Her path, limiting. Her experience, never-ending.
She turned my world upside-down.
At times, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was showing me.
She invited me to take a seat and enjoy the show.
What I came to realize is that what I was seeing was only momentary.
The students of Visualizing Climate Change from Evergreen State College visited the Quileute coast from April 18th-21st. Upon arriving at Rialto Beach, the ferocity of the ocean was evident. Huge logs were scattered along the shoreline and bewilderment set in as to how they reached their current resting point. My team, the BLENdables (Ben, Lenny, Eric, and Nick) set off to explore the shoreline taking along with us field journals to record observations, cameras to capture specific moments, enough food and water for a full day, and intestinal fortitude to make a few mile hike to the tide pools and back. Our team noticed how the logs created areas to play or even sit back and enjoy the show that Mother Nature was putting on. The sediment ranged in size and was deposited at various locations, but in a pattern that was conducive to erosion and deposition of a beach with prominent headlands, more undulating. Sea stacks left clues as to where the beach used to be. The coast was disappearing without respect to the Quileute Nation’s current reservation boundaries. Sea level rise was moving the Nation back and further in from the coast. The Nation’s plight of hanging on to what little land they had left was evident to me when I noticed the lone tree on top of Hole in the Wall, holding on with only half its roots, waiting to be the next victim of climate change through erosion.
