James McMurtry, “Too Long in the Wasteland,” just to give credit to the singer/writer; someone in Port Angeles, or thereabouts, not to give proper credit to the photographer.

TWENTY seconds or so (maybe a couple of minutes) earlier, the moon was brighter, and right next to the sun.  Be-a-ut-i-ful.  Oh, wait; there was actually too much information with and in the photograph.  It was all too recognizable; another clue for those desperately looking for some sign of waves entering and moving down the Strait.

SO, NO, the photo above is not the one I’m talking about. Yeah, it’s a sunset, somewhere someone will recognize, but it’s not the one I saw, the one I’m not sharing.  This selfishness is not to further tantalize or tease.

THERE WERE NO telltale lines in the photograph, no sign of waves bending to match the shore, sideways to the sea.  Maybe I’ll draw something similar.  I fully realize I can’t actually recreate the beauty of the photograph, and it, perhaps, can’t fully capture the spirit of the moment; that ‘take a big breath’ moment; God’s full palette stretched out to… if you’ll forgive my over-sentimentalizing, forever.

Over-sentimentalizing, yes; but not exaggerating.

Still looking at the forecasts, but, lately; I start at the end of the forecast period.

YESTERDAY, about sunset, my new white t-shirt covered with red paint splatter, red dots soft-edged by sweat; I cruised into the Quilcene Village Store (the QVS, according to Adam Wipeout) to get Trish the Saturday/Sunday Peninsula Daily News; a really nice (not huge) RV, an SUP on the roof, honked as it passed, went a few hundred yards up Surf Route 101, made a four-point turn in someone’s driveway, and came back.

NOW, there have been quite a few times when seeing any rig with surfboards visible stopped anywhere in my neighborhood, I might just attack the occupants.  “Where are you going? What do you expect, wave-wise?”

That kind of thing. Once it was some friends of Cash and Tanya, up from Oregon. I heard about it the next time I ran into them.  “How did you know it was me?”  “Well…”

THIS TIME it was Concrete Pete, sort-of-recently-retired, coming up from Westport in the ‘outrageously expensive’ RV with stories of trips to Baja and… mostly Baja, but he did have to show me the layout in his RV. “You’ll have to get yourself one of these when you retire.”

“Yeah, right, Pete.”  As soon as he left, half an hour from his home, after I scared the girl inside the QVS (“It’s not my blood,” I said), I thought to myself, “Geez, I should have taken a picture.”

NEXT TIME.