Done, Done, Done With The Desert

High tide at First Beach, Quileute Reservation, on Saturday.
Turn your volume down before you click. What I wanted to catch was the rattling thunder of the backrush pulling cobbles down the foreshore, but the little camera's audio pickup was overwhelmed.

By August, I will be living out there somewhere within reach of Ocean. For now, back to work here in the high desert.

Seeing The Thirteenth Redd

On Thursday M and her friend counted 12 steelhead redds in their assigned stretch of creek. Last night at dusk we walked down into the nearby stretch, and she showed me how to recognize the disturbed gravel patch which means it's a place where a fish dug a hole and buried eggs. I put on her waders and pretended to see what she was pointing out. Maybe I saw. I certainly got to experience the bliss of standing in the middle of the creek...

I Never Met a Tide Table I Didn't Love

Now there are three: in my shirt pocket the one I tore out of the newspaper the day I arrived—and isn't it DIVINE to be someplace where there's a tide table in the newspaper— and the one for April we got at the lodge in Kalaloch; and in the pocket of my pack the elaborate one with conversion tables and suns and moons and whatnot for the whole year for the whole northwest that came from the all-in-one store in Forks.

Yesterday and today drove out to La Push. Beautiful capital-O-Ocean. No whales, though other people were seeing them. Who cares. Beautiful ocean, beautiful ocean. No rain yesterday, some rain today. Who cares. Beautiful ocean, beautiful ocean.

Um, yeah, I also talked to a storage place about where to put my stuff when I get here, and bought a county street map, and found out what I will need to get a library card when I get here,

and bought my hostess a big Stanley thermos for a bread-and-butter present. Haven't seen her all day, she got a call early this morning from a volunteer biologist who needed help counting redds in Siebert Creek (?? wikipedia says 'a salmon redd is the space at the bottom of a stream that a spawning salmon makes for its eggs'). She crashed around assembling her waders and daypack and rushing-away breakfast and (not very good) thermos and so on, and was gone. By the time I got back from the Ocean, she had gone off to Port Townsend to hear a naturalist talk about newt migrations. Or something equally entrancing.

Did, Might

M loves Beach Four on the Olympic Coast the best, because it has tidepools. We walked, and got rained on. She took a longer walk, to further tidepools. I got my book and myself pervasively damp, mismanaging raingear. Coming home we were chasing a rainbow for almost an hour. Caught it at Crescent Bay on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

M is planning a trip to Bhutan for next month, so she can finish her book. Yesterday's expedition was by way of playing hookey from preparations. Today she is making phone calls about immunizations, and such. I might go out to La Push. The gray whale migration is passing.

Beach Four
Crescent Bay