As I sit in front of my laptop, I can hear the sonorous, implacable roar of the Pacific Ocean just outside the balcony window of our hotel room. I love the ocean for its timelessness steady, unrelenting, unshakeable cadence. There’s a constancy and a predictability I love. I could sit and listen to the waves crashing on the beach for hours…and there are times when I’ve done just that. It’s something I find incredibly peaceful and comforting; it feeds a part of my soul nothing else in the natural world does or could ever hope to.
The sound of the ocean is something I came to much later than people who grew up along the West Coast, and that might account for the appreciation and sense of awe I feel whenever I’m at the beach. Growing up in landlocked northern Minnesota, my parents didn’t have the money to haul the family 2000 miles to see the Pacific Ocean. I can count the number of times my family left Minnesota before I left to go to college on one hand…and still have a finger or two left over. The ocean was something I saw on television or in books and magazines. Growing up on one of Minnesota’s largest lakes, I didn’t lack for shoreline, but when I looked past the waves and saw the north short of Leech Lake…well, somehow I always felt I was missing out on something. Turns out I was.
I was 23 before I saw (well, at least HEARD) the Pacific Ocean. When my then girlfriend/later wife/even later ex-wife and I decided to get married, there wasn’t little discussion about where we were going to live. I wanted to leave the frozen tundra of Minnesota in the worst way, and she’d grown up in Portland and wanted to go home. So I packed up my old kit bag and we headed west. I fell in love with the Pacific Northwest, and even though that marriage ended by the time I was 30, Portland had become home. There was no going back to Minnesota (though a few years later I did just that for one disastrous year before returning to Portland).
The first time I visited Lisa in Oregon, we packed up her Dad’s car with a picnic basket and a blanket and headed to Manzanita on the Oregon Coast. We left behind a 90-degree summer day in Portland and two-plus hours later pulled into a 60-degree fog bank in Manzanita. We parked near the beach, but Manzanita was so heavily socked in that we knew there would be no seeing the ocean. With visibility at less 200 yards, not much of anything was going to be revealed that day. Still, we’d driven for more than two hours to have a picnic on the beach…and so we decided to do exactly that.
I never did see the ocean that day, but as we sat on our blanket on the beach, I could hear the rhythmic beat of the surf. It began a more than 30-year love affair with the ocean that’s showing no sign of abating.
Erin and I live in Portland, about a two-hour drive to the east of the Oregon Coast. We don’t make the drive as often as I might prefer, but whenever we do, it’s almost as exciting as it was the first time.
One of my favorite places in the world is Oceanside, OR. It’s a tiny little hamlet just west of Tillamook and it’s not a place you’d merely pass through; the only road into town ends at the parking lot just above the beach. If you’re in Oceanside, it’s because it’s your destination. Because it’s off the beaten path, not many tourists make it there, even during the summer. There’s no traffic, no competition for parking, just the ocean and an opportunity to lose myself for a few hours. Many are the times I’ve driven to Oceanside, rolled down the windows of my car, and invested a few hours in just listening to the ocean. There’s just something about waves crashing on the beach that relaxes me almost instantly.
The sound of the surf is mesmerizing, but what truly fascinates me is the fact that the constant rhythmic report is the same now as it’s been since the dawn of time. The constant gentle roar of the surf is what Lewis and Clark would have heard. It’s what Native Americans going back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years would’ve heard. That sense of history, of connectedness with something substantially unchanged since the beginning of time inspires a sense of awe unlike anything else I’ve encountered.
Erin and I came to a wide spot on Highway 101 called Otter Crest, OR, to spend a long Valentine’s Day weekend. Our hotel room looks out over the Pacific Ocean, and as I listen to the waves crashing on the beach, I can feel myself gradually unwinding. I’ve long thought I’d love to either live on the Oregon Coast full time or own a beach house. Living on the coast probably isn’t practical for someone with any hope of a viable career…but a beach house may be a possibility. Someday. For now I’m just going to relax and enjoy being in a place that’s always delivered an overabundance of peace and contentment.
We’ll go back home to our lives tomorrow, but the ocean will be here waiting for me when I return, same as it always has. You might say it’s the longest running theme in my life…and there’s some considerable comfort to be found in that.
