Spending time at the Oregon coast, when the weather is right, is a process of taking all of your nervous energy and bringing it to the edge of the world, and letting it get pulled out into the vast Pacific. And then you get charged, you invest yourself by just being there, and the ocean gives back peace and feeling and energizes your soul. You take it back with you to the valley, and the more you go the more a residual peace and energy lives in you, you can call on it when you need it.
When you fly over the ocean to Asia and you're hanging in a silver tube chasing the sun during an endless day which ends in darkness and fitful sleep, crammed into your seat high above the black ocean eight miles below, you get a sense of the water's vastness and the size of the earth itself.
You can't really feel the beauty in every cell of your body until you make the trip to China, and stand on that shore near the crowded and dirty city of Shanghai and look back, and months or years later you hike out the long peninsula near Tillamook and hike down to the beach with a few beers and a cigar and you feel and hear the rhythm of the ocean. Dwarfed by a huge rock overhang and the peninsula itself, there's a trail that goes out a couple of miles through the old growth trees and thick underbrush, which themselves are dwarfed and humbled by the constant wind and the severe winter weather. This is the place of old shipwrecks and regular drownings, where a fisherman is standing on the rocks and a rogue wave makes him disapear, people say, this is where he was last seen, his car was parked nearby and his body was never found.
Out at the end of the peninsula, you are stand a hundred and fifty feet above the ocean on the end of the giant gray boulders, the cold wind drying the sweat off your body that clings and irritates - from the difficult walk up the trail. Wind in your face listening to waves being driven onto the rock face below, lost in the reverie of sun, water, the absence of man.
Take a nap on the beach, there is no one, there are no rules, the colors are primary and the deep blues and light greens of the water breaking around the rocks - dangerous waters - all of this takes away your stress and your sense of time, you could be living a thousand years in the past.
If you work up your courage enough, and the sun is warming the sand, you might want to grab your little styrofoam boogie board and wade into the freezing water, which is always around fourty five degrees. When your feet have turned blue and you're standing waist high in the turquoise water, a foamy wave will sneek up and wrap around your upper body, taking away the heat from your lungs so you almost can't breath. But you jump onto the little surfboard in front of the next wave, which is a giant wall of water that blocks out the sun - and you ride the powerful Pacific, surprised that you can actually feel the power of the wave, like the first time you fell out of tree you were climbing and knew you had to relax and hit the ground with a soft body - you ride connected and a part of this translucent miniature world all the way back to the edge of the continent, too exhausted to get up and then feeling the gentle backflow of heated water coming off the beach which the rising tide brings off the dry sand of the shore.
The first time Jim came to the Northwest was to hike West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island. Flying out from the hot and humid midlands in August, they had hiked for five days, camping, and listened to the roar of ocean and felt the cold mist, climbing up and down sandstone creek walls and walking across vast blowdown areas of giant Doug Fir, expending huge amounts of energy hiking, and the sun had never shown itself except for a few minutes during the entire trip. They had not brought enough food, and Jim had picked mussells off the rocks at low tide to boil up and eat before they crawled into their tents at night.
Returning to the midlands and dreaming during the hot summer night, the haunting power of the Pacific adventure begins to work on him. It centers on the memory of sitting in small boat, captained by a native about half way through the fifty miles, crossing the inlet of a tidal lake which blocks the trail, the ocean sucking water out so fast there are giant whirlpools that could suck the boat under, but this Indian is skillful and guides the boat across to a giant totem soaring fifty feet out of the sand on the other side. Now, it's the color of the water, the electric blue of the whirlpools, which he can't quite picture any more, which still haunts him. This Northwest country, vast, powerful, is pulling on his spirit.
http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Secret_Of_The_Sea.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgdBsUjNsx8
