But... we also climbed down to the pebble beaches along the shore below the bridge.
We walked in forests dripping with moisture (you should have seen it when the sun managed to peer out from beyond the clouds, all fairy rainbows along the branches...) and alive with birdsong. We trod the path down to the shore, onto the pebbles and the sand and the driftwood bleached from sun and age, down to the edge of an ocean which broke clean and lucid over the stones. I could smell salt and sea and clean air and cedar sap.
I watched the beautiful ocean.
And I thought about you, Louisiana. About you, Florida. And I thought about what this beach might look like if that gusher was in Puget Sound instead of the Gulf of Mexico. And my heart broke, and I felt guilty for being grateful that this part of the world is still the way that God has made it.
I was just reading more news coverage of the Gulf. Things seem to be getting worse, not better. This cannot be fixed, it seems - things have been so screwed up by the costcutting measures that would maximise company profits that we might lose the WORLD for the chasing of the almighty dollar.
Can you conceive of a lifeless ocean? I'm starting to get an inkling of what that might be like.
And I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it that I am a part of the species which has done this, which can do this, and then cannot find a way to make it right.
Oh, dear God, you beautiful Puget Sound. Will there come a day that I remember that moment of clear water, and it exists only in that quiet grief-laden patch of my memory....? I almost can't bear the thought of that...
