Last weekend Violet, the Seal and I decided to go on a last minute adventure. We ended up driving north for a few hours to the sweet little town of Bellingham. On our way back we stopped at Larrabee State Park. There was a short wooded trail that led to a small beach. Violet, the Seal and I explored our little desert island of a beach together, walking in the sand, climbing on rocks, looking at little tide pools with sea anemone, starfish, and little crabs. At one point, maybe a few hundred feet away, we watched a blue heron stalk and catch her lunch. She was huge and her graceful ability to dart her beak into the water and come back up with a fish was beautiful and had all three of us awe-struck.

We didn’t know we were going to stop here and I certainly wasn’t wearing the right shoes for it. I had on a pair of very water unfriendly leather loafers and because of that I was trying to be extra careful not to get them wet with salt water (It was really cold and we were walking on rock with bits of coral barnacle or I would have just taken them off.) After a few hours we decided we should get going and began walking back up the beach. Every step I took my foot would sink in a puddle of soggy sand and after several steps my feet were getting quite wet. My mind thought, “I am going UP the beach, AWAY from the ocean, there won’t be any water this next step.” But sure enough, somehow every step I took landed me in water. I became more and more focused on my feet and where I was going to step next but I didn’t want to stop moving because that would make my feet sink even further into the wet sand. Eventually, I started to try and hop quickly, hoping this next time my feet would find dry land. But still, with every step my foot found water.

Finally, Violet said, “jesse, stop! Just stop and look at the big picture here.” And so, quite frustrated and soggy footed, I stopped and took my focused attention off of my two wet feet and looked all around to see where I was in the scheme of things. Because I had only been focusing on my feet and nothing else I hadn’t noticed that I was walking right up the path of a shallow but wide stream of water that was flowing from the hillside into the ocean. Three or four steps to either side was an entire beach of dry sand. So, now that I had seen the whole beach compared to where I was exactly I hopped three times to the right and that was that. Dryland.