Surrounded by Blue
...the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty...
---Wallace L Nichols, Blue Mind
Since Fourth of July fell on a Thursday this year, we made it into a 4-day weekend and retreated to the forested finger of Penrose Point State Park, surrounded by the southern reaches of Puget Sound, to walk gentle forest trails and gravel beaches, paddle quiet waterways, share s'mores and stories by the campfire and sleep in a tent in the woods.
It was over all too soon, and looking back now from the darkening days of fall, my thoughts wistfully yearn for another delivery of the goodness of those days......
Bring me from the Point... the slow dawning of the day, heralded by a restless murder of crows screeching outside of our tent, eager to seize the day's bounty. The horizon slowly brightens, changing from grays to hinted yellow to teases of blue sky as the orb that powers life hurls itself into the sky.....
Bring me from the Point... the silence of the early morning along a soft forest trail by Mayo Cove, broken by seabirds unseen in the fog, calling. The forest is punctuated by relict old-growth douglas firs piercing the fog above....
Bring me from the Point... morning in the campground-- campfire smoke! -- bacon! -- coffee! -- pancakes!
Bring me from the Point... an hour reclined in complete relaxation, far-off children shouting with delight as they explore their own new horizons; a delicious volume by Heather Durham in my hands, fantasies of Going Feral myself...
Bring me from the Point... a voyage into the surrounding sea by kayak, after a tenuous launch from sucking mud at low low tide, a reminder that the tidal range is double that of Birch Bay here in the innermost reaches of Puget Sound, amplified by the distance from the open ocean and the intervening constrictions of Admiralty Inlet and Tacoma Narrows.....
Bring me from the Point.....slow paddling alongside The Spit (which is not a real sand spit but a deposition of some long-lost glacial outwash channel of the Puget Lobe of the Last Great Ice).......
Bring me from the Point...... a slow glide beside languorous plumose anemones holding fast to nearly exposed deep water boulders; they can reproduce themselves simply by moving off their point of attachment, leaving bits of their pedal disk to grow into new versions of themselves......
Bring me from the Point....a rush of wings, a splash, death and hunger sated, as a bald eagle snaps up a fish, perches on a beached log and feeds, mere yards from our quiet kayaks...
Bring me from the Point...a lazy ramble through the big trees--tall douglas fir and robust madrone--that cover the blue-water-surrounded protrusion of Penrose Point, saved by some lucky convergence of chance and foresight to become a cherished part of our public lands....
Bring me from the Point.....a slow walk on the pebbly beach past fantasmal shapes of sun-bleached logs, with their skeleton branches draped in streamers of seaweed...
Bring me from the Point.... that wonderful contentedness that comes from being in a protected area with enlightened management and the loyal support of citizens throughout the state and beyond.
Bring me from the Point... the assurance that these joys will outlive everyone enjoying the park today..... good, good, good....
Bring me from the Point... an evening around the campfire with Patty, Nicholas, Anna, Mikah and Hannah, marshmallows on sticks.....their stories, their dreams of their unfolding lives....Mikah and Hannah, married for 5 months, navigating a route toward homeownership....Nicholas and Anna, with a wedding coming soon, planning the details of their day to remember forever....
Bring me from the Point.... a sweet kiss from Patty under a cedar bough with a chikadee-dee-dee singing nearby; our love, which has grown amongst the joys, challenges and strains of 32 years, refreshed anew by the sights, sounds and smells of this place by the sea....
Bring me back.... to that green Point, Surrounded by Blue....
--David
