A Foggy morning beach walk at Cape Disappointment

When: May 2016
Where: Cape Disappointment on Washington’s southernmost tip
With: my partner
What: car camping
Accompaniment: I See I Say by Ebony Bones!

fisherman walks across the wet sand of the beach to the surf on a foggy morning at Cape Disappointment, close to the rocky crag where the lighthouse sits beside two wind-formed trees

man in a blue jacket stands in the middle of a pile of beach wood, sun-bleached and weathered and splintering, beside a copse of tree skeletons and a few survivors, their branches so lopsided from the constant wind that they look to be disintegrating, carried away, against a rocky outcropping with sickly looking grass clinging to the veneer of soil

sand dusts a decaying beach log, white at the top with its orange insides exposed and ripped into shaggy strips, the pale gray sand forming a crest in the lee of the log

I associate the beach more with fog than sun. True to form, our camping trip to Cape Disappointment was cool, damp and gray. We wandered out onto the beach, escaping the constant drone of our neighbor’s RV generator, and found people coming in from clamming. A thin sheet of water covered the sand by the shore, with dark piles marking the site of each excavation. Fog softened the bluff above, a reminder of why the lighthouse was built there. The crowd headed in and we were left with the beach to ourselves and a handful of stragglers.

I collect textures, so the beach at Cape Disappointment was a tonal treasure trove. Sand in all its forms, shaped into patterns by water and wind. Sun-bleached splintering logs in piles, the power to amass them incomprehensible. On their own, blanketed in sand and draped with coiled spans of rope lost from fishing boats.

Tracy Durnell