Salal
November 27, 2018
A world that smells of sand and sea and dirt: that fishy, salty soil, musty stagnant swamp water on sweet-rooted plants. Sometimes, this place feels more powerful to me than the ocean itself. More moving, more vast; older and stronger. The rattle of leaves and conifer needles is like the sound of waves, the air warm like a more tropical coast.
However, it’s merely a pathway, a method of movement between two locations, a portal between two worlds. Less than 1000 feet in length, it opens on one side to the warm white dunes of a cold ocean and on the other to a paved road of dark asphalt surrounded by leaning, windswept trees. One direction you hastily take off your shoes to feel the soft sand, the other you hastily put them back on, sand in your socks better than the jagged asphalt.
The pathway is old, the planks that you walk on rotted by sea air and the salty swamp the path cuts through. Every couple years a work party will gather and repair the old wood, I’m told, but by the time anyone walks there again the sea has already begun to reclaim them.
The path is surrounded on all sides by the salal that grows in the wetlands – older and taller than anywhere else you’ll find it. It blocks out the sunlight and keeps you from the wind that travels through the space between dunes and tree line, making the path feel safe and protected like an old grandma’s hug. The ground seeps the sweet, raw smell of dead things – decomposing leaves in salty still water – and sandy dirt catches in between barefoot toes. Framing the planks below, moss and dune grass grow wild where the swamp water has dried up, catching the little sunlight that makes it through the dark green, oval-shaped leaves of the salal roof.
Occasionally, though the salal closes in on either side like a tunnel, you’ll catch a glimpse of the surrounding swamp through gaps in the knotted branches. Half-concealed stumps rest in deceivingly shallow-looking water and even when the wind blows wild over your head, the water barely ripples. Colored a dull olive green and completely opaque, the only living things you’ll see are the occasional frog or toad resting its nostrils above the water, or a great blue heron poised to catch them. When I was younger, I thought that the darkness at the start of the path held great ancient beasts like the black bears that ate our coastal trash, but as I spent more time there over the years I realized the only ancient thing there was benevolent, breathed with the ocean air and ate sunlight rather than hotdogs and s’more remains.
Going to the dunes and ocean, the pathway gives you a sense of awe as you draw ever closer to the muted sound of waves crashing in the distance. Coming back from the ocean, tired and wet, skin pink from the harsh wind, the path back feels like a home you could melt into the walls of and never come back.