Reverie

Seaside, Oregon. It's a small, aging resort town hanging off the far western end of the Lewis and Clark Trail, one of many small, seaside towns strung out like fruit along the vine of the Oregon Coast highway. Thank goodness for Sacagawea, without whom these great white explorers would have been lost in the plains and mountains between the eastern USA and the then unknown great Oregon Territory.

It's raining today, an intermittent kind of rain going from umbrella thumping, wind driven bluster to a light misting, typical of the northwest coastal region. We think of this being the western shore of North America, either USA or Canada. When it comes to the Pacific, this is the eastern portion. This ocean reaches halfway around the world from here, a massive distance unfathomable to most as they walk the local promenade, watching the waves pound on the shore and the seabirds race by in the wind.

Just as the Eskimos have a hundred different words for snow, we of the rain have a vast vocabulary to describe the ever changing nature of this coastal precipitation. Rain here, driven in off the Pacific, can be light, almost friendly at times. It can be merciless, brutal, pounding. It can be on and off, intermittent, like a rhythm in some mysterious tune, playing for our attention then leaving us to wonder. It can be anything in between, and everything in between, often all in the same day, sometimes even at the same time.

Our hotel room is on the first floor, with a massive room wide window, making it easy for us to look out and just as easy for the strollers to look in. We are the caged; they are the free. We are safe from the elements; they have braved the breezes pushing the heaving waves to shore. Looking out this window, watching that pounding surf, those gulls whipping by, the sand and shore, it's easy to forget the world out there, easy to fall into reverie. That's a good thing.