The Man Comes Around. July 11. Day 15.

Dear Trail Friends,

I am back on the trail, walked a very short day to South Beach Campground - just a few miles south of where Chris and I spent the night in Newport. 

The return from the wedding in Nashville was stressful - our Sunday 3pm flight was cancelled due to mechanical problems. Alaska Airlines was wonderful - they flew us all out on an extra flight at 8am Monday morning, gave us meal vouchers for dinner and breakfast, put us up at a nice hotel, and were very kind and warm in dealing with us.  And still it was stressful and exhausting. 

We landed Monday around 11am and got back to Sandy's house in Seattle and loaded our car and headed for Newport by 12:30. We arrived around 6pm but were really too exhausted to truly appreciate and enjoy the special Herman Melville room (at the Sylvia Beach hotel) with ocean view, the great dinner served family style (we just didn't have the energy to truly enjoy interacting with the other guests, though they were quite wonderful), or to have a leisurely beachwalk in the morning or evening (though each time we made an heroic attempt).  It felt more like an ordeal than a vacation - which was sad. 

Photo 1 is a collage of some of the special touches in the room. Photo 2 is the view out the window. 

 

 

My walk today was easy and the day unusually warm and sunny beginning early in the morning. I didn't start walking til after Chris left, around 9:30am. 

I walked a little over a mile from Nye Beach to Yaquina Bay, found a trail up to 101 and the bridge over the bay, and found my way back around the bay to the beach, then walked another mile or 2 of beach til I realized I had walked a little beyond my campground for the night - and so turned around to come back. 

Photo 3 shows the path through the dunes toward the beach. I was pleased that I found it. 

 

 Photo 4 shows how the path became stairs through beautiful dense greenery. 

 

Photo 5 is a closer view of the bridge I walked across.  I like bridges a lot. 

 

Photo 6 is a collage of wood sculptures (along the jetty on my way back to the beach) that moved and intrigued me.

 

 I could not figure out how they were joined so that they could move (without falling apart) and I was very impressed by the artist who seemed content with the joy of making them and placing them in a beautiful spot - no need for anyone to know who made them. I pondered that non-attachment, that ability to relinquish recognition and applause and to be satisfied with simply making beauty.  Especially I thought about it in relation to my own attachment - and all the emotions that were storming in me because my fantasy of a special vacation day with Chris was actually an ordeal and strain for both of us. 

I stopped to have lunch (in part so I would arrive a little later at the campground) and remembered that I had been inspired to buy Johnny Cash's last album, The Man Comes Around, when a family member (hard relationship to describe - Jenifer, daughter of Lynne, who is second wife of Chris's first husband, George) mentioned that the album was a meditation on death. That made me think of Leonard cohen's last album and interested me. I listened to it as I walked and later again in my tent. For me it was about death - and also transience and grief and guilt and regret - and I found myself sobbing and crying - as if about Chris and our stillborn vacation - but clearly about more than that. Somehow deep grief seems to be bigger than any particular loss. It was a relief to let go and cry and I felt close to the music and everyone else who experiences loss, especially the kind of loss that is mixed up with being disappointed in oneself and one's own choices and capabilities. 

I don't know exactly why but those delicately balanced anonymous wood sculptures, moving so delicately and gracefully (and yet resiliently) in the wind seem to represent to me the ability to live with the hard stuff and to let go of the attachments that make me want (and expect) to be able to somehow dodge or diminish the pain in life. 

Look, I know that a botched vacation is not mega-loss, and I know that lots of you reading this have losses in your life that puts it into perspective. But somehow that little loss touched on the larger losses: that Chris and I will die, that we are aging, that we have no control over how and when we are diminished by age, that inevitably we sometimes let each other down no matter how much we love each other. 

There is a film tonite at 9pm on Oregon Lighthouses. I wish I had the energy to go. Partly in honor of trail angel George and his journey to visit all the lighthouses on the east and west coasts. Partly because when I was sobbing and crying I felt as if I were a ship in a dark ocean storm, and the music and lyrics and voice of Johnny Cash were a lighthouse guiding me safely to shore. I guess even if I don't make it to the film just the fact that it was happening has added meaning to my day. 

(And frankly I am all snuggled into my sleeping bag and ready for bed and tomorrow will be a very long day, so I don't really want to get out and put my shoes back on and go. Too bad I can't watch the film here in my tent without putting my shoes on and walking through the campground which will be cold and dark after the film. ) 

Enough. Thank you for being here (there? - here and there). May you find a lighthouse to guide you through every storm. Please know that putting this experience into words in anticipation of your kind listening has been healing to me. I feel at the moment more like one of those beautifully balanced wood sculptures than like a ship lost in a storm. 

See you tomorrow on the beach.