by Nick Neely
For my parents
For Sarah
Copyright © 2016 by Nick Neely
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Neely, Nick, author.
Title: Coast range: a collection from the Pacific edge / Nick Neely.
Description: Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint Press,
[2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016020226
Subjects: LCSH: Neely, Nick. | BISAC: NATURE / Essays.
Classification: LCC AC8 .N35 2016 | DDC 979--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020226
Cover design by Debbie Berne
Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10987654321
ebook ISBN 9781619028593
Contents
Chiton
The Book of Agate
The Afterlife
Discovering Anna
Gone Rogue, or Suck It Up
A Guide to Coyote Management
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Carcass Toss
Chanty
Homestead
Slow Flame
Acknowledgments
Chiton
Along my home California coast, you may find, on the softest littoral rock, an infinite number of subtle dimples. It’s as if, for eons, some ambitious soul lingered to rub first this spot, then that, until each became a smooth and nearly uniform divot. These shallow holes—catching seawater, reflecting sky and fog—are not the work of some invisible thumb, however, but of the foot of a five-hundred-million-year-old: a mollusk. They are the resting places of chiton.
Now the best way to understand a chiton (kī-tän) is to wait until sunset, flop on your belly at the sea’s rocky edge, and lie quite still. Make sure it’s high tide, when chitons are busiest. Then, with your ear pressed to the stone, you might hear the faint vibrations of scraping as, underwater, their rasp-like radulae rev up in their mouths and they begin to lurch forward to graze the algal fields, inch by inch. Some chitons reap “diatom scuzz”; others prefer a healthy leaf of algae. All cut with precision: The outermost “teeth” of their radulae are capped with magnetite, harder than stainless steel.
Chitons are also called “sea cradles,” because eight calcareous plates overlap across their backs, a defensive arch surrounded by a fleshy girdle. More than nine hundred species crawl the world’s shores, but they’re most varied on our West Coast (and in Australia). If you’re lucky, while perusing a Pacific tide pool you might chance upon a foot-long brick-red gumboot chiton, a creature lovingly nicknamed the “wandering meatloaf.” This giant’s leathery girdle actually wraps clear around its plates and is slightly fuzzy to the touch: Twenty species of red algae grow on its back. All of which makes me wonder if the gumboot wouldn’t enjoy nibbling on itself, just a little.
Chitons are guarded, territorial. They don’t like limpets, another grazer. They have light-sensitive organs, “aesthetes,” in their shells—their plates are innervated—which relay signals to the region resembling a head. Some even have lens-bearing “eyes” on their backs and see shapes. Thus, when your shadow crosses, a chiton will cling fast, masquerading as rock. Should you, or a wave, catch and flip a chiton upside down by surprise, however, it will curl into a tectonic ball and go with the flow, tumbling to safety.
But this is why it’s really worth lying on your stomach: Each night, some chiton species creep forward on established trails to their feeding grounds, usually no more than a few feet from their primary dimple. Out and back, they go, harvesting, and by morning return on these mucal routes to their hammocks in the stone, where they seal tight to conserve moisture. They perform these rounds for months before moving on to fresh algal pastures. Do you hear them? No one knows how they navigate, exactly, nor how they scour their pits (and some species don’t). Like limpets, their secretions may dissolve the stone, before they polish off the job with their teeth. But now, again, I find myself wondering: Is the chiton’s home its groove, equally a rut and a cradle? Or is it the endless forays made from this center?
The Book of Agate
Here, on my desk, lies a handful of beach agates, catching the winter light. They are charms I’ve given myself to play with. Comforts, pacifiers. Curiosities.
Some are smooth, buttery, worn round by water and time; others are angular and rough, perhaps removed too soon from their wash cycle.
But even these, I find, are easy on the fingers.
Recently these stones—mostly small, translucent pebbles—were lodged in the silt of a river delta, but now they are clean and dry, preserved for a spell. They’ve found a home.
Once an object joins a collection, it tends to become more than itself. Not just symbolic, but sacred. It is retired from all former use, if there was any in its previous incarnation.
Then even a stone snatched from the multitudes—one that’s caromed for thousands of years without much consequence—can no longer be handled so lightly.
Dropping one to the floor, I can’t help but wince a little.
Something collected recalls its many origins all at once: layers of association difficult to distinguish, let alone describe, amid that warm feeling of general owner’s satisfaction.
Holding up this milky pebble to look within, I seem to confront an immeasurable history compressed into an object.
Not just the white lines barreling in on the beach where this rock was discovered—waves that crash down even now, thousands of miles away—but also the eroded pocket in the hills from which it came and every scouring riffle in between.
Agates gather in darkness, in lava rock, where silica gradually precipitates from groundwater. In ancient bubbles and faults, a gel forms, and as it dehydrates, the incipient crystal separates into discrete but fused bands. Eventually, the emptiness of the cavity is filled with a seamless quartz known as chalcedony.
If a small cave is left at the center, then your agate is in fact a geode, a word that means “earthy,” though those glittering innards may seem more like ice or air.
Agate nodules come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and degrees of translucence: from granule to boulder, vermilion to cerulean, clear to opaque. Depends on their original mold, the mineral content of their natal waters, and other mysteries.
So it was that, millions of year ago, these agates began to come into my life.
But I remember, also, that June day when my love and I drove west from Eugene on a misty road, past pastures and barns and clear-cuts on the Douglas fir hillsides.
How we hung a right on Highway 101, curving through dunes and over headlands, until, from the precipitous heights of Cape Perpetua, we descended to a town far from anywhere and clinging to the shore: Welcome to Yachats: The Gem of the Oregon Coast. Pop. 600.
In the Chinook language, Yachats (yah-hots) means “dark waters at the foot of the mountain.” Just before town, we drove across the modest river, slow and tannic, overhung with maple and alder. Waters flowing out of the mossy Coast Range into a shallow bay.
All my life, it seems, I have collected places, looking, I suspect, for just the right one. Here in the Northwest was a pocket in which our eyes felt suddenly comfortable.
Yachats is all edges—mountains meeting river, meeting ocean, meeting sky—but ideally propo
rtioned, charming, as if it would all fit beneath the dome of a snow globe.
Turn over these stones, and thoughts flurry.
As a child, I was given a small red plastic rock tumbler one Christmas, because I had the collecting bug: the impulse to hold, and possibly hoard, the world.
Or rather, it had collected me.
A tumbler mimics water. As the drum slowly rotates, it piles rock on top of rock, over and over. First harsh sand is added, and then polishing powder, so that, when the grinding is over and all is quiet, each stone shines like water itself.
Below the surface of our backyard, however, I found only crumbly sandstone, too soft to polish. So I had to look elsewhere for gems: In wildflowers. Flitting through oaks.
Spotted salamanders, glistening under pots.
Books.
Collections, I’ve read, often begin with a gift or serendipity. Rarely are they planned. But once that first item is in hand, others accrue as if by their own volition.
John Dewey: “No unprejudiced observer will lightly deny the existence of an original tendency to assimilate objects and events to the self, to make them part of the ‘me.’ We may even admit that the ‘me’ cannot exist without the ‘mine.’ The self gets solidity and form through an appropriation of things which identifies them with whatever we call myself. . . . ‘I own therefore I am.’”
Solidity and form: A collection is the silica that gradually fills some part of the psyche.
Usually my Yachats agates rest in a glass bowl, but sometimes I find them scattered across my desk, among my papers and receipts. Lately they sit in clusters on stacks of unread books as if to prevent me from working.
“I am unpacking my library,” wrote Walter Benjamin. “Yes, I am.”
Suddenly emboldened, I sweep them into the cup of my hand, let them go clinking back into their dish. There, I can keep an eye on them.
Such are the gentle tides of a rare day.
“Guard well your spare moments,” wrote Emerson. “They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”
The truth is diamonds are a dull choice: They serve as currency because none can be told apart. Nor are they actually rare. The market is only carefully controlled, and advertised.
No two agates are alike in design, and each has a chemical fingerprint, sometimes plainly visible, that an expert can trace to within fifty miles of its source.
The philosopher Theophrastus (372–287 B.C.), a disciple of Aristotle, was the first to write of agates in his treatise On Stones. “The achates is also a beautiful stone,” he wrote, “it comes from the river Achates in Sicily and is sold at a high price.”
Fidus Achates, friend of Aeneas.
But agates in fact come tumbling down streams and mountains the world over, and today are considered only semiprecious.
“Semi-worthless,” goes the joke.
Some of these rocks can offer a view, though, not unlike a kaleidoscope; a toy that, now that I think of it, houses bits of glass like those gleaned from a beach.
A word that comes from the Greek kalos, “beautiful,” and eidos, “form.”
Turn the tube, faintly hear the sound of the sea within.
We checked into the Dublin House motel, ended up staying three days. The woman at the rock shop down the street showed us several sample agates in a basket, whetting my appetite.
Below the highway, in the placid Yachats River channel, a giant log was beached like a whale, saplings and long grass spouting from its weathered back.
At low tide, we walked across the sand to dip our hands into the brackish water and found evidence that a forest had once lined the stream: the octopoid roots of trees knocked over by a rising sea, a sudden tidal wave, or a more recent wave of settlers.
Remnants, excavated by the same winter storms that bring agates to light.
At first my love hunted gamely with me. But she had no luck and, before long, gave up and sat down on a stump. She might tell it differently.
There, at her feet, she found an orange agate—I could hardly believe it—and, satisfied, went off to paint the landscape for which she has infinite patience.
My nature is to keep searching.
It’s believed that agate separates into bands because of electrical charges and slight chemical variations. Often these strata include mineral impurities of vivid color, iron oxides especially, blues and reds.
When cut or polished, an agate’s surface has striations that resemble tree rings, as if one could count back the years to see when drought occurred and civilizations fell.
Petrified wood is also agatized, each fibrous cell replaced by silica. In my bowl are several old-growth stones, which are common along the Oregon coast. Each is a piece of tanbark from a lost playground.
Inside the chamber of a developing agate, gravity sometimes pulls the chalcedony to the floor, forming a pool of horizontal layers called “onyx,” which means “fingernail.”
Expose these glassy interiors, and one can see entire landscapes: Anvilhead clouds hanging over desert buttes. Whitecaps to the horizon.
Turning my index finger in the window’s light, the fine keratinous ridges of my fingernail remind me of breakers as seen from a headland.
Pliny the Elder also wrote at length of agate in his Natural History, describing many varieties: “The Indian agate . . . on them you will find represented rivers, woods, and farm horses; and one can see in them coaches, small chariots, and horse litters and in addition the fittings and trappings of horses. . . . Those found in Thrace and near the mountain Oeta, upon Mount Parnassus, on the isle of Lesbos and in Messene, have the image of flowers, such as grow in the highways and paths in the fields.”
I’m new at agate-gazing, but so far haven’t encountered any equines.
As we drove along the Oregon coast, we were absorbed by the bands of the landscape: The blue and white waves. The slick and dry stretches of sand. The quiet back pools reflecting the fast clouds off the Pacific.
Swaths of tidal marsh. Bluffs and chasms. The pavement the thinnest of lines.
Wreathes of beach cobble, too many stones to fathom. Mountains.
Holding this one, I remember how islands rose out of the sea, and how lava flowed into the ocean in a hissing swirl of steam, leaving hills of lumpish pillow basalt.
How the Juan de Fuca plate offshore collided with the North American plate, lifting the entire smoldering mass between sixty-six million and thirty-six million years ago, forming the Coast Range and this gorgeous drive.
This layer of continent is now disappearing: Sea stacks stand as pillars to a former coastline, and the basalt of the shore is riddled with coves and inlets that funnel waves furiously into blowholes, as if in homage to a volcanic past and the migrating gray whales.
Cruelly, the coast dumps its agates directly in the sea. But I have salvaged a few.
Whenever I’m distracted, one of these agates tends to find its way into my hands, turning over, and over, as if in an eddy. It seems to look into me.
Here I hold an opaque blue agate, one of my best. Slightly wider than my thumb, but shorter, it has what seems a wart on its pale bottom. That, or the dark eye of a hurricane.
Many agates do have “eyes.” These are thought to form when stalactites or burls of chalcedony, hanging from the rind of an unfinished agate, are enveloped by more crystallization. When the agate is eventually worn or cut, spots stare out.
The other side of this blue stone has a groove that reminds me of a narrow lake surrounded by elevated terraces, or a reservoir with bathtub rings along its tiny shoreline.
How I found this blue agate I can no longer quite recall. The minute I did, my mind filled with excitement and scattered. I wanted to show her this keepsake up on the bluff.
But I think I was on my knees, and by writing this line, I make it so.
It’s true that people become hesitant to collect after childhood for
fear of being seen as simpleminded or self-indulgent. Unproductive.
To engage with rocks is a pretty silly business.
Annie Dillard tells of a man on the Washington coast who, several times each day, took down a beach cobble with a white band (“a wishing stone”) from a shelf to teach it to talk. But she views it charitably. “I assume,” she writes, “that like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. I wish him well.”
Transparent and hollow: a state of mind quite like what’s required to find a beach agate, though luck is also involved. Probably that man could have used some luck as well.
My professional opinion is that the mere discovery of a stone gives it voice.
Such as that voice is. As Dillard argues, “Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”
Yet the sound of stones being tumbled by the waves is remarkable. It is a thousand knuckles rapping softly at a door.
Monstrous in heavy surf.
“Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand, / Begin, and cease, and then again begin . . .”