Emily Articulated: Coastal

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

The overhead fan hums through my borrowed camper van, mixing with waves riding a Pacific wind. The air is cool and clean and thick with briny humidity. Sand and damp cling to my belongings, evidence of recent time spent outdoors.

Throughout my life, I’ve found myself on the coast for many reasons, pulled toward its grandeur and its difference from my regular surroundings. Often, these trips are precipitated by impending changes, big decisions, bigger feelings or moments when clarity feels just beyond my grasp.

Perhaps the gusts and gales batter against my unease with the full force of nature’s will. Perhaps I’m comforted by the fact that an ocean so tumultuous can also settle into a calm, placid sunset — peace embodied in birds flying against a gentle orange sky.

I’ve headed far west during breakups, before big moves, when grief got too big for my body, before dropping out of college and before returning to it, during times of loss and times when I simply didn’t know what came next.

The impulse to go was built, perhaps, from years of fleeing to tree perches and backyard hideouts when my parents’ shouting matches grew too loud to be blocked by a bedroom door — an impulse I’ve honed over decades of use.

This time, I’ve returned to the ocean seeking refuge from smoky skies, their haze suffocating the inherent tranquility of our home. The smoke looms as a reminder of the uncertainty of our future; of summers no longer unmarred by fire season, of tragedy and destruction close enough to hear its knock on a neighbor’s door, knowing that someday it may knock on ours, too.

Our “go bags” are packed, symbols of all that we stand to lose and the smallness of what we’d keep if lightning struck our hillside; if the ill intentions of someone’s sick mind turned toward our forest, too.

People and animals displaced weigh heavily on my tender heart, while donated pet toys and GoFundMe contributions feel an awful lot like “thoughts and prayers” against the chasm of destruction and loss.

As the West burns, and smoke hangs like clouds between us and the mountains we can barely see, we’re forced to make peace with uncertainty. Or, if not peace, then an ambivalent cohabitation; a subtle acknowledgment; a silent plea to, at least sometimes, be left alone.

When I was 15, I spent my first summer on the ocean in Friday Harbor, Wash., in the San Juan Islands, sharing a small camper with my sister. We watched An Inconvenient Truth at a budget theater, and I left feeling strangely sure that everything would be okay — despite the impending doom.

I was hopeful we’d take care of the planet I felt like I was seeing for the first time. If people knew orcas existed, knew they played in strands of kelp while seagulls soared overhead; if they watched otters hurl themselves down slick rocks like water slides; if they meandered through moss-covered glens and fern-laden forests so green they glowed — surely, they’d choose care over harm. Surely, they’d protect it.

Twenty years later, I’m back on a nearby shore, with far less certainty and hope, searching for clarity in the wiles and whims of nature. I now know better than to believe that loving something guarantees we’ll save it. We can love forests and still watch them burn. We can know exactly what we stand to lose and continue living in ways that make the losing more likely. Knowledge, it turns out, is not the same thing as action. Neither is love.

And yet, I’m not sure that makes the loving useless.

I still come here. I still feel something loosen in me when the horizon becomes nothing but water and sky. I’m reminded that some storms calm, that waves crash on shores just to return to the ocean a little bit changed, but mostly the same as they were before.  Not everything has order, not everything works out or happens for a reason. And yet, we’re still here — making sense of the nonsensical in whatever ways feel right to us.

Maybe it’s ironic or insensitive to leave my home to cope with the reality of others losing theirs. But staying felt like living inside the loss, with the AQI climbing as the toll of destruction did, too. So, I guess, this is simply permission to find reprieve, in whatever ways we can.

To leave when we need to leave (and to be so grateful when we can). To stand beside an ocean when we need to feel small. To let the wind batter against what we can’t resolve. To accept, for a little while, that we don’t have to resolve it.

The fires are still burning. Our go bags are still packed. There is no lesson waiting for me in the waves that will make any of that less true. But this morning, the air is cool and clean. The Pacific keeps arriving at the shore and pulling away again. Somewhere beyond the camper window, birds are riding the wind.

For now, that is enough. Certainly, uncertain.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.