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By Root 227 0

One hour, you watched waves batter the cobbles at the foot of the bluff, and then later, the tide receded, leaving the beach silent and open-palmed. And the weather was shifty and capricious. It snowed in spring, hailed in summer, froze and melted and froze again all winter, and fall could be long and dark and wet. You could watch fronts spinning off the Gulf of Alaska, pinwheeling bands of clouds over the mountains across the bay. Some days, wispy clouds raked the sky; on others, cumulus tumbled over the bluff. Rain in town turned to snow as you drove out, and fog pressed in so thick you could barely see past the hood of your car—then you’d get up to the top of the hills behind town and find the sun blaring. Because seaside folks are used to an unpredictable sky, constancy makes them nervous. People here got antsy with day after day of sun. And they knew to wait out squalls beneath a tree or in a coffee shop, to wait out the wind in a cove rather than make the crossing from the other side of the bay.

Nothing was predictable. Nothing stayed the same. On sunny days, the water looked deep blue or as green as jade. Under clouds, it was a skin of mercury pulled taut or gray, windblown silk. And, as if to mimic the sea, the town itself was constantly metamorphosing and evolving. The school bus garage became a pizza place and liquor store; the travel agency moved into an old restaurant, and a hair salon took its place. The biggest bar in town closed and sat empty and the pottery shop became a burrito joint. Remaining patches of green were graded and built upon, giving the town an awkward stepped arrangement: The end of the community college’s parking lot was at eye level with a tiny church right behind it, and a vacant shop sat on the slope below the gravel pad it should have been built upon.

Insistent on change, the sea cares nothing for history. The black seams of coal that lined the bluff’s edge contained ancient plants. But the sea made everything new again. Coal dropped to the beach in rectangular chunks and, after storms, people drove trucks onto the sand to collect it to heat their houses. Waves wore down what was left to black grains that gathered like shadows around the bases of rocks and in pools in the sand. Near the sea, the earth is never still. John and I would wake to find a few more feet gone from the edge of the bluff in front of our rental house.

Living in a state of constant change set me adrift. So I bought a piano, sold on consignment from a shop a hundred miles up the highway. I imagined the weight and bulk of it as an anchor, something to root me and tether me home. We wrapped it in blankets and drove it down the highway in a borrowed trailer under spitting snow. It took six of us to lift it into the house. But as we moved it from one rental place to the next, dragging this anchor didn’t make me feel at home.

Unpredictability and change require the sea’s inhabitants to adapt or die. This creates bizarre creatures suited to live near boiling undersea vents, in subzero temperatures, in super-saline waters, in places slapped remorselessly by storms, and in the sometimes dry, sometimes drowned intertidal zone. So, when the tide goes out, anemones close in on themselves and wear shards of shell and stone as armor against the deadly dry world. Eel-like gobi fish linger in the wet spots beneath stones until the sea returns. And limpets tightly clamp their conical shells against the surface of rocks to trap the moisture they need to live. The sea is guiltless, harsh, and sustaining. So you go adrift, leave yourself to the mercy of currents, wear your skeleton on the outside, anchor yourself—or crawl under a rock.

The town was filled with an odd assortment of people who had found their own ways to live. There was the long-bearded man who carved walking sticks and sold them next to the entrance to the warehouse supermarket. One day, the cabin he’d been squatting in mysteriously burned down. There was a young loner who hiked into town from his cabin ten miles back in the hills. He wore fatigues, carried an army