been beachcombing the Washington shores of the Long Beach Peninsula for nearly two weeks. Not many Japanese glass floats, most of them are plastic now. But I have found enough, especially after the great honking storm on the sixth, to swap for food at a curio museum and general store on the waterfront in Ilwaco. The shorebirds are good company, but this state has a doltish law extending the public highway system to the beaches. I’ve seen pickups speed up to try to hit flocks of sanderlings and gulls, and motorbikers kick the heads of penguinlike murres, breaking their necks. My greatest satisfaction wasn’t the eight-inch green-glass float I found in a wadge of kelp, but watching a pickup marooned in the wet sand with the tide coming in way out on Leadbetter Point. The driver got out; the truck did not. I tried to help him get unstuck, but it was futile. I gave him a shot of Teacher’s and we drank silently to the sinking truck, his loss, the sanderlings’ and clams’ gain. I’m on their side, but I felt a little sorry for him in spite of myself. It was a nice truck.
My cynicism may be coming home to roost these days because other than the one glass ball, I’ve found nothing of value for three days other than the clean sea air, peace, and tranquillity when the beach traffic is at bay. Plus sunsets of lead and copper that no scrap dealer could ever afford. I think I’ll head north.
November 13. My ride around Willapa Bay came in an oyster truck. When I told the driver I loved oysters, he said he hoped I like zinc. Why, I asked? “ ’Cuz the fishermen is turning up radioactive zinc in the oysters here,” he said. “They say it comes down the Columbia from Hanford and around the bay on the outflow plume.” One day I’d walked over the peninsula to the bay side and poached a few at low tide; they were great, roasted over my campfire with a few butter clams. “And I won’t eat sturgeon from the river no more,” the driver went on, “not with the paper mill pumping out chlorine.” Silly me, expecting this country to be wild and pristine, as the visitors’ guide says. Blazers on the beach, the big cedars mostly in absentia, glow-in-the-dark seafood. Roll on, Columbia.
November 20, Shi Shi Beach. The Olympic Park beaches may be sandy in summer, but in winter they go largely to pea gravel and cobbles. Most of the floats I find are shattered. Backpackers clamber over the driftwood piles like crabs, sometimes finding the whole ones before me. I feel I have a prior claim; their packs, after all, are full of food. I have found a sign saying “No Smoking” in Russian, and a pig’s heart (I think), as well as a coconut in its husk. I cooked its sweet meat with mussels plucked from the rocks—red tide should be over by now—and a large crayfish I caught in a back-beach pond, over a driftwood fire in a sprucy enclave, out of the rain.
Latter-day back-to-the-landers and poets have built huts by a glorious spot called Point of Arches, where horns and hoops of black basalt spill a mile out into the sea. They asked me to join them for the winter, but I declined. I don’t think their company would improve upon the ravens and the black bears that nose around my camp. And besides, I don’t believe anyone (since the Makah left long ago) should live here. Well, if the loggers don’t roust them out, the weather will. They’ve built in a gully and will surely be launched to sea during some big storm to come.
November 30. And so they were. And so was my tent. I am cold and wet through, though never too hungry in this land that made the Makah fat in winter. Not that I’ve got the dried salmon, gray whale blubber, and eulachon oil that stuck to their ribs during the winter ceremonials. But I’ve feasted on razor and horse clams, sea cucumber, a ruffed grouse I got with a lucky rock toss, and plenty of late evergreen huckleberries and cranberries. The none-too-adept hippies up in the ravine told me there was nothing here to eat. For the most part they seemed to subsist on canned goods and hot dogs, for which they made periodic trips out to the reservation store in Neah Bay.
But now, roofless to the elements, they’ve left, leaving their midden of old moldy sleeping bags and tin cans in the ruins of their campsite. I reckon I’ll be gone too, soon. Even if I waited out the winter without dying by drowning or pneumonia or sheer rot—it rains a hundred inches in winter here—I doubt there would be any butterflies to catch in this dense rainforest. Now, if my clients would buy unlimited quantities of these fine big banana slugs, or the purple urchins or lavender and orange sea stars that plaster the rocks offshore—if I could emulate Doc in Cannery Row, financing my beer and pickling fluid with the proceeds from harvesting the tide pools—then I’d be in business.
But no, my customers want butterflies. Even the Olympic Mountains won’t help, as they’re just about all in the national park, where amateurs (read: professionals without degrees, like me) cannot collect. Maybe it’s time to start heading for the Rockies. One of the beach survivalists shot a gull the other day and didn’t even try to eat it. I asked him why he did it. “Just practicin’ my survival skills, man,” is what he said. Easy riding, gull.
December 3. Slow hitching along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Passenger cars whizzed on by without a second look; can’t blame them. I probably wouldn’t pick me up. Fortunately, I had chestnut-backed chickadees and golden-crowned kinglets for company. Finally, a crabber gave me a lift and a couple of Dungeness crabs that I cooked in a driftwood fire at the eponymous Dungeness Spit. Then a bird-watcher took me down Hood Canal and all the way to Tacoma. I told him about the motorbiked murres, and he told me of an oil spill he’d recently been in on. “A murre with a broken neck would have been lucky,” he said. “We had dozens of them all gummed up in crude.” This was offshore. “We’re waiting for the big one in Puget Sound,” he told me, “with a governor who wants to let supertankers in. One of these days there’s going to be a really giant spill in one of the bays—Puget Sound, Barkley Sound, maybe up in Prince William Sound where they still have sea otters—and then we’ll see how oil and water mix.” If it’s down here, he told me, we can just about say goodbye to rhinoceros auklets, and marbled murrelets too—“even if they still have any big trees left to nest in.” He was verging on gloomy, so I bought him an Oly at the tavern near the Tacoma railyards where he dropped me off. We drank to the birds, the trees, Robinson Jeffers, and all the other sad misanthropes like ourselves.
December 5. Caught a freight east, but the bull kicked me off at Wishram—an old-time hobo junction outside a has-been railroad town deep inside the Columbia Gorge. Hoboes don’t like Dungeness crab, at least these didn’t, nor did they much like me. Anyway, I didn’t feel like waking up splayed, even if it had been warm enough to sleep, which it wasn’t with the infamous Gorge wind screaming through like just another train. It may have been an old-time ’bo camp, but these weren’t old-time ’boes. I’ve never known a genuine gentleman of the road to be unwelcoming around his fire. These guys were younger, harder—guys back from Vietnam with incredulous looks in their eyes, guys on drugs or wishing they were. I walked up the long grade to Highway 14 and tried the asphalt road instead. God bless that onion-truck driver! Now I sit in an all-night truck stop outside Walla Walla, a dusty dawn coming on. Will I ever get out of here, or will I become an onion grunt in the spring (as the driver suggested), planting Walla Walla sweets, maybe even sticking around to pull them up in the summer?
Waitress figures I’ll never get out of here. Gum-chewing siren in a coral uniform, she saw me writing and asked me what. “Just traveler’s tales,” I told her.
“Not romances?” she asked, clearly disappointed. When I convinced her I was no novelist, just a vagrant making chicken scratches while waiting for a ride, and no, I couldn’t write her life story for her, though I was sure it was every bit as fascinating and “weird” as she said, she told me I’d never get a ride. Coreen pouted for a while, but I was her only company, so she broke down and gave me another cup of coffee and a slice of peach pie, at the cost of also accepting a slice of her plenty-weird story. Then the morning trade began to butt in, demanding Coreen’s attention and aborting the saga, which I was quite enjoying, as it made my life sound easy. Why am I writing this crap? Just to stay awake.
December 13. I’ve read that Friday the 13th was a lucky day in the old religions, turned around by the latecomers, just like All Hallows’ itself. Anyway, the goblins smiled, and I landed from a ride with a rancher
