Cascade Head · Camp Westwind
At the edge of the ocean
A shell waits on the sand. Tap it or the beach to invite a little company. Hold sand to send it home. On a keyboard, R invites or dismisses it. I invites it closer.
This piece returns to Camp Westwind, near Cascade Head on the Oregon Coast. Nearby National Weather Service wind observations from Roads End guide the drift and the imagined sea’s intensity. NOAA tide predictions for the Salmon River entrance gently shift the water’s reach. These are observations and predictions, not a sensor at camp or measured wave conditions. Sunset and night unfold with time spent here, rather than the actual hour; the date’s approximate moon phase shapes the darkness. The three rocks, reflected sky, and synthesized surf are remembered and imagined.
Sea Sparkle is an imagined glimpse of bioluminescent plankton, responding to disturbed water and damp sand. Its rare appearance is weighted by season and recent coastal air observations, not a report or prediction of a real bloom.
While working at Outdoor School, late at night when everyone was asleep, I’d walk out to the beach alone and look over the ocean and up at the endless sky. On stormy nights I’d stand there cold, sleep deprived, humming songs from the evening campfire beneath the sound of crashing waves and roaring wind.
I would stare into the dark horizon, listening to the waves break against the shore. Some nights it was so dark I couldn’t tell where the sand ended and the ocean began. It felt like the darkness surrounded me, and that at any moment one of those waves could reach out and swallow me whole.
I was young and lost then, somewhere between the life I had come from and a life I could feel waiting for me. For the first time, I was beginning to understand that growing up wasn't simply something that happened to you. I was making choices about who I would become, and some of those choices would carry me forward in ways I could never undo.
There was something terrifying about that realization. I could still look back and recognize the person I had been, but ahead of me there was no one yet. There were only possibilities, and the strange knowledge that eventually I would have to choose to become.
And so some nights, with the sand beneath my feet and the stars above my head, I felt as though I were standing at the edge of the universe.
I was afraid of the ocean. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of everything beyond that horizon.
Maybe I was simply afraid to be.
But I stayed and returned night after night.
I stood there with the wind and mist against my face, humming those songs into the darkness, listening to the waves crash somewhere beyond what I could see.
And when I was ready, I walked back.
Terence
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