We have been at the beach, walking the long, broad beaches near the delta of the Humptulips River. This is the heart of Humptulips County. The forest and sea are in a perpetual ecological standoff here, each one ending so that the other can begin; each one increasingly resplendent and dominant the farther from the other it gets.
The beaches are the demarcation zone, and the ever-shifting spume line the closest to an actual boundary one can find between these two vastly different worlds. When I am on a beach, I always walk the spume line to see what the ocean has tossed aside. I always walk the spume line with my father and we look for ambergris. When I was young and walking a beach with him in reality, he told me about ambergris and how he hoped to find it one day. For him it represented treasure, unexpected riches to be found along the shoreline and cast into his path by chance and the waves.
While I didn’t find any ambergris today, I did find my father’s spirit as I always seem to do during these now physically solitary treasure hunts. I will look again for ambergris tomorrow morning while Helen hunts for shells and rocks. I don’t really care whether I find any as long as I can continue to search for it occasionally, for it is along the spume line that my father is the closest he can be to me. The spume line is the line of demarcation between life and death: here is where the sea casts aside offerings of its dead so that shore birds may sustain life and here is where my father’s spirit is best able to nurture mine; here is where the wall between life and death is most nearly permeable.
In the commingled sounds of wind and surf I can hear my father sing his stories anew. It is not so much that I hear his stories verbatim as he once told them to me, but the sense of wonder and expectation they cast over a young child those many years ago is instantly rekindled near the surf – especially on these beaches near the location of my father’s and mother’s childhood. It was here I felt closest to him in life, and it is here I am nearest to him as he sleeps.
A portion of my morning’s walk was with Peter. I didn’t mention ambergris to him today, but I am certain I have done so in the past. I hope that he, too, spared a few moments searching for ambergris, but I didn’t ask. As we walked together, we did share recollections of playing pirates and of Star Wars reenactments along this same shore. Perhaps within those recollections was just the merest glimmer of ambergris.
