The Road Taken
I just got back from the coast — sorry if you went into Daddle withdrawals, but like most things addictive, best to keep your fix in moderation. We met up with old college era friends and their kids and their grandkid for the luvva old age! Rented a modest mansion twice the size of our hacienda and only four times as nice, then set up camp on the edge of the Pacific. And discovered razor clam season was open.
My cronies from the Heartland, lubbers all, didn’t understand my excitement over this. 43 years ago I vacationed out to the coast and for a sunny week in June, dug razors until I essentially ‘went native’. The rainforest at Kalaloch was wild and temperate and everything the coast was too — I was totally, absolutely, irrevocably hooked on the Pacific NW. It took me a few years, but I moved out here to live.
The year after the first visit I drove 2500 miles back to dig those clams once again. The beaches were closed! I felt like Adam at the Gates of Eden with its No Trespassing sign up and a This Means You! underneath. Eve and the snake were on the other side making applesauce. I drove back to Wisconsin a day later. Dumb, I know, but I came, even if symbolically, for the razor clams.
Since then I’ve never been out there on the coast when the digging season was open. 43 years. But this week it was digging tides once again, the weather was perfect and I was back in 1971, shovel in hand, a 21 year old kid who had no clue where life would lead, down in the sand looking for telltale dimples, clues, it turned out, to the future.
Whales spouted beyond the surfline and the crabbing fleet, old friends gathered for a retelling of stories told too many times, the stars came out at night in numbers beyond fathom. I don’t believe our lives are cyclical … but sometimes we do circle back and it’s almost as if we can begin anew, optimistic, naïve, starry-eyed and willing to follow a path into an uncertain future. I’m home now but it already feels different.
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