keyhole limpets

I saw a hole in a thicket of salmonberries and shore pines. The thicket stood atop a cliff that overlooked the ocean. There was a cove below it. No houses littered the landscape.

I peered inside the hole and saw a trail that disappeared into the dark woods. I was alone. The sun was out. I drank cheap coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

I took the trail and followed a sharply-angled path down, down, down. The ocean became louder with every step of my descent. I could not see, but sensed the trail would end at the water’s edge, and reveal a secret beach. As I walked, I considered that I might be the only person in the world destined to discover this beach.

The trail ended at a precipice. I could see the ocean and the beach but they were a hundred feet below me, down an almost sheer vertical face of cliff.

I noticed a yellow rope tide to a tree. The rope stretched from the tree and into the precipice.

Holding my coffee in my left hand, I rigged up a belay of sorts and lowered myself down. I had never belayed before in my life, and certainly not while drinking cheap coffee.

I landed safely and beheld a beach that doubtless looked like it did thousands upon thousands of years ago. I had seen many a secret beach on the Oregon Coast, but nothing like this.

The tide was out, eerily far. It exposed hundreds of rocks and tidepools. The amount of driftwood astonished me. None bore the marks of chainsaws. The logs were so large that I could never build a fort with them.

I kept moving north across wet sand. I saw strange tracks that didn’t register. I knelt over to investigate. Nothing….then….bear. A bear had walked on this beach earlier that morning.

I traversed the tidepools and examined their bounty encrusted on the rocks: mussels, sea stars, kelp and keyhole limpets. It was the first time I had ever seen a live keyhole limpet. I’d collected the shells of thousands of dead ones and now, at long last, I had discovered live ones!

I did a little limpet jig. That meant something in my Oregon life, finding a live one. It felt like an epiphany, a direction, a literal and metaphysical one. I realized I would be a fool to ignore it. I would not, I told myself right there.

The dream ended. I woke up and I knew it wasn’t a dream. I had walked down a secret beach with bear tracks and live limpets.

Come with me. I’ll show you my secret beach and its treasures. You will have to belay with me. It will change your life.

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