The Agate Hunter

I parked my RV for the winter in Southern Oregon. The ocean was different here. It had many words and many moods. The power was from vibrations that never ceased. I spent much time with Old Man Ocean, leather-bound journals overflowing with observations and stories.

Along with winter storms, Old Man Ocean also offered blue skies and clear, cold days of agate hunting.

“Hold it to the light…” A local gentleman approached on the deserted beach and began to teach me how to find them. He also opened my heart a bit, though nothing was to come of it. There was, alas, no romance.

Though certainly clean, he always appeared as sea-tossed as the agates he loved. He had no sense of humor and everything was scientifically serious, a direct opposite of my own personality.

Over the next two months, we would meet at first light, to hike the trail through the wild blackberries and across the dunes. We carried broom handles with kitty litter scoops strapped to the ends, to save aching backs from bending over during the hunting. He was curious about my calling it that. I carried a bucket, but he always filled his pockets, returning to his car to place them there, then walking back to begin anew.

Agates and jasper filled his car, the cup holders, the seats, the floorboards. When asked why he did not bring a bucket, he seemed baffled, incredulously stating that he had pockets, as seriously as if this were the only explanation possible.

Bucket-worthy

He taught me to never put on my raincoat unless it appeared a sustained rain. The chilling sea spray and the cold rainforest mist needed to be withstood. He showed me how to dig pits for the tides when I didn’t feel like walking, carefully instructing that walking was the best way, for the direction and time when the sun would light them up. “When in a pit, be watchful of sneaker waves and know your exit.”

He showed me what the striations meant in the jasper also lying atop the gritty, volcanic sand. Mumbling in scientific jargon, he often wandered away with half a sentence in the balance, to examine driftwood or a plant on the dunes.

One day he did not begin his lectures. As we stood on the beach, he said it was time to show him what I had learned. He was satisfied with my answers and left in midmorning. I never saw him again. I asked around the very small town for this “local” and no one had heard of him.

Alone

I would arrive at first light alone. Then I walked the beach alone, dug my pits alone, knelt in the sand and spoke aloud to myself about the rock descriptions and missed him.

Agates and jasper, and “just pretty rocks” that had annoyed him in theory, filled my cup holders, the seats, the floorboards. The bucket got in my way in the wind while hunting, so I filled my pockets instead. I took the long walk back to my truck to put them there and returned to start anew.

A lot of pockets

“Hold it to the light…” I wearily answered from my pit. A young tourist had leaned over to inquire if what they found was an agate. I climbed out to show them. They assumed I was a local and I did not correct them. They were eager to learn about the jasper as well. A new cycle began.

“You do this a lot, why don’t you have a bucket?”

Shhh.

No title needed

Cody entrance to Yellowstone National Park.

In today’s world…. this.

Politics to lie where they may… this.

Freedom… this.

On the open drive from Cody, Wyoming, to the Yellowstone entrance… this.

The right to drive it… this.

I have said “this” enough times.

This.

Coastal blips and a bee….

With my RV set up in a small town in Washington state and my soul restless, I got in my truck before daylight and wandered for several hours off the beaten path.

I soon found myself in a tiny place, a coastal blip in the road. Blips in the road have long lured the curious traveler. This was a rough blip, far from other towns, tourists, and much of anything at all. It backed into the foggy rain forest hills and looked out upon a small sheltered cove cluttered with seasoned fishing boats.

Bait and beer were the shelf staples at the town store, which was also the fish weigh station. The coffee was wonderful and they kept it coming, even when I wandered out onto the creaking wooden porch in search of poetry.

A cold mist slowly drenched everything. The wind cast the sea about the docks and rows of fish cleaning stations, salt heavy on the air.

They were wary of me. A young game warden drove up and quickly started a friendly conversation about my intentions, clearly summoned.

I lingered half a day before anyone could be coerced to chat. I then heard tall tales about storms, fires, eagles and a bear. “We are the top of the world, can’t you tell?” But then, abruptly, I was told that I should be careful on the winding rain forest road out, an explicit farewell.

Nonetheless, in the dusk I stepped into the small diner to warm up before leaving. I received curt nods, as people kept to themselves.

I had stayed too long. For all their cautious friendliness, I was still the outsider who was expected to leave.

When darkness fell and they drifted home, my light spirit drifted into the darkness as well. I began to feel alone, utterly and starkly alone.

Soon the diner was deserted. Though the hours stated they were open, I suspected they were not.

As I was gathering my raincoat, the damp that pooled in the windowsill and clung to the faded orange/brown curtains with prints from the 1970’s brought a bee to my side.

I shared the salt on my wrist and the cool sips from my water glass. Thank you for seeing me, little one. This lonely outsider needed to feel seen.

I named him Jeremiah

Grace. I named her Grace.

Before the world changed… and she’s still out there, the calf with her now two years older.

Whale Dancer

Tonight I write with no plan, no goal, no structure. I open my desk, take up an ink fountain pen, and let my thoughts flow.

Off the coast of Monterey, California, the sea was cold and fog rose from her breath. The morning was short and tense as the sun rose above the compass engraved upon her salt pier.

The sun was not to fully appear, for the fog was as thick as my ink pen upon this page. I was aboard a science ship, my boots gripping the deck as I walked, my fleece shirt drinking the joining of sea and sky.

Would I see my quarry in the cold fog and rough seas? No. The science students said it was not “whale weather.” So I would sit back and enjoy this, the thing my pen breathes upon this page… my perfection, my happiness, my soul screaming to the sea that I am within her depths and I feel her power. I bend over the side, into the spray, and I tell her that she is my fire. I close my eyes and shout silently from within.

And then she breached. A Humpback in full breach. She joyfully expressed the wonder within her own heart, matching my own, at full breach in cold fog. She was dancing in fog. She was singing in fog. She was embracing the cold. Her calf was nearby, she was as a shout, my ink fountain jar tipping and spilling would-be words across the rumpled pages….the black ink dashing across the page and onto the banks of the salt pier, the decks of the science ship, the surface of the open sea, uncontained.

Then back into the cold fog. Did I see her? Did we share a dance? Did she have one joyful, delighted scream within the depths, as did I, into the spray?

Shadow in fog, you shared my fire.

Below the Belt

Sometimes life hits you below the belt. With it, you run to sit, looking at this, with a homemade sandwich and a coke, for a pause… the maddening waves, the battering wind, the voices of sea creatures in their depths, and an earnest longing of a ship for the “Light to the Sea” hits you, ancient, cold, hard, honest.

And all is well.

Cape Blanco Light out of Port Orford, Oregon.

Tornados and kittens in a backpack

“Night of tornados” – wasn’t that the name of a horror flick?

We will get to the whales next time.

Today we are backtracking from my notes. It was May 21, 2019. Don’t let the older date fool you, the moment will never leave.

San Angelo State Park, in Texas, is one of the most beautiful places on earth. The area is shrub trees, mesquite brush, cactus, rolling hills, stone cliffs, deer, coyotes, jack rabbits, bob-whites… forget meditation apps, just visit this place at dusk and dawn.

Camped a few miles from the town, I had the perfect spot in the isolated southern section. I was on a ridge facing down into a little valley, the town quietly in the distance. There were no lights in this area and the night sky sparkled without “light pollution.” It was so perfect that I have a mind to request it each time I return, and return I shall.

Just look at it.

The day was splendid.

At almost dusk, a park ranger drove to each sparsely placed RV, warning us with the proverbial ominous stare into the distance… a tornado had wiped out several town blocks two days earlier. It was looking well to happen again.

“It is too late to leave. We are locking the gates and will not be back until morning.”

What?

The storm came quickly and I did not yet know Seashell, my 5th wheel, well enough to determine when it was safe to stay inside or when she would go over. I had trouble walking without grasping something. Later my Fitbit watch told me I had accomplished this:

I lost electricity early. I still had cell connection and in the dark, I checked my Facebook weather feeds. *refresh refresh refresh*

The night provided horizontal green lightning that enveloped San Angelo like a lasso without a lead. Seashell was a shuddering mess as the wind slid across her roof, under her belly, and around her sides. A green “lead” of the lasso soon extended over me.

The park bathhouse, a place to seek shelter, had looked very far away. Now it looked farther. I gathered important papers and the newly burned DVDs of family 8mms and slides into waterproof bags, acutely aware it was all I had left of them.

I learned that two cats will almost fit inside a backpack if they are terrified enough and to look there first before panicking and tearing a trailer apart because they had left their carriers. Moving them, I apologized in soothing whispers through puffs of loose fur.

Raincoat, handgun, water, medicine, headlamp… the door would not open. Why had I not gone sooner?

The green stretched and wobbled, with roiled black within. The blue and yellow lights of electrical surges popped as sections of town went dark. When green flashed on the other side of me, where there was nothing, I solemnly watched for a dark shape there as well.

None of the other RVers were heading for the bathhouse. Were we all waiting for someone else to go first, thereby asserting the seriousness of the moment?

I thought of Iowa, where in my youth a tornado had introduced me to a graphic human death by Mother Nature. I felt underwater. I curled onto the couch and dozed off, somehow. It had been hours.

My phone app tornado siren put that Old World banshee to shame.

My phone flashed: San Angelo, seek shelter. San Angelo, false alarm. San Angelo, keep watch. San Angelo, seek shelter immediately. It is south of you. It is southwest of you. It is moving north towards you. It has touched down three places. There are now more than one.

I knew people were in basements and interior rooms. I was on a ridge. I switched off my small battery candle that had kept me sane through the night. The dark felt like velvet. I sat on the floor with the kittens and trembled. We waited.

A friend from afar stayed up with me all night. She must have been exhausted. She gave me encouragement, weather reports, comfort, humor, a presence in a void. Her name is Veda. She was my angel.

The culmination of this blog is not that a tornado never reached the ridge. No, it brought the realization that I was not prepared to be the person I saw in Iowa. It made me wonder why I had not put a bible into my backpack. I had a tiny New Testament. It would have fit. Why was it an afterthought?

The storm put on an Old West dance hall show that night, complete with raucous fistfights and howled curses. Blessed first light brought views of downed tree limbs, scattered shrubs, slumped fences, and the defiant songs of birds celebrating victory.

Defiance. Let us all have it in times of peril.

Finis.

DejaVu dear Self…

Oh dear readers and dear self, I’ve been looking back on my first journey westward in Serenity, detailed here on WordPress, and bigbangboom, what the hey…???? I’ve traveled the same path on my trip in Seashell so many years later?

I know much has happened and my brain had relapses of enough multitudes that we shall pretend it didn’t occur, but again what the hey?? I’m following the same route without realizing it?

Ok, girl, get a grip. Perhaps you are following a long-dormant-memory path from your youth, from your dad later in life, from… who knows. Or perhaps you are just seriously picking the best route.

And they are all the same.

I’ve gone back to review where I stayed on my first trip compared to the second and it’s been an eye opener. I’ve changed. They’ve changed. Life’s changed. The black water dump at the KOA in Barstow, California has changed. I’ll leave you guessing or grinning or groaning at that.

I must make a conscious effort to pick different routes, even if it means perhaps choosing bad ones (with safety and preparation). It must be done.

As I head back home to Texas from Oregon, this will happen. And it will be risky because those familiar routes are the safe ones.

Hold onto your hats. And your water jugs and your diesel fuel cans.

Thankfully, I do have some time to prepare for this.

In the meanwhile, how about those ferocious winter coastal waves? Oregon, you amaze me.

Trip “not finis” and a giant BOOM!

I’m still sitting in Oregon. Port Orford’s tiny fishing village vibe has gripped me by the soul. I have much to write about, 99% of it good. But I need to backstep, backtrack…. to write about places I’ve made notes about, as it will soon be time to leave my agate and jasper strewn black sand beach, and I do not wish to forget the trail which led me here.

The earthquake shook me with a boom! I was quietly relaxing in my recliner on the extended slide out, which means basically hanging in mid-air, when it happened. A deep single popping boom followed by vibrations and bouncing and a rumbled groan from Seashell stunned me. It did not “roll” like most earthquakes that I have experienced. It bounced straight up and down.

At first I assumed this was due to the construction of the slide out. But reports from townsfolk in “sticks and bricks” and up as far as Portland five hours away, indicated that it was indeed a straight up and down bounce. An active volcanic plate offshore, increasing in said action, is being closely watched.

A tsunami alert was not issued, but some folks jumped in their cars and fled up “coastguard hill” anyway. Some drunken folks from a bar ran down to the harbor to see if the water was going out. I sat in my chair wondering what to do, eventually realizing that I should go outside to turn off the propane tanks, also being thankful that I had properly chocked the tires.

I now have gathered a “go bag” as instructed by local emergency personnel, and I have also learned of the location on Jackson street with supplies meant only for children separated from their parents in such a case. They really should have been cautious about telling the general public about that. Of course, I just did.

At first reported one mile offshore, with the epicenter at our harbor, it was changed to be inland, almost completely underneath me. No wonder the boom rattled into my chest.

This excitement having passed, and the 3 aftershocks also passed…. we now focus on my backtracking to my journey here. And even with that eye opener that the power of Oregon lies not only in her massive storm waves, but in her power beneath the ground, I yet remain.

*Humbled, lost, found*

As the trip winds down with only 1/4 of what I’d planned, since I came to a screeching halt in Oregon, I’m reminded of how long I saved money for it, this promise of seeing places, experiencing things, visiting those long “out of reach” worlds that I’d only dreamed of. It’s been so much better than my dreams!

I’ve been completely out of my comfort zone, alternately happy, worried, bored, frustrated, frightened, exhilarated, ecstatic, calm, lost, and ultimately found.

We live in a beautiful country filled with diverse cultures and places. I’ve met fascinating people along my journey, from all walks of life. Each will forever be a part of me, as I carry their memories in this happy heart. I will write soon about some particular ones.

I thank God for this mind blowing opportunity and I am humbled by it.

Trip, finis. I will miss you, yet never lose you.