I didn’t think I needed a crystal. I didn’t know what a crystal would do for me.
Ryan rummaged around his pocket for a second; he held out his fist to me. The little rock he dropped in my hand was weightless, so tiny. It seemed orange but also purple and I thought for a second it might be amethyst. He told me it had broken off from one of his crystals and that I could keep it.
The day cleared up on the drive to the coast. Light blue skies, the atmosphere hazy, and fat, lazy clouds with flat bottoms settled firmly in the sky. Warm, I left my jacket in the car when we stopped in Corvallis for lunch.
There have been days when I have left work in the afternoon exhausted. So I would stop by Red Fox for a drink. Whiskeysodabitters. The bartenders there don’t even ask me anymore because they already know.
Ryan and I sit on the patio, our office hours we call them.
We just bitch and bitch. And rant. Then we laugh a little bit.
This week Ryan paced the patio. I’d had never seen him so anxious.
I told Ryan I was packing for the coast. “Toothbrush? Check. Ring of protection? Check. Emergency flask? Check.”
“Did you remember to bring your crystal?”
Yes, I carried the little crystal bud in my pocket. I had discovered it to be more translucent with white scratches and flaws than colored as I had first thought.
Signs warn drivers to slow down to 30 miles per hour before turns that fold quickly in upon themselves, that wrap around the feet of hills. The land falls away past the road, and every once in a while I see a creek burying itself in a ravine to the other side.
I rested my head for a second in the back seat, but then, “There it is!” We were tumbling down the last hills of the Coastal Range toward that flat gray slate, the ocean.
We found the lodge south past a town call Yachats; it looked a little Bates Motel like. Two low buildings, flat gray faded with white trim, a lawn away from the beach. No signal on my mobile phone. No phone in the room to call for help. A poor wifi connection that was absolutely useless. The place was tidy though.
A loud booming, paced, sounded from around the rocks, the unknown rumble of destruction interrupting from the movie theater next door. It caused a primordial fear; a fear activated in a deep cluster of neurons, never to be revealed and identified and dissected. White spray jumped from the chasm and I did not dare get closer to the edge, to walk farther past the rock wall to discover the source of this sound.
Devil’s Churn at high tide, the water surged and sprayed a little, though we had heard that the tide that afternoon would not be that strong, that usually the display in the chasm looked even more treacherous.
Signs warned against “sneaker waves,” water that would tangle around your legs and pull you back over the cliff, into the ocean. Here in this place, even a little wave, water around the ankles and a little spray, did not inherently seem that benign and I wondered what it would take to let me become so comfortable so that the water could take me unaware.
I lost that little piece of crystal on the beach. It must have fallen out of my pocket, a sacrifice to the ocean to keep me safe. And nothing happened. There ended up being no reason to worry.
At night, on the beach, around the fire, we drank and there was laughter. The dark was dimensionless except for the crests of waves blossoming like unnaturally white teeth in widening smiles. The ocean at night seems flat, more like a screen, than that immense regression toward the horizon that awes during the day.
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