The Work of a Rock Is To Ponder
September 18, 2016
Rows of rock cairns, Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park
Rock
by Jane Hirschfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt
What appears to be stubbornness,
refusal, or interruption,
is to it a simple privacy. It broods
its one thought like a quail her clutch of eggs.
Mosses and lichens
listen outside the locked door.
Stars turn the length of one winter, then the next.
Rocks fill their own shadows without hesitation,
and do not question silence,
however long.
Nor are they discomforted by cold, by rain, by heat.
The work of a rock is to ponder whatever is:
an act that looks singly like prayer,
but is not prayer.
As for this boulder,
its meditations are slow but complete.
Someday, its thinking worn out, it will be
carried away by an ant.
A Mystrium camille,
perhaps, caught in some equally diligent,
equally single pursuit of a thought of her own.
The flat, smooth, water-rounded pebbles and rocks on the beaches of Washington’s Pacific coast seem to inspire Andy Goldsworthy-ish mini-sculptures. I often find cairns, those piles of gradually smaller and smaller stones precariously balanced. Part of their appeal is their ephemeral nature, waiting to be toppled by tide or wind or passersby.
My sister and her husband collect heart-shaped stones. I seem incapable of walking a beach without picking up at least one favorite rock or stone to take home. On this day, I found irresistible this dimpled rock that felt good in my hand and pocket:
And I added my own Andy Goldsworthy-inspired rock art to the Rialto Beach landscape. It was likely dismantled by the next incoming tide, but I couldn’t wait around to witness its destruction.
Road Trip: Three Ocean Beaches in Olympic National Park
September 17, 2016
Pacific Ocean at Rialto Beach
“That far-resounding roar is the Ocean’s voice of welcome. His salt breath brings a blessing along with it.”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, from “Footprints on the Sea-shore”
Olympic National Park has several beach access points to the Pacific coast. On this road trip, we stopped at three beaches and walked barefoot in the sand.
Rialto Beach was the wildest shore with stretches of pebbly sand and sea stacks jutting up from the water.
Ruby Beach was glorious in the morning light. We descended a short trail down from the parking area to the beach. Old tree trunks littered the shore above the tide line. This beach, too, had sea stacks. But it also had tide pools to explore and fine sand to walk on.
Arriving at Ruby Beach in the early morning
Sea stacks
Kalaloch Beach seemed tamer, with a wide expanse of soft sand down to the water’s edge.
Kalaloch Beach
“The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean —
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.”
— Robert Frost, “Devotion”
Sunset Play by Play: Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park
September 16, 2016
Approaching sunset, Rialto Beach
“I never watch a sunset without feeling the scene before me is more beautiful than any painting could possibly be, for it has the additional advantage of constant change, is never the same from one instant to the next.”
— Sigurd F. Olson, Reflections from the North Country
The sunset over the Pacific Ocean on this particular evening was an experience of pearlescent pageantry. It was an evening of lustrous pink and gray skies. Here is the play-by-play:
“Fold upon fold of light,
Half-heaven of tender fire,
Conflagration of peace.
Wide hearth of the evening world.
How can a cloud give peace,
Peace speak through bodiless fire
And still the angry world?”
— Edwin Muir, from “Sunset”
The Cry of Seagulls
August 17, 2016
“And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?”
— C. S. Lewis
One memorable part of my day trip to Rialto Beach was that I got many great photographs of seagulls in flight. They were feeding in the surf, right at the edge the water, and they were swooping past at eye level. So here are the results of my photo frenzy capturing the freedom of flight:
Juvenile seagull
Watercolor sketch of seagulls
Another watercolor sketch of seagulls
Day Trip to Rialto Beach on the Pacific Coast
August 16, 2016
Sol Duc River at its mouth on the Pacific Ocean
Olympic National Park is really huge and encompasses such diverse landscapes — snow-capped mountains, freshwater lakes (like Lake Crescent), ocean beaches, and temperate rain forests. It really is a marvel. Rialto Beach was less than an hour’s drive from Nature Bridge campus, so three of us interrupted our retreat to make a day trip there.
Rock cairns on the Rialto Beach
Walking barefoot on the beach
Rialto Beach is wild, windy, and glorious. The surf pounds. The air is rich with ozone. Sea stacks off shore appear and disappear in the mist. Huge logs litter the upper beach. Tall evergreens border the ocean’s edge. The beach is sandy and pebbly, and all the pebbles from small to large are flat and smooth. The parking lots were full, but the immensity of the coast absorbed all those people so you felt the space as expansive.
We walked along the beach to the Hole in the Wall, ate a picnic lunch, and then painted for an hour or so. Here are some photos of our day at Rialto Beach:
Sea stack like a ghostly phantom on the horizon
One of the world’s giant sandboxes
Two friends
Ink and watercolor sketch of sea stacks
Watercolor painting of sea stacks at Rialto Beach
Another view of sea stacks from First Beach, La Push
Ocean Waves as Symbols
August 5, 2014
Pacific waves at Rialto Beach, Washington
“In the winter of life, the sea lulls and comforts. It has the look and sound of eternity without putting one through the troublesome formality of having to die first.”
I like what Jonathan Raban says about ocean waves in his essay “Waves” from Driving Home. He is talking about the Oregon coast, but the wild Rialto Beach on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is similar:
“The line of breakers on the beach is a fantastic dissipation of long-accumulated power. It is the fall of kings.”
” . . . the crest of each wave poised for its downfall, is a universal symbol because it unites the extremities of human experience in a single continuous line.”
“Nowhere do waves break with more reliable splendor than on the melancholy coast of Oregon, where the great Pacific wave trains come to a spectacular end on beaches of pulverized green sand.”
Road Trips and the Mind
August 3, 2014
“Carried along on the hum of the motor and the countryside passing by, the journey itself flows through you and clears your head. Ideas one held on to without any reason depart; others, however, are readjusted and settle like pebbles at the bottom of a stream. There’s no need to interfere; the road does that work for you. One would like to think that it stretches out like this, dispensing its good offices, not just to the ends of India but even further, until death.”
— Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
Nearing sunset on Hwy 101, Olympic Peninsula
This has been a vacation-less summer for me, and I’ve been craving a getaway. This weekend my husband and I took a daytrip to a few ocean beaches on the Olympic Peninsula. We drove from sun up to sun down — a long day — but relaxing in the way Bouvier describes in the quote above, the miles stringing along with free-flowing thoughts and impressions. The day was a tonic.
We explored two beaches I had never been to before near La Push on the Pacific coast and Rialto Beach where I had taken my niece last year. Our summer weather has been hot and sunny lately, but interestingly, a fog bank had settled right where the water met the land, and it stayed cool and gray on the beaches. We could barely make out the silhouettes of sea stacks off shore. Still, being by the ocean was restorative — the fresh smells of salt and wet sand, the rhythmic crashing of the waves.
First Beach in LaPush with fog-enshrouded sea stacks
Jetty at First Beach
Through the “eye” of driftwood
Watching the waves
Mile+ path down to Second Beach included stairs down the bluff
Fog at Second Beach
Surf fishing at Second Beach
Second Beach
Sand sculpture
Pebbly shore at Rialto Beach
The sun never made it out
Stacked beach rocks, Rialto Beach
Rialto Beach
Seagull
Seagull
“The beach is a good spot for spending that transitional hour between day and night as the waves roll up and slide back, tugging out some of a busy day’s wrinkles.”
— Sonny Brewer, A Sound Like Thunder
Sunset at Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park
“O wise magician to whom shall fall the task of chronicling this extraordinary sunset, this turning of the world to show the sun’s face as never before.”
— Cervantes, Don Quixote
“To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line . . .”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
Nature’s own show — the setting sun — rivaled any National Geographic special on television. It was a fitting end to our first day of sightseeing in Olympic National Park.
“There was no end to the joyful exaltation on this edge of oscillations.”
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
The Pacific Ocean at Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park
The last half of our Olympic National Park road trip took us to several Pacific coast beaches. We stopped at Mora Campground on the way to Rialto Beach to pitch our tent, as we planned to have a picnic supper at the beach and stay until sunset. We didn’t want to have to set up our tent in the dark.
Our campsite at Mora Campground
The beach was two miles from the campground. We passed the Quillayute River as we neared the end of the road. Straight ahead was the endless ocean, the mighty Pacific.
Quillayute River
Sea stacks at Rialto Beach
Fourteen shades of gray
“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.”
— Henry Beston
This was my first time at Rialto Beach. It’s a wild coast, with waves crashing and casting up sea foam onto the pebbly beach. Sea stacks added interest to the horizon line. Weathered driftwood lined the upper beach. The water was cold, but irresistible to children (and adults).
Rialto beach
The wild shores at Rialto Beach
Our beach chairs
Driftwood
The sky
Waiting for sunset
“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”
— Victor Hugo
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