Driftwood Was Just the Excuse

      No place in the world could have been more beautiful last week than the northern California coast. The sea was emerald green with a white-froth surf that gentled onto the shore with a soothing, massage-sound-track, underneath-hearing boom. There was nothing violent or seething about it, nothing gray and dark,  or intense and loud. The Pacific Ocean had taken a day off from its hard work.

      Mike and I weren't the only people to take a day off to wander on the sandy beach of Tolowa Dunes State Park that day, but there weren't hordes of people, either, only two or three families, a few other couples, some people with dogs. One man stood in the surf for an hour or more, throwing a fishing line into the ocean and reeling it in again while his wife fixed a lunch well up the beach from the incoming tide. Most people were wandering through scallops of small rocks tossed up by the recent storm, probably hunting for agates, which are not uncommon on these beaches, though to find one is rare enough to elicit a squeal of delight. No one squealed, that we could hear, but everyone seemed content just to be in that gorgeous scene with the excuse of agate-hunting to bring them there.

      It wasn't agates that brought me to the beach that day, dragging a very willing Mike with me, but driftwood for the item on my 75x75 project (75 tasks of 75 repetitions each before my 75th birthday; see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com) that my son had suggested. In his version I would cut 75 small rounds of wood, woodburn a word onto each, and make pendants. In my amendment I would use driftwood.

      When we walked over the dunes – and after we recovered from our first stunned look at the emerald-green ocean – I gave Mike a bag and instructed him what to look for: small pieces of driftwood, smooth enough to write on but big enough for words like "graciousness" and "gratitude." Pieces with interesting color or shape were especially valued – like agates among pretty rocks.

      We wandered through scattered driftwood for an hour, looking for suitable pieces, then reconvened and spread our finds on the sand. We had about 150 pieces. I threw out some as too big or too rough, but I kept most of them, since I couldn't know for sure what would work till I started the project.

      We ate lunch sitting on a log facing that incomparably beautiful ocean, then took a long walk down the long beach, looking towards the mountains of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness white with snow in the distance. Over the dunes, the mountains of the Siskiyou Wilderness rose even closer and were even brighter with snow. The sky was a cloudless blue, the ocean green and white, the mountains purple and white, the wind only a brisk breeze – a perfect day!

      On the way back, we stopped at my favorite swimming hole on the Smith River, just to look, I said, since I had not thought to bring a bathing suit or a towel with me. 

The camera couldn't quite capture that exquisite color, but it came close.

The river was an unbelievable turquoise green, exactly the color of a turquoise ring I used to have. The pull to swim was strong. It's a good thing there were two young men, a birder and a fisher, also on the beach, or I might have been tempted in spite of the cold except that the ferocious current of the river was also a deterrent. I had to content myself with looking and looking and looking at that incredible color.

      At home that night, I spread my driftwood on the floor to dry out and lose, I hoped, its sand. The next day I started wood-burning the words: Gratitude, Hope, Creativity, Rivers, Love. 

20 of the 75 words

I thought of my sister Sharon as I burned "yoga" onto a piece of wood. Of my daughter-in-law as I wrote "Dance." Of my sister Laura as I wrote "Garden." Of my son as I wrote "Rhythm" and a whole lot of other words because the project had been his idea. And of Mike because we had had such a special day collecting driftwood at the Pacific Ocean on one of the most beautiful days the Northern California coast has to offer.

(See thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com, March 7, 2019, for a complete list of the 75 words.)