A Taste of Futility on the Shores of Deception Point

Written and Narrated by Andrew Couch

Tunes in this Episode

Hazlehurst - Pale Cricket

Time Has Told Me - Nick Drake

Deception Point State Park, Washington. The beach faces the strait of Juan de Fuca, beautifully littered with driftwood ranging in size from giant tree trunks to smooth and tiny sticks. It’s a strange place, where the wild coastal charm of the Pacific Northwest is frequently menaced from above by the terrible flying death machines of the United States Navy. We made it to the beach for sunset - myself, my wife and our dog. Two of us were tired from a long day on our bicycles, while one of us was extremely eager to put a little sand in his fur.

To reach the sand we had to climb over a natural barricade of dead and sand blasted trees, which I would imagine have lined the beach since the first big tree died and was swept away by a river. Scaling the trunks, we encountered an older woman standing on top of one of the huge logs, beaming a smile at us - especially at our dog. A creature wasting exactly zero time getting his paws on the beach.

“What a handsome dog! Oh, and he looks just like your nice beard!” She didn’t need to qualify the compliment. I felt like it was more generous to me than to our little guy. He is handsome in a rugged, scruffy way. His hair does share a similar color scheme to my brown and increasingly grey beard. However, his hair is long and wiry, and sweeps effortlessly into a natural but stylish mohawk on top of his head. In contrast, my beard looks more like the elderly offspring of a used Brillo pad and an afro. 

At her feet was a collection of stones, clearly pilfered from the beach, arranged in a row, still glistening with enough sea water to make them seem interesting. “Are you putting these in your garden?” I asked stupidly. Our dog at this point was four paws into the sand, leaping around and kicking like a tiny bucking bronco, rapidly skittering between the logs and sniffing furiously at random spots. His experience in these moments is a mystery, his nose, so powerful and sensitive, leaves his world quite peculiar to me. What information lingers in the aromas? What communication am I missing with my senses so limited and comparatively dull? As opaque as his inner understanding may be to me, there was absolutely no mystery in what he was seeking.

The woman smiled politely at my dumb question. Her eyes, like shining blue gems, catching the orange hue of the setting sun and flashing it back at the sea like two tiny flares, warning any lost ships away from her stones. Her teeth were charmingly gapped, giving her smile a hint of mania. They flashed at me as she said, “Oh no, I just like looking at the rocks.” She turned her wild eyes and teeth towards the row of medium sized stones at her feet, as if to prove her point, then gestured toward an elderly man on the beach with a weighted down T-shirt, filled with smaller stones hanging below his belly, saying, “My husband likes to collect little ones.” Looking back into my eyes, she asked where I was from.

I asked her in return where she had come from and she giggled, “Right here actually!” Her laugh conveyed the same touch of mania as her teeth. “You know, I’ve been coming to this beach since…” She paused to scan the beach for the best point of reference. “…well, since I was his size!” She said this, pointing to our handsome, wiry, dog.

And there he was, the size of an embryonic elk, his mysterious experience ongoing, his search successful, confirming my hunch, carrying what was obviously the very best piece of driftwood on a beach with literally thousands of pieces to choose from. I marveled at the image she planted in my brain, this woman, now well into her seventies – once a girl so small she could fit into a basket, staring at rocks with the same intense, gap-toothed enthusiasm. How many creature-sizes had she passed through in her life? Don’t most people reach their full height by eighteen? Her first beach visit, as she crawled along and got sand in her cloth diaper, she was the size of a small but handsome dog, but what came next? Did she totter about like a young chimpanzee as she realized the joys of arranging her rocks on top of the driftwood? Did she confidently stroll the sand, matching the size and gentle nature of a pony, picking her way through driftwood and stone, endlessly tumbling, piling up, washing away, then returning for more, decade after decade?

At that moment, the perfect piece of driftwood landed at my toes, and two dog eyes, wilder than even the most erratically gapped set of teeth, locked onto mine. If I could communicate with even half the clarity this silent animal has at his disposal, I’m not sure what I’d do. I can’t guarantee my intentions would remain benevolent. Perhaps I would attempt to take over a small country, or at least run for governor of a mostly rural state?

I picked up the stick and tossed it down the beach as far as I could, watching in amusement as a dog the size of a toddler tore across the sand with the speed of a baby cheetah. The husband of the wild eyed rock enthusiast laid his haul at her feet. It felt familiar, wordless and anticipatory. But I could no sooner imagine her launching a stone down the beach than I could picture him running after it. She knelt down to inspect his offering as he turned to the beach once more, ignoring the dazzling display of sunset colors, focusing instead on the moving four foot radius around his feet.

My dog was back before the man picked up his first stone. My wife, eyes closed and soaking up the final rays of the sun before it dunked into the sea like a cookie, was the next creature on the beach to have something laid at her feet. The dog seems to get a kick out of bringing his carefully chosen stick to the person least interested in tossing it.

I, meanwhile, couldn’t get my mind to stop thinking about the size of things. What am I the size of now - are giraffe fetuses over six feet tall? And what about these rocks? When wet, they all look at least a little interesting, but I know better than to bring them home, right? Don’t I have a pile somewhere, dull and colorless, so far from the waves that once brought out their colors, slowly turning them to sand? And is that the point of a stone, once it breaks apart from its mountain parent, to turn to sand, crushed by time and water, endlessly knocking into its brothers and sisters? I was starting to spin-out.

Fantastic, I thought to myself, existential dread…again. Another taste of that old familiar, edgeless and soft; pointlessness-panic landed on me like beads of sweat dripping from a hangman’s forearm onto a murderer’s chest. I was missing the sunset, thinking of stones, worried for small creatures, concerned for men and women - the old ones, the new ones, the vast majority who came and went already, and the unknown number yet to be born – all sharing the same futile fate. The paradox of the infinite, too weird and impossible to grasp, sits on the edges of our minds, like a wild-eyed beachgoer, ignoring the setting sun, focusing instead on the tiny meal of our bones. Swirling like pieces broken from the whole, interesting when wet, dull when dry, leaving behind nothing more than a mild irritant for the crotch of any future creature big enough to play in the debris field of its kind. The human animal, so violently tossed upon the shore, deposited by the river of consciousness for a short tumble on the beach before rejoining the sea, and for what?

My tailspin of despair was interrupted by the most content of all creatures, our dog, as he dropped what was evidently an even better stick at my feet. The old woman smiled at me. There was strange knowing in her eyes. Surely she couldn’t hear my thoughts? But could she see the chaos rampaging through me like an elephant in a pumpkin patch? She turned her gaze back to the last fingernail clipping of the sun as it slowly sank into the horizon. I did the same after tossing the stick. My wife, tranquil and pleased, seemingly unencumbered by point or pointlessness, broadened her smile to accept the last moment of the sun’s daily visit.

The love one can feel at any given moment is something worth remembering; especially when sticks, stones, and creatures pile up in the mind. For a moment I was reminded, certainty might just be a trick, if not a curse. If what I fear is true, the only thing more pointless than existing is chasing after the reasons why. There is a freedom in not knowing. There is only right now, there is only what actually happens, and there are the stories we tell about yesterday, tomorrow and if. Anything else washed up on the shore is worth admiring for the brief sliver of time both debris and human imagination find themselves in the same place. I relaxed and sat with my wife as the dog menaced the sand like the jets in the clouds.

Looking back once more to the old woman, she sure seemed to have something figured out. She and her husband collected one another, leaving their lovely piles of stone to dry on the beach, waving sweetly goodbye on their way back home.