Spring 1994

It had been raining intermittently for two days by the time we pulled into the dark campground, and we had been on the road for four. We were mostly quiet after all the time together in the beat-up old pickup. Small talk had been exhausted, and we were both tired and not looking forward to another night in the soggy confines of the tent.

The campground where we were staying is famous for its enormous dunes, which march up and down the Oregon coastline for miles. We decided to check out the dunes before we set up the tent, so I locked up the truck and we walked off into the night, after carefully noting which campsite was ours.

The campground was strategically dotted with lights, but once we got on the trail out to the beach, it grew dark very quickly. The little flashlight I carried accentuated the dark rather than rolling it back. As we walked into the bowl between two tall, rounded dunes, the silence drew around us, as if we were entering an intimate, enclosed space rather than walking between huge mounds of sand.

In my memory we were silent, although in reality she and I were always talking about something. I'm sure it was something inconsequential, commenting on the strange, indistinct bulk of the dunes as we walked between them, or apologizing for one of the innumerable arguments that flowed between us like water flecked with razor-sharp shards of ice. I might have held her hand.

It was hard to tell how long we'd been walking or how far we'd gone, but it hadn't been a long or a short time when the rain started. The sound of the rain on the dunes was a curious kind of sizzling. It was strange and beautiful, but our jackets were permanently damp from walking around in the rain, and we didn't want to get too much wetter. We turned around and walked back to the campsite, as silent, in my memory, as we had been when we came.

We set up the tent quickly and efficiently, and ate something from a can for dinner. We crawled into the tent and curled up around each other for warmth; the rain had stopped back in the campground and the tent was mostly dry, so we went to sleep quickly.

Sometime around five, the rain started up again, and right around dawn it started to soak through the roof of the tent and fall down on us in fat, sluggish droplets. I was exhausted, so I tried to ignore it, but when she sat up and said she couldn't sleep any more, we both agreed to leave the tent and sleep for another couple hours in the cab of the truck.

I woke up later curled around the gearshift knob, and stretched up straight. My back and neck were stiff, and I was still damp and chilly. She was a painful curl in the corner of the cab. She looked so sad and frail. I reached over and rested a hand on her hip. She didn't move.

The previous summer she and I had taken another drive along the coast in my father's pickup. The sky had been an endless blue. It was a beautiful, breezy, warm day, and the road twisted and turned its way along the coast, high above the endless slate of the Pacific. We'd been driving all day, stopping periodically to watch the water pound the rocky promontories of the coastline. Everything was huge and old and immensely powerful, and just being there was exciting.

After driving along for a while, we had pulled off at a vantage point a thousand feet or more straight above the ocean. It was mid-afternoon, so the sun was halfway down the sky and the breeze was in our faces. I had stood behind her, and suddenly and impulsively wrapped my arms around her. She laughed and leaned back into me, turning to kiss me on the cheek. I stood there and looked out to sea, my arms wrapped around her, feeling a small piece of forever.

This morning, she woke up slowly, we wrapped up the tent, and drove out of the campground. We talked about our plans for the day. Maybe we ate something for breakfast. It started raining again as we turned onto the highway, heading south.