#maybe some bull kelp fronds

[kelporama]

Waves sloshing winged kelp over red algae.

You can see why brown algae is also called golden algae. The glow of sunlight on seaweed absolutely melts your heart.

#kelp #seaweed #marine life #probably sugar kelp too #maybe some bull kelp fronds

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Drifting

I spent my forty-fourth birthday exploring the rugged beaches of Washington's outer coast. For two precious days, I hiked through the cool green woods covering its headlands, and scrambled over the jumbled logs lining its shores, and enjoyed one of the last wild places in America.

It is a special terrain that can tell its own story. One can immediately sense the forces and processes working to shape this maritime environment. Even the most cursory of glances will reveal what's been happening; the eons become visible within a few seconds of observation. The forest grows thick here, right up to the water's edge, but the Pacific is always trying to push its boundaries further and further inland. Wind and water collide with the earth, an unceasing onslaught, until the ground gives way, year after year, and the coastal concavities deepen over the centuries, like bites taken from a crust of bread. The results of this erosion are steep bays, towering promontories, and rocky beaches. But these are not the gentle shores of suntans and Mai Tais and tourists roasting on their folding chairs. No, ma'am … this is a violent, severe frontier, where wood gets splintered and rocks crack and souls are beaten into submission.

Giant trees … Sitka spruces, maybe a hundred feet tall or more, and cedars, firs, hemlocks … tumble down the cliffs, and fall into the water, or are plucked from the ground by the incoming tides. They are bashed repeatedly against the rocks; this action strips them of branches and bark, sometimes making a shaggy-looking fringe of their pulverized outer layers. After a few months or years of this thunderous battery, the sun-bleached and salted wood turns into modern sculpture … twisted, tortured, stunning. The beach is strewn with such relics, dead trees whittled down into unexpected shapes by the churning action of water.

At low tide, the shore becomes like the surface of another planet. Half-buried chunks of limestone are honeycombed and smoothed into surrealistic shapes, looking very much like the paintings of Yves Tanguy or Kay Sage, but with starfish and barnacles and anemones clinging to them. The retreating sea reveals huge open flats of sand and mud, which are further scored by trickling freshwater and runoff into dazzling patterns … moirés, chevrons, herringbones. Many of the resulting forms seem familiar; from a standing view, they remind one of river deltas and canyons as they would appear from an airplane. It's all-too-easy to see how the collapsing bank of sand on the edge of a little rivulet mirrors the cliffs crumbling all around you. The relationship between the macrocosmic and microcosmic is very plain in such a situation.

It's amazing how much debris gets left behind as the tide goes out: bivalve shells, dead crabs, plastic bottles scoured into opacity, fishing net floats, boat bumpers, tires, knots of colorful rope. There's plenty of bull kelp, which despite its appearance is not a plant at all but a type of algae; its long stipes, fronds, and bladders tangle into messy clumps, which look from a distance like gorgon heads littering the sand. You can find a lot of things that have drifted over from Japan, some of it detritus from the great tsunami of 2011. Sometimes shoes with human feet inside show up.

When you arrive at any of these beaches, it's likely that your access to the shore will be blocked by a large pile of driftwood. It's a scary business, to clamber over this kind of deadfall … the logs are round, slippery, and precariously balanced. One misstep may mean broken bones or worse. And the assembly of wood forms can differ from day to day, even hour to hour, as the incoming tide may lift and shift the logs around. It's a living sculpture, and a deadly one.

Many people die out here. Beachcombers get caught below the cliffs at high tide, and are unable to climb the steep rock faces to safety. They drown in the crashing surf, or they are bludgeoned by all the floating trunks. Such accidents are more frequent than you might think … for when it comes, the returning water is fast, and powerful, and utterly merciless. If you don't research the topography beforehand, and fail to pay attention to the tides, your doom will be swift and certain.

Some of the beaches have waterfalls coursing down the cliff faces. Or, even more dramatically, the jutting headlands will erode unevenly, leaving huge chunks of rock orphaned in the water. These "sea stacks", tall and topped by gnarled trees, offer the perfect habitat for shorebirds. On my birthday, I watched a pair of bald eagles preparing to mate. They locked talons and plummeted towards the ground, separating at the last possible instant, risking death in order to prove their fortitude to themselves and one another.

It was on one of these beaches … south of La Push, in the lands that belonged to the Quileute, and the Quinalt, and the Chimakum before them … when I began to consider the social landscape I would be returning to, if and when I turned my back to all this magic, and returned to my everyday humdrum minimum-wage life. I looked at the driftwood, sensing its story of travel and transformation, envying perhaps its freedom.

For in the human world, everyone wants you to be anchored in place. Everyone wants you to have a job … just one, preferably, for a long while, long enough that your "career" can be defined by this type of job, long enough for you to earn a pension, long enough for you to earn a coffee mug embossed with the company logo. The concept of "occupation" has become subservient to the structures of "employment". You're told to climb the ladder of professional achievement, and grow straight up in your little shaft of sunlight, if you know what's good for you. You're told that your merit will be tied to your income, that you're only as good as your credit score, that your best bet is to hold out for a promotion. Your résumé will be your biography … and it better not be too bland or too bold, or you won't be hired. If you're fancy, you might dub this glorified rap sheet a "curriculum vitae", but it will still be just that: a condensed accounting of your professional history.

In the human world, you'll be trained to occupy your niche and be grateful for it. You'll encouraged to stay in a job long enough to be rewarded with a pension. You'll accept that your health care, housing, and even your romantic life will be tied to your employment status. You'll cede your dignity, your schedule, and your autonomy to your employers. You'll have to ask permission from your boss before you can nurse your baby, attend a funeral, or see a doctor. You'll be reminded that your education will have value only if nets you a high-paying position. You'll be led to believe that your chief achievements as a human being will be professional milestones, rather than philosophical or spiritual revelations. You will be an employee until your useful working life is over, and then you will be retired. And you will consider yourself lucky to have "made it".

In the human world, you're supposed to contribute to the stability of the forest by remaining rooted in place for as long as possible. But spend any time in an old wood and you will see that permanence is an illusion. The forest is an incredibly dynamic place, full of crashes and decay and mutations. Even the towering redwood will fall someday, and its trunk will nurse a dozen new saplings, and mushrooms will squish its bark, and its heartwood will soften under the scuttling feet of centipedes. Or, depending on its proximity to the coast, the tree might slide down the face of a crumbling embankment, and splash into the surf, where it will slowly become something else entirely: a piece of drifting art.

As I prepared to leave, I looked again at the mass of weathered logs, casualties of the battle between the sea and the land, and realized then that I was more akin to them than the healthy and tall spruces spearing the sky above.

For I've already fallen off the cliff of professional ambition. It's too late and too improbable for me to "make it", in any traditional sense. Now I just want to drift with the tides. If the ocean is going to keep bashing me against the rocks, I might as well surrender to its power, and allow myself to be reduced by its motions, until I become a stark and beautiful abstraction. Lots of people want to be the tallest tree in the forest … and to them I say, have at it. Enjoy your climb towards the sun. But as for myself, I think I'd rather be like a piece of driftwood … gnarled, scarred, unique, sometimes adorning the shore, sometimes dancing in the waves, forever in flux, forever changing, forever landing somewhere new.

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