It Rained Upside Down
One of my favorite things about living on the rural coast of Washington State was the ocean. Sure, there were scenic summer days of hiking from the highway to the beaches, but also rainy sojourns meant more as out-of-door exercise than enjoying the scenery (swathed in fog as it tended to be), and camping trips wherein my family walked repeatedly from the tent/camper trailer to the water’s edge.
It seemed that winter provided the most violent wave action, as cold storms were carried by the jet stream from Alaska and the Arctic Circle to our particular parallel. Naked and vulnerable to these storms, the coast always got the worst of it, before they blasted through Seattle a touch more lightly. The electricity, a tenuous thing at best, would invariably flicker, and often go out for a span of hours to days.
Trips to the ocean during these times of great meteorological activity were rarer than at any other time, as we tended to stay inside where it was dry and warm, like normal people. Once in a while, though, we couldn’t help ourselves and piled into the car to brave the badly paved two-lane road leading out of town, sometimes feeling the car being pushed by gales of wind and watching the rain splatter angrily against all the windows.
I moved away, the year that the parking lot disappeared. A huge storm pushed the waves up and over the bank of sand, washing away, breaking up, or completely covering the little parking lot with upwards of 50 feet of sand, rocks, and entire trees. I only saw the aftermath, a year afterwards. The parking lot had been half-uncovered, the rest of it left buried. A new jetty, made of large amounts of boulders that would probably fit one at a time on a dump truck, had just been completed, breaking up the waves before they reached the small Native American village and saving the beach from further erosion and damage. It was an amazing sight, knowing what it looked like before and seeing the mild terraforming of both nature and man. I prefer remembering it as it was. It always shocks me how different it is when I visit.
One year, the ex and I visited my parents over Christmas, and while a large storm brewed, we decided to make our own way to the coast, just to see what it was like, with the wind blowing so obnoxiously and it raining as hard as it was. Again I was startled by the state of the aformentioned parking lot. Even before getting out of the car we could hear the waves pounding furiously against the tall sand dunes obscuring our view of the water. I was almost afraid to walk to the top of the jetty separating the half-parking lot from the edge of the ocean, not that I feared being hurt, but I had this horrific mental image of waves larger than I had ever seen, white-caps being shorn off by the wind whipping the waves into a frenzy and stealing saltwater off the top of each breaking wave. I was worried how high the tide might be, and judging by the furious noise, I worried that I’d peek over the jetty just in time to find that the tide was WAY IN and about to swallow me, the ex, and the car whole.
I peeked, and sighed in mild relief–it was daylight but it was so dark in this storm that it was mildly nightmarish, but it was enough to see that the waves were farther away than I was imagining, still close enough that I could have gotten my feet wet inside of 75 yards, but far enough away to calm me a little. I stared at the waves, pushing in directly off the ocean and tumbling, pounding themselves into the shallower surf and dying at the sand’s edge. Each wave, as it crashed, reverberated through the ground. I’d never experienced that before. It rather freaked me out, and I stayed very close to the ex.
What I remember most, though, were not the angry waves, nor the tumultuous sky, but the rain. I was getting water up my nose because where I was standing, the wind was so violent and situated just so that it was seemingly raining up from the ground.
I think we stayed there for about ten minutes before getting soaked enough to run back to the car, getting the car floor muddy, and escaping back to town, to the warm fire at my parents’ house. It was certainly an experience and a sight to behold, though.
