“Tidal Shift” Tiffany

The Coast has a way of alienating you from everything else. The coarse, gray-brown sand stretches for miles both ahead of and behind you, fading into a horizon of mountains floating on fog. In places like Cannon Beach, you rarely see where the ground ends and the mountains begin, only fog with floating giants on either side, and miles of sand in between. For me, it has always been both an appeal and a drawback: walk as far as you can, see as much as you can, but, in the end, you hardly made a dent in covering the length of the beach. It’s like that line from The Phantom Tollbooth: follow the line forever and you will find Infinity. It was this hypnotic infinite that kept me from watching the ocean more closely, and almost led to my death. When I was ten years old, my parents took me on a weekend trip to Cannon Beach as a reward for having scored especially well on my state testing. Further proof, they said, of the academic superiority of homeschooling. Our hotel room overlooked a short seawall made of man-sized basalt boulders. I thought they were rolled there by the tides, like the lines of foam and seaweed and scalloped streaks of black volcanic sand. Years later, I would realize they were manmade, cut from the surrounding mountains that were once themselves below sea level, loaded onto flatbeds, driven down the mountainside, and dumped and rolled onto the beach in massive heaps to block the same waters they came from, to protect the things that men made.