Cascade Head: A Map of Belonging
Way up here the earth is bald, but blooming. Dried stalks of angelica pose in high relief above the open grassland, still arching for the sun while whistling with barrenness. Wood smoke curls inland for winter. The day is placid and cornflower blue, unusual for January on the northern Oregon coast. The ocean, soundlessly deep and indigo below, loosens tatted white waves in a punchbowl of brine. Surf scoters and the shiny heads of seals break the surface, reminding me that the water is nutrient-rich, alive. And that there are some places where I cannot survive.
Atop Cascade Head – a windswept headland north of the Salmon River estuary, and protected by the Nature Conservancy – I sit and take in a rare view: Lincoln City seems to have disappeared behind the hills to the south, all six miles of casinos, hotels and strip malls gone, as if human habitation is an illusion and this great unfolding of geologic time is the only reality.
But that would be a false reading of the landscape. Beneath the Salmon River’s rich deposits and tidal debris are the remains of the native villages of the Neschensney people and their sacred burial grounds. Living in plankhouses along the river, the small Tillamook band subsisted on fish and the coastal mountains’ wild berries and plants. They were accomplished canoers residing between two ageless forces: the river swaying through salt marsh, silting itself in a slow fish-dance; and the ocean, tidally heaving onto the land, then retreating to reveal the gifts of its surge. How did these people endure such a tenacious place and justify staying when the tides swelled or when the river breached? They survived the Pacific tsunami of 1700 a.d., but not contact with white settlers, who brought the decimation of small pox in the 1800′s and relocation soon thereafter. Where were their stories now, so seemingly erased, from this peculiar point of view?
I first visited Cascade Head the weekend after the September 11 attacks for a drawing workshop at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, which I had enrolled in months earlier. The participants, including myself, were not sure if this was the appropriate thing to do, the right place to be, so overwhelmed by our frozen states of not knowing of what was coming next. Some of us had family stuck in places far from home, unable to get anywhere due to the halted air traffic. Emotions ran from sadness to anger to helplessness to restlessness.
We took to the trail that traced the headland and switchbacked from cedar to alder groves, from salmonberry to open sky. We always knew our orientation, no matter how winding the path. The ocean pulsed and filled the air with its rich salt musk. Each of us found our own place to eat lunch and think. After a few hours of writing, sketching and talking, we decided that the act of coming together on this remote bluff was enough reason to justify the retreat. We were not wrong to seek the solitude of the woods and the waves as balm to human madness, to the needless loss of so many lives.
Somewhere nearby, larvae of the threatened Oregon Silverspot butterfly waited to emerge, feed on viola adunca, skim the grasses in search of one another. Beneath us, umber earth slid into a watery knot of logjam and kelp forest. The Pacific battered basalt stacks until they became as smooth as a mortar under the pestle’s grind, or break free, would one day be carried away.
* * *
After two weeks of listening to radio reports of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, I finally turn on the television to see images of the destruction and add a piece to the puzzle of my incomprehension. The daily total of confirmed dead rises like flood waters, do not recede. Maps and computer simulations give me an intellectual understanding of the physical event, but not an emotional relief. I know how this could happen, but why did this happen?
I have heard stories of children being the first victims of the giant wave as they ran to the low-tide line to harvest stranded fish. Reports of people ignoring the behavior of wild and domestic animals – who headed instinctively and quickly towards higher ground – and went to the land’s edge out of curiosity instead, bewilder me. On the evening news, the image of a Buddhist monk in an orange robe is bright against the chaotic monochrome rubble of sand, concrete and wood. Praying where the sea meets his feet with tame breakers, he throws blossoms to the foam, as if to the feet of the Buddha. The ocean seems amnesiac. It does not look like it just swallowed two hundred and fifty thousand people.
Nearly half-way around the globe from the Indian Ocean, we Pacific Northwesterners live precariously along the Ring of Fire. Tsunami Evacuation Routes are advertised along Highway 101 – residents can sleep a little easier knowing that some warning systems are in place, though there are still gaps and weaknesses in the communication web. Many in the region live within arm’s reach of great and likely natural disasters: thirteen megathrust earthquakes have occurred off the Pacific Coast within the past 6000 years, producing avalanches, mudslides and tsunamis. Another is predicted to occur within the next 50 years, according to seismologists. Yet we plan our cities within floodplains, perch houses on sheer cliffs, and ski along the flanks of active volcanoes. There is an assuredness in the belief that nothing bad could ever really happen to us, not within our lifetimes, a belief that we are a permanent feature of the landscape. But earth slumps and slides, and waves sneak up when our backs are turned. Our lives, and the stories of them, are as flimsy as a child’s driftwood fort. The ground I stand upon seems stable, for the moment. Another illusion.
A formerly wealthy Thai man shows a television reporter the remains of his beachfront home. Remains of his exclusive neighborhood extend up and down the beach. He points to a place buried by sand, a vague outline of two walls coming together. “That was my children’s bedroom,” he states flatly. He does not elaborate about how he survived the tsunami, or what has become of his family. “I was rich and now I have nothing,” is his only claim.
A neighbor thought to be dead walks toward the man and they embrace. Their figures loom over the wreckage. Memories of this place, and their former selves, are folded neatly into their forms, huddled, yet alive.
* * *
A rip-tide zips from the mouth of the Salmon River up the spit. Underneath, where river meets sea, the level of the sandbar is ever-changing, shifting with a rhythmic pulse of sediment winding through salt-water. The stronger, older hands of the sea unravel braids of forest loam. Gulls rise before me and stall, hundreds of feet above the smooth water. The bluff begs to be rolled down, but I do not move. I resist the impulse to separate myself from the earth and be set free, like a kite made of the thinnest weave.
Walking up the spit early one autumn morning following Hurricane Katrina, I come to the continent’s edge and hope the water can grace me with a borderland of clarity, meet me half-way. Well below my former grassland perch, I face the rising bottle-green surf. Breakers obscure the horizon for a long pause, then curl into themselves like an afterthought, catching only light and air. It takes some nerve and much humility to face their crashings, knowing how fragile this moment is.
The hurricane that had just scoured the Gulf of Mexico with its force displaced millions, sweeping its havoc across the land. The rich New Orleans-Biloxi-Delta culture had been forced to relocate above the flood-line and levies, to spread themselves over the vast American interior creating a thin web of a resilient band of people. Ocean-people, temporarily land-locked, were slow to come back. An equally diverse flora and fauna culture had also been severely stressed and nearly obliterated, for the time being. Who knew when the pelicans would return and the swamp animals would again recognize a non-polluted terrain they could survive in? The amount of recent tragedy, both human-made and global, just in the past six years, is enough to sink me, like standing too long on a just-doused beach.
Our interactions with the land become testaments – humans scribe upon its skin like a quill or a blade and the earth shapes us like clay to fit its niches. We build homes with wood, drag and pile stone upon stone, till the soil, burn or bury our dead and return them to the earth as ash. What the coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest left behind as tangible evidence of their existence – tools, fish middens, burial sites – are quickly overcome by time’s urge to decompose. Left as maps to be uncovered by hands nuanced enough to read the details – by archeologists, artists, and other sensitives – their histories are stored like holograms. Currents of stories reside under our feet, wait to be released like tremors.
But how do you attempt to recover the stories of the missing and the dead when the land beneath them has given way and been swept out to sea? When the imprint of a single life is now a tabula rasa, how do we construct a map of absence?
There is beauty and gratitude in this tenacious relationship, between land and sea, between human and the more-than-human. Participants in a sacred and creative interplay, we continue to sing odes of nets thrown and fish caught. We are drawn to the violence of storms and admire the petrels and gannets who can navigate such extremes. We commit, again and again, to ride upon the ocean’s belly, sojourn crest and trough.
Perhaps the Neschensney called this rugged bit of land home because they were able to exist in the smallest niche possible, to make use of what was given. They survived, for a time, because they understood the language of river-meets-sea and responded in a dialect of resiliency and respect.
The beach at my feet is studded with pebbles. I find a palm-sized black one, smooth and heavy. I let its weight and warmth settle in my hand, my fingers curling around its fossilized record, then throw it back to the water releasing my jagged, human fears. It is my one wish that the ocean cares. But my own foot-fall prayer has released me, not the ocean’s breakerfall. I scribe a map of belonging with each step. The ocean will continue to spin is tidal waltz. It will swell with warming waters, create a new world for those of us left on dry ground. When it craves land higher up than it has ever tasted, it will not care if we are standing in its way.
Maybe why we need the lasting image of a monk wrapped in orange on the white sand in Thailand – a messenger willing to tread the place between our human desires and the ocean’s indifference – is that someone must, again and again, show us how to speak the language of non-judgement, of how not to come to the brink with a list 250,000 names long and a debt of blame. We must be willing to stand barefoot in the surf like a child and offer the brightest flowers imaginable to the brine.
First published by Sea Stories, an online journal from The Blue Ocean Institute. http://seastories.org/
