Eating Sand: An Agony on Gained Perspective

I used to wear neckties. I had a bunch. Royal and navy striped, purple paisley, tiny green polka dots, a Dolce & Gabbana cream on cream floral print. A grey suit, a black suit and a navy one too. A smattering of splash color handkerchiefs for the breast pocket, tie bars and cufflinks with my initials engraved in them. Ruddy brown wingtips with the matching belt and another set in black. What happened to all that stuff?

While sifting through my now grown children’s elementary homework that had spilled from a cardboard box into a laundry basket abandoned years ago to the recesses of my bedroom closet, “Post Nirvana” plays an SNL Anniversary Concert from the living room television.

Drawings of cats and trees, stick humans holding hands drafted by the fingers of a child learning how to hold a crayon, are heaped alongside stacks of paper displaying pristine kanji penmanship. “Top to bottom, right to left,” I recall the 7-year-old version of my daughter teaching me. Lessons from their English grammar classes are mixed in with the faded third-grade times tables and broken YMCA trophies from my own youth. Proof of foreign government issued State health insurance for her study abroad are now all piled with the State of Oregon papers my son received just last week for his passed driver’s exam.

Maybe this is just a simple tribute song from Dave Grohl and his latest frontman; or perhaps it is the latest reincarnation, Foo Fighters having emerged from mourning Kurt, his new daughter just maybe born from anguished escape after Taylor’s death and now, perhaps like me, self-identification and his own family dynamic in the midst of another rebirth as well.

From the plastic basket, I remove some black slacks I wore only once, having bought them over a decade ago for a wedding. One folded edge at the hip pocket is covered filthy in dust, the portion which had been exposed from underneath the piles of learned lessons. I toss them in the Goodwill donation trash bag and go in again, coming back up with a crumpled trucker hat in my hands.

As I stare at the basic bicycle graphic enwreathed by the word “Chuckin,” I smile at the memories. And then I pause… and wonder… are the dunes when this started?! Hmmm...maybe it was more like thirteen years ago? Or maybe more simple...yeah, it started when I was born. Or was it when my recently widowered grandfather’s father was kicked out of his children’s lives as a young man a century or so ago? ...huh.

In any case; this winter has been the longest yet.

“Let’s GOOOO!” Chuck yells from the driver’s seat, engine running, as the rest of us pile in with him. “We’re on a schedule here now!”

The chorus of screams from Bellbottoms of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion suddenly erupt from his Ford Explorer’s stereo as we peel out the rock and dirt, headed downhill to the ocean trailhead below. None of us has been here before and I’d picked the spot. Plenty of discussion leading up to this moment had revolved around “What about doing this?,” or “How about we head over there?” Finally, I’d ruled, “No…this is why we’re here in this quirky little town. This is what we’re doing.” It would be about a six or seven mile round trip, plus whatever else we got into.

The trailhead starts off through your average state campground and after half a mile or so, the vast dune structure appears, as far as the eye can see, no ocean yet visible. The sand is warm and soft underfoot, making for slow going.

After settling into the pace for a few minutes, I feel a tug from behind and then, hearing his laughter, see Chuck’s backside charging up to the top of the nearby dune with the disc he’s ripped from underneath the straps on my back. Soon, my pack too is in the sand and we’re all trading hucks with each other. After just enough to work up a mild bead of sweat, we realize the sun is beginning to drift a little lower in the afternoon sky and we still have an unknown way to go. Back to the safari.

Over the course of the next hour, between some intermittent groans and subsequent long periods of silence, our group has dispersed over about a quarter mile. I find myself in the middle, torn in between checking back in on Chuck and the explorers, and keeping up pace with our leader. Wait...is this habitual? Am I always in second place?

About a year earlier, arriving at Waldo Lake, I was late. Like, really late. Hours late. But I didn’t really know it. Beforehand, I’d thought it was fine, and we hadn’t really discussed a specific push-off time into the canoes. Or had we? Communication is hard.

The fact that the fellas were annoyed on the docks at high noon was not really the problem, though. It’s that you don’t want to sit there waiting for your pal, only to then be paddling into the setting sun on a mountain lake. You see, the principles of thermodynamics combined with the rotating and subsequently cooling earth, often make for paddling into a major headwind when headed west in the late afternoon. I felt exposed. So, do yourself a favor and oar west on Waldo Lake in the early morning sunrise and back out east in the afternoon, wind at your back in both directions. You’re welcome.

Nevermind the hard pull, we made it to our spot on the far side, located at the earliest headwater trickle of the Willamette River and at the edge of a forest burn. As the sun set on us exploring the burn, I was struck by the forgiveness of time.

Sit with that for a minute. For after all, that’s the point.

The passage of time, itself, is a great forgiver. This place had, about a decade before, been a tremendous forest with tall fir trees dominating the lakeside terrain. And, perched on a hill there that evening, it was easily apparent that those gloriously huge trees had also existed as suffocating bullies. For the undergrowth that year was positively blossoming.

At least for right then, brilliant and multicolored wildflowers, ferns, grasses and saplings speckled the landscape as far as the eye could see amidst the burned-out husks and downed giants. For all that the reverence and beauty the imagery of an old growth forest deservedly conjures in the mind, this scene was no less majestic; and certainly considering the geological scale of time, it will have existed for a only fraction of history.

How lucky we were to witness the natural aftermath of carnage. Soon enough, in another decade or two, those saplings’ roots will have found each other in a structural weave under the earth softened by fire and rain. They will reach ever higher and higher to the heavens, and in another minute a century or so from now again dominate the skyline, having long since choked out the wildflowers and grasses, only leaving the occasional fern to exist in their shadows.

In my uncertainty and reflection, stumbling down to the bottom of the final dune at a small bank of coastal trees, I stop at the beginning of a defined trail. It is juxtaposed to the wide open dunescape of just minutes before, only marginally visible marker posts protruding from the ever-changing landscape at varying and difficult to discern intervals. I am somehow calmer now and have a good feeling we’ll be walking by this spot again. So, I go to stash the small cooler of a couple beers under a trailside tree when I am passed up by one of the crew who’d caught up. Classic tortoise and hare moment.

I fall into step, and I am immediately annoyed. For now, instead of getting to see the trail unfurl before me, I’m staring at the back of my buddy’s head. I take a breath and allow myself to follow for a while. Perhaps there is something to learn here. As he wanders from side to side within the narrow confines of the trail, I feel myself wanting to quicken the pace. But I also notice that he’s noticing things that I otherwise wouldn’t see. That’s sweet, I think to myself, he’s really paying attention to his surroundings, living in the moment. One person’s uncertainty is another’s exploration?

Almost as quickly, though, I see an opening. He makes an obvious navigational error, choosing the false trail to the right, stepping offline just enough for me to dart ahead along the more well-worn path. I charge, mind unfettered at the directional clarity the trail provides, beginning to consume it now, as if it’s a delicious meal to be devoured, bite by step.

A small clearing in the trees and one last glimpse of the dune sea sends me reeling into a cave of branches. The tangle of limbs on either side reaches up and intertwines above, and my heart rate accelerates, though not because of my quickened pace through the outstretched living tunnel…something darker awaits ahead. The warm sun in the sky is disappearing and the hot soft sand under my bare feet has been replaced by cold, hard dirt. Murkiness envelops the trail, the drooping sun blocked out by the thick thicket.

Death comes in many ways. The death of a grandparent. The death of a relationship. The death of a business, or a marriage, or a childhood, or a career. The death of a friend.

Coming to grips with Chuck’s impending finality while I was lying on the dirt shoreline bank of Indigo Lake just south of the Diamond Peak Wilderness, even as his body was still breathing shallowly in a coma back in Eugene, all I could see was death. A decomposing log broke the surface of the stagnant water just a few yards away. Algae encased it underwater and spread, suspended atop the murky veneer in every direction. Fungi sprung up out of the log that remained above the water, if you could even call that green grey muck, “water.”

Slime covered and plenty ripe. Perfect, I thought to myself, I’ve put myself down right into a bacteria and frass infested cesspool. Ceratopogonidae (that’s a “no-see-um”) larvae wriggled by the millions floating under the surface while their elders bounced along above. Yuck. What am I doing to myself wallowing in this soup? Is Chuck even worth this damage? He’d himself say “definitely not.” In fact, he’d say “get the **** out of there you idiot!”

About to pick myself up, a bird set down out of the sky, landing next to me on a stone protruding from the dirty sand. It immediately dove its face toward the ground and came up with a beetle, one of dozens crawling around me that I hadn’t even noticed while fixated on the death ooze. It cocked its head to look at me, beak full, blinked and then flew off.

That beetle, now fully dead mind you, was immeasurably more complex a life form than the washed ashore “no-see-um” larvae it fed on; and incalculably less complex than the dinosaur descendant that just flew off with its snack. I figured it out. Like at Waldo Lake years before among the wildflowers, there I was again, rolling around in the beginning, not in the end. That cesspool was full of life, not death. The bacteria and fungi, the larvae and insects, the birds and voles to the deer and mountain lion above; all local life emerged from that and every other nearby small mountain lake primordial stew.

My thoughts immediately jumped to our children. As the forest decomposes to serve the mountain cubs and saplings, so our own future’s purpose is our kids. Everything else is superficial.

The dark tunnel of twigs is lightening and the damp cold sandy dirt below is warming again. Flecks of sunlight burst through the branches and onto my footfalls as I bound underneath them. The foliage begins to diversify into larger leafed plant life as the sunlight intensifies, the warmer and warmer ground now also noticeably more wet. I realize I’m approaching a swamp and, right on cue, a milled plank of redwood appears lying in the path. My bare feet scamper across it to find two more, now side-by side, at its end. I gallop atop more and more successive timbers which all at once, ramp up into a foot bridge network, elevated by pairs of round log trunk sections a couple of feet above the now forested tropical grassland, something out of a Temple Run video game or Indiana Jones movie.

Just as I wonder to myself, is this still Oregon?, I come upon the leader of our team as he is enjoying the trail as much as I am, albeit a tad more thoughtfully. I, and many others, have put a lot of faith in this fine fella over the years; but right now, I am on my own trajectory. This adventure was my pick and the last thing I want right now is to stop and chat about it. As he turns, hearing my footsteps from behind, I cut him off without stopping; “I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

Leaving him behind and in the lead at a full run now, I drop from the forest catwalk and onto the cold sand, dunes rising back out of the swamp. The grasses here are drier and, frankly, much more painfully aggressive on the undersides of my feet. I can hear the ocean waves now crashing just beyond the final climb, which I scramble up and over, bursting onto the beach, my pack and its belongings, shoes and clothing scattered on the ground in my wake.

This stretch of our home continent’s shoreline where it meets the Pacific Ocean is completely and utterly empty. Both to the north and south as far as the eye can see, there is not a single human soul, only a few crab and some shy snowy plover. A light breeze comes off the water as, the purpose of Chuck’s schedule now fulfilled, the orange, red, and yellow sun oozes, dripping down into the horizon.

I remember looking over at my friends in stride on the dunes that day, thinking to myself in satisfaction, we’re going to be adventuring like this for the rest of our lives. It turns out, even today, I am still right about that, just not in the way I thought I’d be.

Now, having largely traded in my professional apparel for smartwool and wingtips for kickers, reflecting on changed priorities adapted over time in a laundry basket full of memories; I can easily see that wandering the details of life certainly has value, whether imagining the vast expanse of time on the edge of a burned forest or wallowing on banks of a murky lake where new life is literally being fed from death. If you don’t spend some time in there exploring, you may not find out how you got to wherever is here.

The ocean’s cold salty water at my knees has my prickled feet soothed, but its vastness allows me to venture no further. I’ve finally reached the end of this particular trail, and I know that on this night with the setting sun, the full moon will rise behind me, lighting our way through the thicket to a cold beer stashed under a tree and eventually back across the dunes.

Our time here is long enough to figure it out, but it’s not exactly geologic. So, spring clean the recesses of your closets…and then, “Let’s GOOOO.”

Photography by Charles A. Long

Written by Bryan A. Jensen