Tides and Trails

Yesterday I saw spawning salmon skittering through the shallows of a creek. I watched a spent fish tumble downstream, its decomposing body twirling in the current. Then, while climbing a ravine, I came across a salmon carcass on a ledge of green moss. The fish had been gnawed by woodland creatures. Ocean nutrients stored in this salmon's body are now cycling through the forest, and a new generation of fish is encased in eggs amid the gravels of the stream. When the salmon fry

Wild salmon are so embattled right now I can't bring myself to fish for them. After I moved to the coast I put my fly-rod in storage. When the salmon are running, I run forest trails, trying to catch sight of wild fish torpedoing through pools and slithering across gravel bars. When a trail I'm running ends, I bushwack and slog upstream, tracing a small segment of a salmon's remarkable journey that spans hundreds, or even thousands, of miles. A few days ago, a coho as long as

My wife, Amy, texted me a picture of a mangled creature she came across when she was running at dawn on Crescent Beach. It looked like an animal about four feet long that had been chomped in half. This grisly scene was near Indian Beach, site of a shark attack on a surfer a few weeks earlier. When I saw the photo, I ran to Crescent Beach to try to figure out what had happened to the carcass. I took the same trail that Amy and I had been running a few weeks ago when we heard s

I have yet to find orange cup coral in my backyard tidelands. I’ve wanted to see this colorful coral of the cold Pacific ever since I moved to the Oregon Coast. Common in some rocky intertidal areas, this species hasn’t revealed itself in my tidepool wanderings. Snails and plumose anemones have quickened my pulse while I was hunting orange cup coral. When I stumbled toward patches of attention-grabbing color, I realized these orange creatures weren’t the corals I was looking

When I go tidepooling I expect to see anemones and crabs, starfish and sculpins. I hope to spot a nudibranch species that’s new to me, maybe an octopus or some creature from the deep stranded in a shallow pool. A few nights ago, while I was squinting downward into dark water, a strange being descended from above. To say it scared me half to death isn’t accurate—I was more than halfway to a heart attack. * * * While running on a dark beach before the moon rose, I had lions on