Volcano Coast

I run three miles on a clearish day in August. My partner and I have been in southern Oregon for four days and have yet to see a clear sky. Rogue Valley has become home to a passing snake of smoke that presses against the sides of the mountains. The smoke has bloomed from the surrounding fires in California and Canada, and here in Oregon. Their thick shadow is heavy over the town. In the parking lot of one of the malls, we stop to ask an older woman who is hunched with several large bags on her arms and a bleach white face towel over her mouth, if she needs help. Her hair is peppered and tied in a loose bun. Her skin is leathery from the sun and dry air.

Offended, she shoots back at us “do I look like I need help?” We tell her not particularly, her head was down and the towel was over her mouth. We wanted to help if we could. Of course this made it worse. But, honestly, there was something more: an unmistakable heaviness in her walk, a curve in her back as she burrowed her face into that immaculate towel. But help is not to be decided by others, she’s right. “I’m just covering my face from this fucking smoke.”

“It’s awful, I know.” I say, and I see her face loosen. Weeks like this, maybe years now of seemingly endless summers of oppressive heat and smoke beyond what this valley has seen in known history have gotten to her. ‘This place is changing’, we say in the glimmer between our eyes. Who doesn’t need help? But from whom do we need it?

I stubbornly sit on the porch of my partner’s childhood home, despite the passing smoke, feeling phlegm settle like a small boat in my esophagus, because to be outside when the air feels, if only, slightly clean, is lovely. I ignore the ash quietly collecting like funeral lace over the town - and in my lungs is a soft accumulation I don’t notice until a few hours pass. Inside, three young dogs, no older than two, stare at me. Two are pitbull mixes and one is an easily influenced poodle. They like me, but I am by no means their favorite person, having given them only a moderate amount of rubs, and not much in terms of treats. These are not my dogs, even though they are wonderful and silly and baffling companions.

Just yesterday, we went on a two mile hike on Mount Ashland. This hillside is full of wildflowers, which are ebbing in dried bunches of dulled color into the heat of August, only a few late bloomers pressed with heat, fragmented rain, and wind become late and virulent gems of summer. Dust rounds up in massive clouds as the dogs rumble and disturb everything they can. It’s as if they have not a single care for gravity or wind, for vermin or trees in their storming of the mountain as they tumble through fallen branches, dried brush, and precious fading flowers. Tongues long as carpets touch each dried leaf as they pass. Huge puppy bodies fling into filth. A through-hiking couple stops to say hello, and scowls at the mention of smoke and heat that bookend this moment in the shadow of the Douglas Fir.

This land used to mark the end for settlers who endured treacherous travels in order to arrive, buy it cheap, and thrive by making home in a country completely unlike a mirror. This whole place is built on the bodies of caretakers who had known it like it was their heart, their eyelash, their mother, their food. Now it burns to an unprecedented level while Umpqua ice cream still has a chief head on its mast like the Mickey Mouse of the west. Like that man never really existed, like that man is a person in the past, ‘which is surely gone’ it implies cynically, or maniacally. And yet the land burns on account of these misrememberings, these thefts and biases. Despite all of this, the Umpqua tribe is still working to protect and maintain its community.

Fire is a language. Humans, for whom the hermetic gods stole the sun, the fire is the meeting place. Long fingers of chemical reaction rend the shadows off our skin and onto the space behind us, into whose depths we must look as they cocoon the flame. It was by fires that we spoke and sang about the troubles in our lives, the dreams which maybe we dream together in some small way. In how many ways has communication been initiated by the light, or even within the smoke and flame. W.G. Sebald wrote that fire lies in the core of every technology, from a fish hook to a porcelain cup, to a television program, he writes. Fire is in the heart of all living things as well.

We drive to the coast, mountains obscured by smoke the entire way, and yet I imagine that beyond the next bend we will break through. It’s suffocating to see these giant redwoods swimming in the thick sand colored smoke. As we drive a swath of the forest is cut, another burnt. It’s so claustrophobic tears press out of my eyes. I realize I am starving. We drove so fast out of town - toward the ocean - we didn’t eat lunch and now I find myself unable to cope with the plumes and I cling to the notion that at once we will break free. This smoke is only trapped between the mountains as if meandering through a maze, but no.

The beach is overcome by smoke. I thought a shore was a vantage. I thought a shore was a place of visibility. But it is only a stage for illusion. The sun shimmers pink on the water below. It was seven hours of coastline, and then finally, at Bandon, the smoke began to clear, not all the way. But there was a tissuey shadow like a wall along the bay.

The rocks crashing with waves out in the water have not rolled down from some invisible mountains. They rise out of the volcanic activity that brews like an ancient battle below this vacation spot. The Pacific is undeniably present in this volcanic mileu. All along US 101 are signs indicating where tsunami safe zones are, and where one is in danger of said tsunami. There is an ever present tension here, in the Pacific Northwest, an understanding that the ground will give way. There must be people live their lives with a tiny voice in the back of their minds always wondering, when? The land marks a side of the infamous ring of fire on the tension between the Pacific Plate and the subducting Juan de Fuca Strait. There will be a giant earthquake that will change everything. It could come today, in one hundred years or one thousand. But it will come.

Stout lighthouses line the bluffs all along the famously foggy shoreline. We hike down to the ocean before high tide on Cape Meares near Tillamook. The vegetation is made up of tall and fallen evergreen trees, from whose long bodies other trees grow off. There is the tallest Sitka Spruce in Oregon, and there is a “octopus” Spruce, whose mysterious formation could have been human or climate made, but they are not sure. I think the age was about 400 years old. It seems someone would know, history is as close as the fog or the smoke, everything feels new and unknown, and is also written on plaques like it’s all a mystery, and it is. How does one know when they can’t see? As we make our way down the embankment, large ferns fan in arabesques all around us. Thick blackberry brambles make treading off the path nearly impossible. The trees are massive and the size of the slugs nearly horrid. I imagine the Jurassic world might have looked like this.

At the shore we separate. He seems to have a better idea of how to follow the paths and I let him go hotly. We seethe at each other for reasons I don’t know if either of us are sure, emotions shift and collide like tectonic plates sometimes, below our minds. The rocks are rounded, bubbled, even with pools of dank salt water, putrid in their cores. The sea presses against the rocky shore with a merciless persistence. Over the ledge some distance away is a sandy beach striking into the waves from which it appears as if there is no entrance or exit. People are just there, like flies circling a living room. I want to talk to him, I want to be here with him, he has not gone far, but the fog already slides its fingers around him with ease. Paths and vistas cut vision by giant rocks in the ocean, fog, smoke, bluffs, boulders, trees. And then I see a plastic green brontosaurus on the rocky beach. I pick it up only to find it is at the foot of a mauled cormorant, and then the shell of a crab in a net next to it. My stomach turns as I look up and he’s ten yards away, out of my acid mouth, feeling the carnage of the shore collect around me, weighing me down, I yell his name. My voice is muffled against the wind, “come back.” A rivulet of my words must reach him, because he does, almost ghostlike, he solidifies out of the fog and I feel my breath return.

The Cape Meares lighthouse is the shortest on the Oregon coast, but for the time it was in operation it had the strongest light. It is one of three lighthouses that link together between Tillamook and Astoria. The lighthouse fulfilled the first order from the Henry-Lepaute firm for a Fresnel lens, which was designed and fabricated in Paris. The lens is made with layers of concentric circles in order to protect and concentrate the light without dulling it. The giant glass structure was transported by boat around Cape Horn and lifted from the bottom of the promontory on hand operated cranes constructed from local spruce timber. It crowns the top of the stout octagonal lighthouse with an illustrious white with a red bullseye. The preliminary bullseye, the red, had 160,000 candlepower, and could be seen from 21,000 nautical miles, a measurement I have trouble fathoming, having little experience on the seas myself. But it stands dark now. The lighthouse was taken out of commission by the National Coastguard in 2014. It stands at the edge, waiting for the sea now. Towns have been washed away since the European settlement of this place - not long ago.

John Meares, born in Ireland in the year 1756. His father was Charles Meares, an Exchequer of the British Empire in Dublin. Not much is known of little John Meares though his father’s patriotic allegiances must have carried through, and yes, he must have looked out of those rocky bluffs on the Irish coast at some point and wanted nothing more than travel. He joined the royal naval academy at 15 and worked his way toward becoming the captain of a ship and traveling all around the world. In his autobiography, he insists most humbly in a 670 page book that he did for commerce, fur trade specifically. And I don’t know whether it was out of rage or a twisted sense of humor that he named one of the capes which he found himself “Disappointment” because he had been looking, apparently, for something else.

On our last day before driving back into the shrouds of smoke. We take a boat out to whale watch at Depoe Bay. There were 30 people on our for an hour-long trip into the tiny bay like a giant’s bathtub beneath the town. A family with a matching tie-dye ensemble takes the helm. As soon as the boat circles the buoy bell, the fog closes in. The boat heads toward a fleet collected in the northwest section of the bay where the captain instructs us to call the whale in, which is a shenanigans some tourists seem to love. I don’t know if these are the kind because their voices are lost to the breeze. The horizon is long gone and the bay swallowed in fog as a procession of marine vignettes begin to pass us in multiples: at different points we see jellyfish; a murre bird and their caretaker, its father; sea lions loping in the waves; a fleet of pelicans skimming the swells which rose like the thousands of breaths of a giant beast. But no whale.

In 2010 the Fresenel lens on the Cape Meares lighthouse was stolen. One was then cracked in a gunfight. All the while there is something much larger making its way around the land, gliding between people. The short span of history crowds against the immense time of the sea and its ancient molten and subducting that occurs below the surface. While whales are being called in on tourist boats, and people are shooting each other at a lighthouse, and the practical Fresnel lens is being stolen for the money it might be worth.

I will return to Brooklyn, to the one bedroom apartment where we live. The cat will lie next to me, allowing me into his house as he nods and turns his crowned head to the window where the rain has a tendency of falling - if only it could rain in the West too. My stomach will turn as I get an email from my boss about one of my clients. He says there will be less work by nearly half this fall. How am I going to make a living? The truth of course is that I will figure it out, I have to. I will spend many weekends alone with a giant white cat and his stone colored crown who doesn’t mind my presence in the least. I will decide to take it as a surprise blessing, reading and writing and silences, a challenge to maneuver through the unknowing - as the the trees and the plants watch and the cool rain washes summer away with the patience of a sculptor.

Yes, we are surrounded with surprises, gifts that come in strange wrappings. We are so certain of our reality that we forget to look as we send emails and walk and reach out to each other desperate, the whole time, not to drown. When of course, the ocean has always, in fact, been our home.