Things We Carry

I walked in July. I carried something—phone? handbag? plane ticket?

I carried a white single-fin. From my shoulders hung a black 28-liter wet/dry bag. Of zippers and recycled polyester, it is a sound tool for bipedal surf-search. Fitted with tick-blocking pants and day-hikers, 7’0″ underarm, I’d stepped through a shady hall of maple, alder, blackberry, salal, thistle, poison oak, ferns, and wind-sheared spruce down to this gap in the coast. Rocky, reefy. Google Earth porn.

I don’t surf here. Except today. Elements agreed for the first time in perhaps two years. Perhaps two decades. Perhaps ever; perhaps never again.

Calm, warm Sunday. Inland forest-fire haze numbs the afternoon sun, soft-focus pastels blurring cirrus into the psychedelic sea, an orange mirror of summer. Dreamtime. Look: gulls and seals and a spouting whale. Bobbing bull kelp lazing in the drift, swaying with the surge, laced with white ribbons of foam—sea plasma. The water color, a coldly fragrant-fresh deep jade, matches