Smith Creek opens into Willapa Bay, Willapa Bay opens into the Pacific. The highway crosses Smith Creek at the entrance to Willapa Bay, and there's a boat launch there. Sharon and I like to put the kayaks in and paddle up the creek. Wide calm water, gray, on the muddy bank a dead saltwater fish, a big one half eaten by crows. The mud on the banks sprouts tall grasses, a red-winged blackbird flits through the grass, flashing its orange badge, giving its cutting call. Tall firs, cottonwoods, pines jostle for position up ahead like commuters hoping for a seat on a train. There's a fork, one branch heading off to the right, meandering for awhile and then slinking around a bend. It's impossible to tell if it dead ends or if it continues around the bend. The main channel is to the left, it seems.
We drift. I'm ahead, and I see Sharon behind in her red kayak, body bundled against the chill, bill of her cap shading her eyes, paddle resting on the coaming as she oh so slowly brings the binoculars up to her eyes, stalking an eagle or a great blue heron. I steer for the left fork, the deeper channel Everything is so calm, so smooth, but the silence is not quiet; a buzz underpins it, makes it buoyant, like the invisible drafts and currents that hold the gull in a rocky, twisting glide high into the patchy complex of blue mixed with black and gray clouds. You can't identify the source of this non-quiet; is it the buzz of crickets or the hiss of the a gentle breeze through fir? Could it be a distant diesel chugging to power the twin propellers of a trawler out on the bay, or maybe an unseen plane behind that line of trees skimming the mouth of the Willapa River where it empties into the Bay? Or it could be the surf crashing down at the beach, and the wind is blowing all that remains of the sound of the waves' wild revelry all the way to this lazy backwater of a stream, only by chance registered by my ears on this drifting day on Smith Creek. It's so faint and yet so distinct, soft, steady, humming; I wonder if it's in my ears, am I just imagining it, or is it really a sound? Maybe it's the sound of the machinery, the whir of the atoms and molecules that make up this drifting scene. In the stillness, it's all that remains, just that insistent but faint cry like babies and gulls and surf. It could be anything, it could be nothing, maybe both; and my listless mind is willing to let it go, to forgo its usual clinging habits and allow this unknown to stay that way; to just drift, and enjoy the drifting, to watch that patient floating gull way up above, and be satisfied to watch, each of us, the soaring gull and me, where we belong.
We drift. I'm ahead, and I see Sharon behind in her red kayak, body bundled against the chill, bill of her cap shading her eyes, paddle resting on the coaming as she oh so slowly brings the binoculars up to her eyes, stalking an eagle or a great blue heron. I steer for the left fork, the deeper channel Everything is so calm, so smooth, but the silence is not quiet; a buzz underpins it, makes it buoyant, like the invisible drafts and currents that hold the gull in a rocky, twisting glide high into the patchy complex of blue mixed with black and gray clouds. You can't identify the source of this non-quiet; is it the buzz of crickets or the hiss of the a gentle breeze through fir? Could it be a distant diesel chugging to power the twin propellers of a trawler out on the bay, or maybe an unseen plane behind that line of trees skimming the mouth of the Willapa River where it empties into the Bay? Or it could be the surf crashing down at the beach, and the wind is blowing all that remains of the sound of the waves' wild revelry all the way to this lazy backwater of a stream, only by chance registered by my ears on this drifting day on Smith Creek. It's so faint and yet so distinct, soft, steady, humming; I wonder if it's in my ears, am I just imagining it, or is it really a sound? Maybe it's the sound of the machinery, the whir of the atoms and molecules that make up this drifting scene. In the stillness, it's all that remains, just that insistent but faint cry like babies and gulls and surf. It could be anything, it could be nothing, maybe both; and my listless mind is willing to let it go, to forgo its usual clinging habits and allow this unknown to stay that way; to just drift, and enjoy the drifting, to watch that patient floating gull way up above, and be satisfied to watch, each of us, the soaring gull and me, where we belong.