We made tracks out of Aberdeen immediately after breakfast, which was our first camping meal: oatmeal with flax seeds for both and dried cranberries for me, plus chugs of oj directly from the carton. We prepared it out of the back of Cassidy and chatted with the people in the next car over (overnight, maybe ten cars had appeared). They drove a Subaru, or she did; he said she never let him have the Legacy's keys. A retired couple, they were in town for a wood-carving contest; the implement of choice was a chain-saw. (No wonder the forests are coming down, except that I like to think that people are sensible enough to use the gnarled, unmillable bits for sculpting.)

The contrast between land not federally owned, national forest, and national park, is marked. When you enter Olympic National Park along 101 from the south, you're on a road that spruce tower over and nearly tunnel in; the impression is overwhelmingly green and enveloping and therefore kind of like the corridor leading to the Wizard of Oz's chamber.

The first campground had no available sites and no potable water. The second one had both, despite the unhelpful campground host's sign indicating otherwise. We saw one site, and I scampered across the loop and saw another, farther from the road, and while I examined it, another party claimed another site, and as they backed their truck into place, they saw me run off to another site. "Made up your mind yet?" one joshed.

This third site was it. Home. I ran for RDC--no stupid near the road site nor one with barely enough room to turn around for us, but this one with these great trees. "Tell those folks I made up my mind," I asked RDC, after he approved and headed for the car. Oh yes. Trees only thirty or forty feet tall but with trunks you could upend a Beetle in. Trees whose limbs took interesting turns for no discernable reason and whose bark oozed fetal amber. Trees covered in moss. And no road noise but lots of surf noise. Plus raspberry bushes. If you need a spot to stay, may I recommend site F-7 on Beach 2 (not Second Beach, which is farther north and has sea stacks). There was even still a dry spot under a pudgy tree from the last campers, who had obviously just cleared out, and there we began to set up.

Who could pitch a tent with such a sound, though? I could hear it. I knew it was there. I began to explore a path through the wood behind the site, awed by a moss-covered coral-like maze of branches over head, peeping into a Wendy-house of a collapsed tree, ducking under low arching limbs, emerging onto a bluff thirty feet over a wide beach pounded by waves. Once again, ocean.

Duty, embodied by my husband, called. Groundcloth laid, tent unfolded, poles snapped together and threaded through, stakes pounded in, fly unfurled, ties tied. Unroll the mats, zip the sleeping bags together, then stow the duffels. Done. Beach.

RDC and I took our private path to the bluff and clambered down a tree's exposed roots to the sand. Determined to swim, I climbed back up and changed swiftly. And I could swim.

The beach is so wide and flat in this stretch that broad swathes of it remain flooded at low tide. We waded into water we expected the sun to have warmed, but coastal streams push cold water over the beaches as well, making races of beach puddles (they didn't strike me as tide pools and apparently didn't strike tide-pool critters either, since none dwelled in them). The streams tumbled steadily over gardens of stone, and despite the currents, the surface was smooth, making for excellent skipping.

That is, if you're a stone-skipper by trade. RDC got his stones to skip seven or more times while I was lucky to get a deuce. My mother is an expert as well, and these were all perfectly shaped--flat ovals of just the right size to whip between your fingers. I toss my rocks backhand, as I learned from BJWL, and tried RDC's forehand, to equal failure. I suck.

I swam while the swimming was good, anyway, near some cavorting kids (safety in numbers, plus parents' eagle eyes) and in clear strong sunlight. This ocean didn't seem as cold the Atlantic off Race Point in June--perhaps because I'd prepared myself for worse--and not too much colder than the Pacific in San Francisco. Warmer than off North Cove the day before, at least. However, neither of my two dips in the Pacific has been very long. Currents more than temperatures made me nervous about diving or swimming with no feet on the bottom. Sharks, as well, I was aware of, though more in SF than here. I'm a member of the "Jaws" generation.

We walked south along the beach, through the beach puddles and over the skeletons of trees. All the trees along the bluff bordering the beach were wind-sculpted, and the structure of the bluff was tone that looked human-made, like bricks. We walked into mist and under cloud, and I was glad I had swum when I did.

What I began to notice about the tree stumps on the beach, and what would be borne out in the rain forest, was that the trees grew braces for themselves. These venerable beings throw out a branch or root at ground level, a branch-root that stretches around the trunk in a self-hug of architectural support.

The perfect skipping stones were not the only interesting rocks on the beach. I began to find stones with perfectly round holes drilled through them, holes with the diameter of M&Ms and thus smaller than the half-sphere depressions burrowed by driller clams (a quarter or half-dollar). They looked deliberate and utilitarian. I rattled a few in my palm, and RDC looked at mine and soon spotted another, which he handed to me.
"What's it for?" I asked.
"For?"
"Yes, for. See, this one is an artist's palette, and this one is a musical instrument, and this one is part of a hinge, I think. What's that one for?"
He dropped it at my feet, gravity in action: "Beachweight."
My laughter would have put any late-nesting seabirds off their eggs. Keep me away in breeding season.

Later in the afternoon we attended a ranger-led guide of tide pools on Beach 3, but we skipped out when the ranger apologized for using big words like syzygy and didn't know what phase the moon was in. Diane writes that she understands not knowing anything about something but didn't understand not wanting to know something about anything (I paraphrase). We saw this phenomenon in action. MS Word Spellcheck flags syzygy, but it also flags itself (nor does it know how to spell "PowerPoint") so that doesn't mean anything. And when the last total solar eclipse of the millennium has been well publicized as happening on Wednesday, August 11, and this is Sunday, August 8, and you have supposedly made a study of tide pools, what phase could the moon be in but three days from new?

With or without accompaniment, the tide pools delighted me. RDC was surprised I have never seen one before; he grew up near New Haven, which did have them. I think the eastern end of Long Island Sound's north shore is much sandier rather the western bit, especially with the Connecticut River's deposits of silt. Annie Dillard describes ocean currents as smearing sand along the coasts and the waves throwing it back up onto the continent's feet. I like that. Anyway, I have never before seen a live wild seastar, or sea urchins, or what might have been a sea cucumber. So I thought of Waiting for Aphrodite as well, which taught me not to call these nonfish starfish but seastars.

This species of seastar occurred primarily in ochre but also in purple, and along its five points grew lines of abrasive white dots like the tops of non-pareils. (RDC didn't know what I meant and I couldn't remember the name of that chocolate candy with the white dots that you get at movies. He knew what Sno-Caps are called, though, and then he understood what I meant.)

The tentacles of the sea-urchins were sticky enough only to make me flinch as my touch sparked their reflexive gathering-in motion. And clams and mussels and crabs, all growing between barnacle-encrusted boulders and monoliths. (My last shred of respect for the ranger evaporated when he asked me how my [bare] feet were doing. I assume they were doing a lot less damage to the barnacles than shoes do, and besides, when I am Empress of the Universe, no one will be permitted to wear shoes on a beach unless the water temperature is below 40.)

"Jaws" occurred to me again. I asked RDC what the dog's name was, the black Lab that didn't come to its master's call when people are paying attention only to the boy's or scout leader's death. "Bait," he immediately suggested. I walloped him. Later, much later, I revised that suggestion to "Chum," as being a more likely dog's name and more applicable to sharks as well. He agreed but told me my answer was too late. Which it was, as usual.

And here I need to confess something. RDC asked long ago that I not post anything sensitive about him, and I think I mostly haven't, but on occasion he has said something so amusing that I have to unleash it on the world. Some of my passive constructions mask RDCisms (while others merely suggest that I should activate my writing). When I have taken credit for, or failed to credit him for, a particularly delicious bon mot, I have told him and he has jumped up and down saying it's not fair but accepted playing by the rules as he set them. When he said "beachweight" I knew I had to write about it, but telling the story, I could either see the uses of the rocks or say "beachweight" but not both, so I asked him pleeeaze, and we redefined sensitive. Beachweight and bait are okay. So there you are.

After supper and before sunset, we sat in our new camp chairs at the top of the bluff and read, right in the teeth of the wind. We walked on the beach during sunset, during which time I again regretted forgetting my kite. Seaspray and mist on our glasses made me wish for those little windshield-wiper spectacle attachments I've yearned for (but might have to invent for myself). We watched the suntrail blaze as the sun nestled into the long low breakers; we watched the trail fade as the sun sank below the horizon; all with enough moisture in the air that we could keep our eyes on nearly the whole thing.

Sleeping to the sound of surf crashing more than made up for the mats being only fourteen inches wide (we are both expansive sleepers).