Scenic Beach

This year Crystal Simone Smith is our guest, and I’m eager to pick her up from the airport. The weather is so remarkable for October that we can’t resist taking the ferry route from Fauntleroy to Southworth. The skies ache with blue. From the deck I say that the mountain is out, and she remarks about sea birds that are foreign to her.

a family of guillemots

milling in the cove—

Rainier making a cloud

sunning cormorant . . .

our ferry shudders

into dock

After the drive to Seabeck, I continue a few miles past the conference center to Scenic Beach State Park. It’s where I take all our guest speakers every year—a reconnection ritual. Huge yellow leaves have begun to carpet the forest floor by the picnic shelter. I point out bright rusty arbutus bark that a previous guest, Marco Fraticelli, loved so much. We amble and sit, walk a bit more, centering ourselves in the woods, with a view of the Olympics across the water. Sometimes a line of fresh snow marks a melting point halfway down the mountains. But not this year.

smell of woodsmoke . . .

a Japanese maple

welcomes us

Soon it will be time to head to the Historic Inn, back at Seabeck, to check in and be on stage for the weekend, but for now we are quiet in the woods, gentle waves lapping at the oyster shells whitening the shore. A stone I skip will take another thousand years to reach the beach again.

as if to say

it’s time to go

one cloud after another