A High and Holy Place

Cities can crawl over forests…but they can’t sprawl into the sea. Not much. Not yet. And that wildness shimmering at the edge of things, lidded and liquid, how lucky those who live near it are to have such a gorgeous reminder of our connection to the unbuilt world.

Cascadia Field Guide

The Lay of the Land

I arrived here, far from home, at the wild threshold between Oregon and the ocean, an hour before sunset on Monday. I’d been driving since sunrise and I wanted to land a bit upon landing. 

I met my dear friend and photographer Joshua Berman in the parking lot of the Neskowin Beach State Recreation Site. Together we walked along Kiwanda Creek to where it enters Neskowin Creek to where it enters the Pacific Ocean. The air, which had been still and sun-warmed all day, began to cool and move. Gently, at first, and with increasing adamance as we walked north, away from the setting sun behind Proposal Rock. 

Without a cloud on the horizon, the sun dropped fast and without fanfare. We stopped to witness the day’s end, and, in the tidal flux, spotted a gull working hard to wrest something from the surf. We watched as she dragged a fist sized object higher and higher onto the beach. We walked toward her, she stayed her ground. She stayed her ground when the waves lapped at her feet. As they receded again, she worked furiously to relocate and continue hauling her quarry through the sand. 

A crab! As we drew closer we made out ten legs kicking and clawing at the gull’s beak, which pecked back again. We watched, riveted, as the gull’s persistence overpowered the crab’s fight. She pecked through the carapace and gulped its contents as the crab’s legs flailed. The spectacle more than made up for the ordinariness of the sunset.

We made our way back to Sitka Center for Art + Ecology, where Josh is partway through an artist-in-residency. We stopped where the road ended on the edge of the Salmon River estuary in the complete darkness that is the Oregon Coast under a new moon–an entire mountain range and half a lunar cycle away from competing light sources. The Milky Way arced above us and Josh traced Cygnus, Lyra, and Aquila that constellated around it in the southwestern sky. 

Sea and starry sky continued to welcome me through the night. I slept on a window seat next to a window open just enough to admit a cold stream of air, the distant roar of the surf, and glints of starshine through the Sitka spruce branches. I dreamt of waking and dressing in layers and leaving at first light to walk up Cascade Head.

Sunrise

We woke, dressed in layers, and left at first light to walk up Cascade Head. The trail began by  climbing through stout, moss-laden Sitka spruce. We broke out of the trees onto the southern shoulder of the headland just as the sun crested the Coastal Range. It cast its slanting light across the foothills whose treetops raked it into golden rays and shafts. The Salmon River wound its way to the mouth of the estuary below the headland in molten pewter. Waves foamed where river met ocean and splayed themselves onto the sandy spit separating the two. 

We took a little spur trail to a peek-a-boo view of the ocean and the coastline to the north. A Sitka spruce jutted away from the slope just where the trail reached its edge, a continuation almost. A thick arm right at foot level, another a perfect seat–wide, flat, covered in moss, welcoming. I stepped out onto the arm. Hugging another limb with my arm, I tested out the seat. My legs flushed with the precarity of my position over the bank that fell away below me. I sat there, heart racing, legs quivering, until I felt myself recalibrate to a sense of safety. This tree was solidly anchored; this was an exposure to fear, not risk. I lay back, Rockabye, Baby in a treetop cradle.

But it was a cold, clear morning. Too cold to lay there for long. Josh and I continued up the trail, through the wide open, nearly treeless headland, to its summit at 1,217 feet above the estuary where we began.

A few years ago, at a reunion of my Opal Creek community just south of here, we passed Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass around in the evenings, after my friends’ wee ones had gone to sleep. Over the course of two nights we read her essay “Burning Cascade Head” to each other. In it, she recounts the first people of this place, the Nechesne, who, as part of their ritual for inviting the salmon back to their natal river, burned the headland annually. 

“I cannot tell you more of that high and holy place,” she writes of her own ascent on the same incised trail. “Words blow away. Even thought dissipates like wisps of cloud sailing up the headland.”

We began our descent. Back on the shoulder where we first broke through the trees, we encountered a pair of hikers bundled in gear embroidered with The Nature Conservancy’s logo. They carried a chain saw, a pole saw. A bow saw and hard hats were strapped to their packs.

I smiled and walked by. Josh, a decidedly different creature than I when it comes to encounters with strangers, stopped and struck up a conversation. At the click of his camera I turned around to see him snapping shots of the pair–Catherine and Chase, they told us when I backtracked, reluctantly, to join the conversation. 

They worked for The Nature Conservancy and they were pointed toward a meadow on the north slope of the headland, just off its summit, where they were limbing the encroaching Sitka spruce. The meadow, protected as it was from the summer’s north wind by the Sitka, was important habitat for the threatened Oregon silverspot butterfly. 

“She’s a conservation writer,” Josh said, nodding toward me, “And I’m a conservation photographer. We’re here for a residency at Sitka, collaborating on a project that responds to this place.”

“Well, if you want to join us tomorrow, we’ve got two workdays planned up on the headland. We could use a couple volunteers,” Catherine invited. 

“Yes!” I blurted out, responding for us both. “Where? When? We’ll be there.”

Sunset

At the end of our day, after descending the trail and touring the 80 acre Grass Mountain conservation project the Sitka Center manages, we again climbed the headland for sunset. We ran into Catherine and Chase at the end of their workday and confirmed our plans for the morning.

“Did you see any elk this morning?” Catherine asked.

“We did!” I said, excitedly. “Just a rump, through the salmonberry thickets below us,” I added, pointing downtrail. “But I’ll take it.”

“They’re up on the headland now,” she reported. “You’ll see more of them, just up the trail.”

The very next stretch of trail and there they were, grazing above the pounding surf. We walked by slowly. Josh’s camera clicked away, and I tried to keep up with it, taking as many mental images as I could, hoping they’d take purchase in my mind.

I climbed back into my tree cradle. I laid there long enough to feel some ease, which came more quickly on the second visit, and the roar of the surf in the hollow cavity of my lungs. I laid there reflecting on the enormous gift that my first 24 hours in this place had been: this tree, our encounter with Catherine and Chase, the opportunity that stretched out in the days ahead, the generosity of my friend to let me crash his residency, his studio and cabin spaces, the elk that seemed unperturbed by our cohabitation of this place. 

We watched the sun drop into the ocean. Another quick, clear, affair. We began our decent. 

The elk had moved farther uphill and now straddled the trail, glowing in the golden light that lingered. I counted thirteen of them, one with two-points on his developing antlers. They watched us with placid curiosity, and we matched their energy and watched back. 

Day one, I thought to myself. Holy wow. (My favorite prayer.)