As I’m working on writing stories from my decades of hiking, I decided that I will share some of them here periodically…I’m sure these will probably look a bit different in their final form, but I find it’s great fun to share what I have now, rather than waiting for that “one day.”

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Insignificance along the Oregon Coast Trail

October 2023

I walked up to Elk River in a panic. The tidal water looked too deep and dark for me to cross. Despite hiking as fast as I could through the damp and dark early hours, it looked like I might be out of luck. Low tide was another ten hours away, and if I had to wait, my day was shot.

I knew hiking the Oregon Coast Trail would be a challenge, but it’s really not fair how tides and swells and eroding cliffs throw up the gauntlet. Other trails don’t behave like this. Other trails are obedient in their stabilized soils and rocky steps. The trail out here doesn’t care that I have to walk through deep sand and journey into the night if I can’t cross this river. She doesn’t care if I slip, splash, and dunk myself on the way across, or if my shoe is sucked off into the sifting sand. The audacity!

I didn’t see a choice, so stepped into the flow.

My crotch is wet!

I panicked while resisting the pull of the ocean. The sea was hungry, but my thick thighs prevailed and hoisted me through the last of the current and onto the sandy bench above the flow.

I peeled off the pack and spread out my tyvek ground cloth. Not much point in it though, I was already soaked, and sand had snuck into every crevice; I felt new chafe on multiple levels.

Socks off, feet out. I lay spread-eagle on the ground and listened to my breath slow.

In. Out.

Inn. Ouut.

Innn. Ouuut.

I watched the clouds move along their own current overhead before closing my eyes to the brightness.

One thing became clear: I am not the most important thing here. I am not important at all.

There was no one around to have witnessed my panicked crossing, and I laughed at the absurdity of it all.

I don’t matter. None of this matters.

The ocean does that: puts me in my place.

I thought: this is what forever will feel like. It will feel like the ocean, where I am a drop in an unfathomable depth of the unknown. Suddenly, I could take anything that came my way. The thoughts that weighed on me minutes before seemed lighter against the backdrop of the sea. Anxiety about starting my new business? Doesn’t really matter. The last argument Kirk and I had? Nah. My Dad’s dementia? What?

I’ve felt this way before: when looking at pancake layers of rock in Utah, when surveying the mountainous horizon from the summit of Mt. Whitney, when gazing up at the Milky Way from the Alvord Desert. That abyss? That’s deep time, and I’m here in it.

I thought about Rumi saying, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” It took me a minute before the concept set up in my mind…what helped was pulling out a scene from a late 90s movie.

Remember the part from Men in Black where alien blasters Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones realized the cat they had been toting around had a glass marble on its collar, and that glass marble was what the aliens had been after all along? The closer you looked at the marble, the deeper it went. There were stars and galaxies inside, and the magic of cinema zoom showed us that an entire universe was contained within that sphere.

The grain of sand between my toes used to be part of a mountain. That mountain used to be the sea floor. The sea floor used to be covered by glaciers. It doesn’t end, so maybe I won’t end either? I’ll become a part of it all, if only a scrap of food for a tree that will preside over the Deschutes River, and then get covered in lava the next time South Sister erupts.

It’s all good. I’m all good.

I shaded my eyes from the intense sun as I struggled to place myself.

Lunch. That’s it. It’s time for lunch.