Today I turned 60.
I want to be clear that this is not a number I’ve been dreading. It’s a number I’ve been planning for. The whole reason I’m standing in Gig Harbor at sunrise instead of setting up event lighting in a Palm Beach ballroom is precisely because of this birthday. I went to where I wanted to be. I watched the sun come up over Mount Rainier from the water’s edge. No party, no crowd, no forced sentimentality. Just coffee and a mountain and a year that is officially underway.
I did briefly consider the kayaks. It was fifty degrees. The waivers stayed unsigned.
The Clamming Situation
On the way north toward Olympic National Park I pulled over at Potlatch State Park on Hood Canal — arrived at low tide without knowing what I was walking into — and found a full operation in progress. People were clamming and oystering along the flats, and two young women working for the state were tracking all of it on a spreadsheet that was considerably more involved than I’d have expected. Clam counts, harvest data, season-setting information, grids and columns and the whole apparatus of state wildlife management applied to shellfish. One of them literally sprinted off mid-conversation to intercept a clammer coming over the hill.
I had signed up at the start of this project to do a short documentary on someone interesting in each state. Standing there watching these two, I thought: that was right there. I didn’t get the camera out. I keep noting these moments, hoping I’ll do something about them eventually.
There was also a tent selling coffee, ice cream, and oysters. That’s either a genius combination or a very specific kind of person being served. Possibly both.
Hurricane Ridge
The drive up into Olympic National Park ended at Hurricane Ridge, which gets its name from the winds that come through in winter. From sea level photographing Mount Rainier in the morning, to snow and Evergreens and a view that stopped me cold in the middle of a sentence I was recording.
I came around a bend on the switchback road and lost it completely. Left to right, nothing but white. I got out of the car. Vancouver Island was down there in the haze. The Olympic peaks were doing what mountains do when you’re finally standing in them instead of looking at them from across the water.
I scampered around in the snow for a while. There is no other word for what I was doing.
Blue hour hit on the drive back down and the sky went that particular shade of deep blue that Pacific Northwest evenings produce and nowhere else quite matches. I had a mushroom burger at a gastro pub in Port Angeles — small town, friendly, exactly the kind of place I want more of this year — and called it a first full day.
Sixty years old. Olympic National Park. A year of fifty states just getting started.
