. I know this picture isn’t sharp. That’s how it looked, like a hallucination, a bad dream.

The watchers take pictures, and I do too. It gets my adrenaline all wound up until get so upset I have to get away and be by myself.

It’s important to bear witness. The job of an artist is to feel things, express feelings. Unfortunately, it’s not always the slacker job it’s reputed to be.

An artist named Mark has a place that will likely fall in next. He was getting ready to evacuate. He told me he has 18 cats. That makes me picture the closing scene in “Logan’s Run” where the old bearded guy is living in D.C. with a zillion cats, having escaped the apocalyptic culture where everyone dies at 30. But I digress.

At any rate, one hopes for an accurate head count of evacuees.

It’s said that the camera can be armor, that the act of looking and composing with a machine creates a psychological detachment from what you’re seeing. Certainly war correspondents need to do this, and I have, more than once, encouraged shy photography students to think this way. It doesn’t always work.

As Betty Butler wrote in the now-nonexistent Beach Gazette on January 7, 1987:

“Were the crowds of people who gathered along the bank to watch the waves undermine the barn’s foundation and send it splintering into the sea awed by the vivid display of the ocean’s fearsome power? Did they feel compassion for the family that had to endure the destruction of their lifelong home, while a festive crowd of onlookers cheered the building’s collapse?

“Some who were drawn to this dramatic spectacle were sensitive to the loss and pain…they winced as the old barn shuddered and the roof collapsed and left soon afterwards. The others, well, the others were there for the show.”

Butler adds that Washaway “serves as a lesson that, once forces are set in motion, mankind’s best efforts to contain them are puny and ineffectual. Our society has shown an arrogant display of contempt for the natural balance…If you believe that technology will bring about a last-minute rescue, you’re a gambler, and the stakes are the world.”

At the Fox’s Den, a sadly departed junk store in Montesano, WA, owner John Fox sold one of his uglier finds, a dirt-yellow Japanese float, to somebody for $200, who then sold it on EBay for $8,000. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” Fox told the South Beach Bulletin, and then the guy returned and gave Fox half the money, allowing Fox to retire, depriving the rest of us of junk. Jerk!

Booty.

Don Pickinpaugh, aka Pic-N-Pa, local legend and champion of the Pioneer Cemetery, drives the beach every day with his wife Mildred in a beat-up Jeep with a plate that says PIC N PA. He collects wood for his line of chain-saw furniture and sculpture called “Oceans of Fun.”

Pic-N-Pa and Mildred

Marcy Merrill and her dog Heidi are skilled collectors too. Marcy has been making these gorgeous wet-plate collodion photographs, coating metal plates with silver nitrate and developing them in ether and grain alcohol. (“It’s for photography,” she explained to the liquor store clerk, of her Everclear purchase).

Marcy and Heidi

The exposure times for wet plates are long: ten or twenty seconds. Inanimate objects, still-lifes and dead things are a plus for subjects that can sit still. She recently found two dolphin skulls, spookily birdlike and distinctively stinking. You can buy special beetles on the internet that will step up the ol’ decomposition process, but what to do with them, once the gig is up? Layoffs ensue.

The tsunami in Japan produced a pile of debris twice the size of Texas, 2,000 miles long. It is making its way across the Pacific. Russian sailors have already spotted a boat marked “Fukushima”, a TV and a fridge.

There is a huge oasis of floating plastic in the middle of the ocean known as the Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of the tsunami debris is supposed to eventually wind up. (See photographer Chris Jordan’s beautiful and devastating photographs of the bodies of albatrosses on Midway Island full of lighters and bottle caps:

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway).

Styrofoam.

Some of the debris is going to Hawaii, and some is headed to the Washington coast, expected to arrive in 2013. Except that, as my neighbor Ray, avid beachcomber, can attest, it is already here.

We will not be outcompeted by Japanese garbage! It will be interesting to see if we can differentiate whose is whose. The welcome wagons await the newcomers.

             A sign in the toilet bowl says “No Trespassing.”

Clout.

Mario’s place is not going to wash away without taking a final bow, a showy stew of plywood, mattresses, and tarpaper.

Think pink.

The problem with collecting things is then people start collecting for you. For a time I collected Shake-Em-Ups, those plastic domes you shake and the snow flies around a little scene.  People kept giving them to me, long after I was sick of them.

Lost soles.

I never find any cool skulls or glass floats or messages in bottles. What I find are flip-flops, the Lost Soles, and what has happened is that Ray is now collecting them for me. He finds platform shoes and stillettos and waterlogged sneakers and those ugly slab-type flip-flops favored by men in jail. He is tireless. Every week there is a pile of new finds waiting on my table and I have to get out the drill and try and find some long screws.

A friend pointed out that it goes against the spirit of Lost Soles to screw them to the wall, instead of letting them fly around for all eternity, but they have proven to be rugged, attractive and durable siding.

Thanks to the people who noticed the importance of Washaway Beach before I was born and created valuable documents. I am informed and illuminated by this work.

North Cove Lighthouse, December 27, 1940. Photo by Stan Spiegle.

The town of North Cove, Washington began falling into the ocean in the late 1800′s. The area was known as Cape Shoalwater for its shoals, fingers of land, sticking out into the sea. It was supposed to be a luxury coastal destination between Seattle and Portland, but then over 100 brick homes, a school, clam cannery, lighthouse and Coast Guard Station fell into the sea. The area has since been known as “Washaway Beach.”

Yellow is 1870 Cape Shoalwater.

Many factors: geographic, geological, ecological and man-made, conspire to make pinpointing the cause of such extreme coastal erosion difficult. If you look at the shape of Washington State, the land sticks out like a nose before curling in and under to Willapa Bay. The ocean is a relentless plastic surgeon.

There are very large waves here, traveling sideways, even crisscrossing, creating some of the largest wave energy levels in the world. The extremely high tides are followed by the scouring action of the ebb, or retreating, tides.

It is windy. The wind crosses a great distance across the water, and picks up speed, which is known as “fetch.” From Asia to Washington is an immense fetch. Copy that?

Or maybe the wind feels like popping up to Alaska, to an area called the Aleutian Low, where it can revive old storms and whip up a few new ones before stopping by here.

Oh, good.

Then there are the dams, like one on the Columbia River, an Army Corps of Engineers project that occurred around the same time as the erosion started. There are jetties built in Westport and one in Washaway, big piles of rocks. There was dredging of a shipping channel by the Coast Guard that continued well into the 1970s. All of this could impact the way sand moves around, which is known as “sediment accretion”,  a fancy way of saying all our sand is going to Long Beach, WA.

Rockpile Peninsula Project.

“Man is a pretty puny animal when it comes to fighting the sea,” Ira Mitchell, a fisherman born in Finland, told the Seattle Times in 1966. “In the last five years alone we have seen…at least 1000 acres of land wiped out by this menace. The ocean will just keep going into the hills. Nothing has been done or attempted. We have watched it go.”

The impending loss of the North Willapa Harbor Grange Hall spurred Mitchell, a retired fisherman, into battle with the bureaucracy of the sea. He organized the Cape Shoalwater-Toke Point Anti-Erosion Project. He began writing letters to newspapers, to politicians, members of Congress, and to the Army Corps of Engineers.

Ring toss.

“We hope that someone somewhere along the line will wake up to save one of the finest recreational areas in our nation,” he wrote. “Every foot of such an area becomes far more precious than any amount of money.”

The Army Corps of Engineers responded with a “Sorry, you don’t have any money, nobody cares” tone that became a trend in their correspondence with Washaway’s activists. “The disaster is not big enough against public property to open the federal purse. Any project the Corps undertakes must promise benefits exceeding cost, that the land is publicly owned and provides a plan for recreational use. No emergency authority is available.”

Camaro.

“I’m sure you will agree, we can look for no constructive assistance from the Army Corps,” Mitchell wrote in the minutes to the Anti-Erosion project. He proposed a grassroots action to collect old car bodies, which, wrapped in torpedo netting and barged out to sea, would create a breakwater, or “groin”. He placed ads in local communities, asking for junk cars. “These old cars are eyesores in any community, but to us they couldn’t be more valuable if they were gold plated.”

The ocean’s demands quickly outweighed supplies. “Old cars work fine but they sink pretty fast,” Mitchell admitted. “We must have hundreds more old cars to continue at the speed and efficiency we would like. We must stress the great possibilities and dire necessities of the situation.”

“I guess we’ll just keep throwing old car bodies in until something better happens,” Richard Jacobsen, a volunteer, told the Times.

The Grange Hall was salvaged when waves began lapping at its door. Then Mitchell began the second phase of his attack. If you can’t do something, he proposed, how about doing nothing? Stop dredging the channel. It might have something to do with the erosion. A fisherman himself, he knew that “any fisherman in this area can tell you that a natural channel exists, which we call the 16 hole.”

State Representative Julia Butler was no help. “Members of the shipping industry agreed the channel was essential to shipping. As for the erosion problem, the Corps says there is no relationship between the erosion and dredging…If dredging is stopped, the losses to the community as a whole would exceed the other losses being mentioned.”

Mitchell was enraged. “Can you wonder that the young people of today are so reluctant to give their lives for a country that allows for such depredations against its citizens? No wonder they tell us it will be a long war in Viet Nam! Looks to us like they hope to win that struggle and our erosion the same way…with TALK!”

The channel dredging continued until 1975. A year later, a local chain-saw artist named Don Pickinpaugh, known as Pic-N-Pa, began his own letter-writing campaign when the old pioneer cemetery began falling into the ocean.

“You and your family enjoy our beaches as much as anyone else in this corner of our great nation and I know we can’t let this happen,” Pic-N-Pa wrote to Governor Dan Evans in March 1976. “To clam or picnic in this area with headstones, bones and bits of caskets protruding from the sandbank just sickens me.”

“The ocean, as you point out,” Evans replied, “is eroding the embankment in the general area as well as specifically next to the cemetery at Wash-A-Way Beach…The state of Washington neither has authority nor funds available for this type of problem.”

Evans was replaced by an eccentric woman governor named Dixie Lee Ray, who in 1977 hired the Boy Scouts for $25,000 to dig and relocate the 90 pioneers across highway 105, where they rest, for the time being, in peace. Ten grave markers were lost  in the shuffle. They are marked with “Unknown”, and there is a sign with the list of who might be whom: “Man found on beach from wreck of schooner Nora Harkins, 1894″, “Man found on beach, 1897″, “Infant, Jacobsen,” and other unlucky pioneer children.

Unknown.

I met Pic-N-Pa at the cemetery a few years back. He was getting ready to cut the grass on a sunny day in February. He agreed that moving bodies was easier than stopping the ocean. “The ocean will do what it wants. It doesn’t matter what you do. All it takes is one nasty storm to take it away.”

He is in his ’80s, but spry and tan and ageless. He has gone through several mowers in 34 years. His friend Don Kiel used to help him mow until he had a heart attack on the job. Pic-N-Pa made one of his trademark chainsaw-art shrines, inscribed, “In memory of my good friend & buddy & helper Don Kiel, who died on this spot, 5/21/04 while mowing, by Pic-N-Pa.”

If any modern person deserves to be buried in the Pioneer Cemetery, it is Don Pickinpaugh, its champion. There’s that nice 27 million dollar jetty right there, installed to save the highway, the only federal money (other than the Scouts) that has ever been spent here. The pile of rocks will keep you dry!

“That’s OK,” Pic-N-Pa told me. He prefers that his ashes be scattered directly into the sea.

There have already been some high tides, and a storm which was  a byproduct of a typhoon in Japan. It was evidenced in the loss of the fort, and also in the vanished path down to the beach which had been cut in the sand at the end of Whipple Ave.

No beach access.

My path through the forest to the beach is still the same, for now. The ladders are still intact, as is the last tree standing of what was a circle of dead trees, seen on the left. I am really going to miss these ladders, and the trees, of course.

I fancy myself a tree-hugger, yet I am really enjoying having those two scary trees on my property gone. I know, I’ll hit the ol’ Desaturate button and then I won’t feel so bad. Everything is better in black and white.

My trailer is suffused with light now, for as long as there is light, which won’t be for long.

Vagabond.

In other news, three astronomers just won the Nobel Prize for Physics by finding that the universe is being blown apart by a mysterious anti-gravitational force called dark energy, which is pushing the galaxies apart. I thought it was just me being morose, the economy, the environment, or the change in the weather. What a relief!

It is as if, a science writer noted, “when you tossed your car keys in the air, instead of coming down, they flew faster and faster to the ceiling.”

Sandpoint planet.

No sense permitting some prophet of doom to wipe every smile away. Life is a cabaret, old chum! It is October, and  I can still wear sunglasses.

There were the most shockingly beautiful clouds. A friend who grew up out here was telling me these clouds are not normal. Everywhere I looked seemed designed to stop me in my tracks and slap me upside the head with gratitude.

Quote, unquote.

It appears that Mario’s place is being blown apart by mysterious forces known as dark energy, both getting ripped down and about to fall in the ocean at the same time.

Tides-A-Com’n. This is what a beach walk looks like in winter, scrambling under the overturned trees, always trying to stay on dry land, or get up to high ground.

Passageway

I read a NYT article about a couple of cancer specialists who bought a place on the water in Maine after one of them got cancer. Working with cancer patients “makes you so aware of the existential realities in life, helps to crystallize its wonder and to be continuously aware of its uncertainties,” Dr. Lowell E. Schnipper said. “If you listen carefully to your patients, you are always living your life a little closer to the edge.”

Gun turret re-emerges.

My friend Regnor is home from the hospital after surgery for esophageal cancer. He got his esophagus shortened and stomach reconfigured, after which, his granddaughter Olivia noticed, he no longer has a belly button.

Regnor says his friend Rick Swanson didn’t miss a beat. “Just tell ‘em you’re in the Navel Reserve.”

Furnished.

View.

For a second there, it was truly summer. I have a bright beach towel that I’ve gotten to use maybe twice and I busted it out  and went to the beach with Marcy.She is just back from the east coast and is determined to continue her boogie-boarding regimen. Since this frigid water is suitable only for dogs and crazy children, a wetsuit is a plus.

There were pelicans on the jetty, which I love for their powerful, agile flight and their resemblance to the Pterodactyl and how they always seem to be having a marvelous time.

As opposed to the seagulls, who look they’re in the military. It looks to me like the seagull gig sucks. All that training and you’re still dumber than crows. I wonder if they ever question authority? I do see some off by themselves, like the table of the uncool in junior high. The Sibley Guide To Birds had no answers for these pressing questions that I have.

Summer. The sand forms inland waterways in some places, sand bars in others. There is a  steep sand shelf forming that can be an early warning, but when the weather is gorgeous, it is pleasurable not to think about warnings.

Summer girls with sandpoint.

The next week was a different story. The wind howled, stirring up churning mists. I made the mistake of reading the South Beach Bulletin‘s predictions of La Nina Doom Winter and disaster preparedness before going to bed.

The metal roof on my trailer in rain can be pleasantly percussive or a terrifying roar. My NOAA disaster radio seems to emit only static. There is no point staying up all night running the ball with scary what-if scenarios, but that’s what I did.

The next day I had Butch Blair of Blair Tree Service take down the two trees voted Most Likely To Kill Me. I was so dazed from no sleep I didn’t take Logging Fashion Photographs, for which I now kick myself. Like the true tree guys, he looks like an elf. If he was wearing curly-toed shoes it wouldn’t seem out of place, but he instead had these sideways spikes that attached to his work boots, and he climbed up a giant tree in the swamp with his chain saw on a rope and took it down in a flash, nimble as an acrobat, while I stood there with my mouth hanging open. If you need tree work in Pacific County, this is your man.

So I bought myself some attempted peace of mind. I figure that’s all I can do, hope / pretend that my thoughts have influence, like prayer. Please, please, just a little bit longer here.

Then, after your house falls into the ocean, the sand points endure as ever-changing sculpture and grave marker, rising and falling, twisting into arcs, loops and whorls, fingerprints, often the only trace remaining in this boneyard of guests and ghosts.

You may not remember this, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it up. I have this very vivid memory from, I think, “Sesame Street”, where beautiful time-lapse photographs of flowers opening in a spring rain were set to “Trumpet Voluntary”, Jeremiah Clarke’s composition, circa 1700, properly known as the March of the Prince of Denmark. It’s not to be confused with the theme from “Masterpiece Theater”, though I like playing that one too.

I can’t get this out of my mind, so I hope you will indulge me. Since I can’t be there to play it for you, and my trumpet high notes are iffy at best, I am outsourcing the music while I show you time-lapse photographs of years of sand points, my Washaway flowers.

Dave and Roberta, happily squatter-free at last.

Fish are jumping

and the cotton is high.

This is as good as it gets here, and yet a nip of ominous foreboding is in the air. You can hear it in the trees, the creak and rustle. See it in the sideways golden light. You know you are kidding yourself when you use the lawnmower as a raking tool. Something wicked this way comes. It’s fall!

Someone is dumping a whole lot of tires on the beach. Big truck tires tied with rope to the bank. Erosion control?

Art installation?

There was a dead seal in the water that was bigger than me. At these times I wonder if there might be a connection between all the garbage we put in the water and the death of the sea creatures and I want to lie down on the beach and scream. I need some of that Kool-Aid, tea, how you say?

Fur is in!

Imagine my satisfaction to learn that two of the New York Times’ “Five Fall Must-Haves”, corduroys and turtlenecks, are already part of my regular uniform! All I need now is a mod ’60′s-style dress inspired by a parachute, black stilletto heels with a gold ring on them, and some fur.