Becoming the Beach

We live walking distance from Lincoln Park, a gorgeous stretch of beach and tall trees on the East side of Puget Sound. A few times a year, we have low tides and if I’m paying attention and we’re at leisure to do so, we walk down to the beach to poke take a look at the sea critters.

It’s about 20 minutes from the front porch to the water. At -2.5, the tide is out well beyond the usual low point. When the tide is this low, there’s an abundance of sea life. Today’s tide revealed a rocky beach covered in a shiny green cellophane of kelp, the surface littered with bright purple starfish and glittering orange tentacled sunstars. Moon jellyfish floated in the shallow water, sometimes they were trapped on the rocks, a gooey transparent circle drying out in the hot sun. There are sea cucumbers — when they’re open, they show their feathery orange gills — and anemones shut tight, slick and weird. If you step wrong — or right, depending on how you interpret it — you may upset a clam buried not too deep in the sand and you will be admonished with a spray of water up to your knees.

The birds go crazy at all this exposed life — it is a fresh salad and seafood bar to them. Crows pick at the crabs, seagulls flip over the broad leaves of rust colored seaweed to find snails underneath. We sat on giant tree trunks, bleached white, and watched a bald eagle slowly lope by, low enough and close enough that we could hear the swish of his wings.

I toyed with the idea of the tidal zone as a metaphor for the human body, how if we were not held together by our skin, we would be like everything on the beach, salty and slick, our bones white like the giant driftwood, our hearts and lungs and livers salty and wet and breathing. I find this reassuring rather than gory, as though I could deconstruct and then, become the beach. It would not be a bad thing to be a beach, not this beach. To be so well loved, so appreciated, met with such glee by all those toddlers who, upon finding yet another slimy, salty, oozing, tentacled living thing, squeal with delight while running up and down the sand under the sparkling summer light.

All pictures in the slideshow above were shot by the unappreciated tech support and logistics team (aka “The Husband” and “Mr. NEV”) using a Panasonic Lumix.