OCR Text |
Show Go Love/221 Renee says, "Like something's burned. Ships all smell this way." Outside again, wind in our faces, the list of rescues is staggering. We stand there in the wind reading name after name-all the drowned souls who'd crewed the ships named for women The rescue ship's pulpit bow is a full-breasted mermaid. I see her swimming to men who breathe prayer water No Harvells or Stepwells, Renee's finger finds a lone Rockerson. We hit a fish and chips for coffee and head south. 101 skirts the ocean, along massive forests of spruce and pine and redwood that grow right down the craggy cliffs where walls of mussel, clam and starfish shine. Every quarter mile we turn a curve and look out onto a stretch of desolate ocean, these cathedral rock islands in the sun, sights we've not prepared to see. I steer while Renee and Lara ooh and ah. The coast seems at once lush and stripped to the bone Bicyclists in blaze orange backpacks pedal slowly on the roadside. Our radio says that four hundred miles from here, in California, the Redwood forest has caught fire. We sight the first whales off Cape Meares The gleaming breaths blow twenty feet high then vanish. The first few times we think we're seeing things, then a silvery breath rises again One must see a living whale blow many times to be convinced, their breath ghosting the horizon We camp at Cape Lookout, just outside Tillamook, where I buy a pawnshop surfrod, pick up hooks and lead and a package of frozen bait that falls apart as soon as it thaws. I find oysters at shack on the bay near the woods, where a woman in a flowery dress bakes bread. "Here," she says straight away when Lara and I walk through the door, "I like these." The floor is flour dusted with footprints. "Take one, honey," she says to Lara, holding out a steaming muffin I order two-dozen fresh oysters, lemons and butter. "My Mama's not hungry in her casket," Lara says. |