Driftwood

Every morning Ben’s grandfather walked a quarter mile to the beach and looked for signs of the apocalypse. The seas were rising — everyone said so — and his cabin sat in a small clearing amidst the hemlocks and blackberry brambles at about nine feet above sea level. “The waves are a-coming for us,” he would say, slipping on his jacket. “Might as well go out and greet ’em.”

But it was an undetectable apocalypse. Years of patrols, and the most he’d ever reported was a dip in the pelican count. Probably because the fishing wasn’t so good as it used to be. Everyone said so.

It probably wouldn’t be the waves that came for them, not at first, Ben’s grandfather once told him. “Desolation’s a sneaky bugger — it’ll slip in the back door,” he’d said, pointing at a little lake nestled behind the dunes. The tiny lake was barely worth a pit stop for migrating birds, but the old man figured it would be the Trojan horse. Someday — well before the sea rose up over the spit dunes — the high tide line would creep up above the seep point, where the lake wept its contents through the sand-bar and into the ocean. Then, rather than a great rush of ocean water that rewrote the landscape in one flurry, salt would leach backward and turn the wetland waters brackish. It would burn the lily pads and wither the newts like grapes left too long on the vine. It would strangle the cedar scrub and salal that lined the lake’s soft shores. The silence of the lake water would take on a different shape, and the marsh greenery would turn the tawny color of a cool flame before it slumped into the fetid pool. Without a root tangle to keep it at bay, sand would march through the lowlands; only then would the sea come for it all.

Ben left the papers and pamphlets scattered across the table and stepped out onto the porch, leaving the door cracked to avoid the sound of the clicking latch. He was barefoot, and the porch decking, beaded with rain, was shockingly cold. Enough to startle the thoughts out of you, his grandfather might have said. But if they had been startled off, the thoughts returned as fast as they fled, and the front yard soon recovered its names: a rusted mailbox on a leaning post, ferns sprouting out of the gutters of the garage. Dandelions spreading like pocks across the gravel driveway.

Things, and things to do.

That was the way of it. You run off to your grandfather’s cabin to get away from thinking about things, but then, there you are, itemizing your to-do list anyway. But no matter. The things and thoughts could take their time with him.

Main among the things to think about this morning seemed to be Tillamook spit, which curved away north, a thin accord between the tempered waters of the bay and the torrents of the unbroken ocean. It was like an upside-down comma, with the little lake as its head and the long reach of the spit its arching tail. Out on the spit, the beach would be littered with debris from the storm. Tangles of kelp, rafts of sea foam, a smattering of new shells to be turned over and considered. The stumpy ridge shrubs would shush each other in the wind as an egret tended the tide line with a librarian’s contemplation. Maybe stuck there in the sand would be a knot of rope that had tugged free from the rigging of a sunken ship. The ship would have been lost somewhere in the deeps, its vacant hull swaddled in chilling blues, its name scrubbed from the bow by the slow abrasion of the sea. Half buried, the castaway knot would be the final echo of the ship’s voyage.

That was the spit in winter: a string of things to be perused and remembered. A morning walk to be done. Put it at the...