The Seeing of Grand Things

At the Oregon coast, for the benefit of his companion, a man points out to sea. Following the line of his arm, I look as well.

For a moment, nothing. And then. A plume of water.

I know what that means, a whale! 

I slip off the rock where I’d seated myself, step over to where my friends are combing for beach treasures, and share the news.

We all gaze out to sea. 

There it is again. Close enough to see the rounded shape of its great back when it spins.

It doesn’t breach, leading me to think it’s not a humpback whale (as if I know soooo much about whales). But it plays its way, spouting and turning, down the length of the coastline.

Thrilled to the core of my being, I tell my friends I’m off to follow the whale and (completely not hearing my friend say she has a pair of binoculars in the car) leave them to do what they want to do and go alone with springing step along the pathway. 

Before too long, it’s evident there’s more than one.

As I move along, I mark at least four of them. Well, at any rate, the plumes of water they shoot and the dark curves of their turning bodies. I’m as giddy as a child, wanting to tell everyone I pass to look out and see the whales for themselves.  

It is spectacular every single time the white bursts of water shoot up.

Later, I find out that about 200 gray whales stay in residence off the Oregon coast from around June to October rather than follow the migration patterns up toward Alaska as their fellow whales do.

A song from an album my family listened to when I was a child comes to mind. I sing it to myself as I walk. The words say: They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters. These see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.

Indeed, the deep has many wonders. 

As does the world. And what a thing it is to be in the presence of the grand, the great, the big, and the mysterious.

A week or so later, when I’m the only friend left from the birthday celebration group, my birthday friend and I go off on a summer adventure to Northern California. She’d asked me what I would like to see while I was in the Pacific Northwest. I’d said the redwoods, not quite expecting her to fulfill my wish. 

But she does. And so we drive down the Oregon coast, stopping off in Port Orford to have our lunch. We slide down a dune and find a spot as much out of the wind as we can (which is not that much and we both end up pelted by and coated with sand).

Beyond the shoreline, rising up out of the water, are great rock formations. With them in view, I’m reminded of the cliffs of the Faroe Islands and the rock formations I saw there. For shapes, though not exactly, though not identically, repeat across the world.

Some days later, flying over Nevada with its configurations of desert, mountains, and the occasional body of water, I think of the fractal patterns of nature. Shorelines, forests, rivers, clouds, ice crystals, ferns. Long ago, sometime in my childhood, my dad introduced me to fractals. Playing off my name, he would call me Mandelbrot (after Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who pioneered the work of fractal geometry, and his Mandelbrot Set) and that naming was something that was—in a family with a lot of children—my own. Well, my dad’s and mine. Something we shared. Beyond that, unlike my dad, appreciating the beauty of fractals is about as mathematical as I get.

We camp at a place called Panther Flats. 

In the morning, we drive over to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. 

The road wends its way between the long-reaching trunks of tall trees. As we make our way under the cooling protection of the canopies, I think of the forests I’ve known—in Colorado, Vermont, Wyoming, Oregon, California, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, England, Scotland, Wales—each with their own feel and with my memories attached. I think of the forests I write about in my fictional works and of how, in life and my writing, I return so often to the trees.  

We park near the trailhead to the Grove of the Titans and walk the mile or so to the grove itself.

Find person in photo for size comparison

There’s a certain scent in certain forests; a deep fragrance wafting out from the pungent evergreens, the loamy perfume of decomposing organic matter mixing with the damp richness of the ground. The faint traces of other plants such as ferns and moss that linger in the moist air. That scent is here. I breathe it in.

The trees rise up unbelievably high. The trunks vary in size according to age or placement.

I read once how trees are, in fact, communal. How they do better when they are together, working as a great, living organism in concert with other great, living organisms such as fungi. How the trees will redirect water or nutrients to a needy tree to help it survive. How they can warn each other of dangers such as herbivorous insects or drought. 

I remember a tree my grandmother took child me and whichever siblings were with us to see. It was somewhere in the East Texas woods behind my grandparents’ house and was too big for all of us to reach our arms around. I often wonder about that tree. I wonder how big it actually was. If it is still there somewhere alive on that property. If so, will I ever find it? Would I recognize it?

The deeper in we go here, the larger the trees are. 

And then, there are the Titans themselves.

Majestic and old, they stretch up toward the sky as it to brush the tips of their great canopies against the far-away expanse of space itself. Give them enough time and they might. 

If we will leave them alone, continue to protect them, guard them, they might.

The next day, we drive the inland route back to Southern Oregon. Just after noon, we stop in Cave Junction to buy tickets for the Oregon Caves. Then we drive up the winding, narrow mountain road and, once at the top and checked in, join up with our tour group to go down into what our ranger guide calls a Solution cave. A solution cave being one in which the rock, perhaps limestone, was formed by the acidic touch of water. 

It's cooler in this cave than it was in the San Antonio Natural Bridge Caverns which I visited with my family in November, charmingly cold, in fact.

It’s because of that visit that I’m nearly not able to descend into these caves. For, apparently, there’s a fungus which could infect and kill the resident bats that can be transferred from cave to cave by a person’s clothing. Even washed. Even months or years later. 

With the help of my phone’s record of photos, I remember what I was wearing on that long ago day… except for the shoes. I can’t remember if I was wearing the same hiking shoes I’m wearing now. None of the photos show my feet.

As we drive up the mountain, thinking of the bats, I determine that if nothing can be done as a safeguard, I will wait outside while my friend takes the cave tour on her own. 

But, as good luck would have it, the cave staff have handy wipes that I use on my shoes to make them safe. And so we go in.

A salamander, glistening and sleek as a snake, rests in its place near the cave’s entrance. The ranger shines his light on it for us to see as we walk past. 

Stalagmites rise upward and stalactites hang down. Cave popcorn and the fragile looking draperies are only some of the cave’s formations to which the ranger draws our attention.  

For a moment, in one place, after warning us, the ranger turns off the lights. We stand in the dark. The very very dark. As we do, he bids us to try to see our hands. Blinking, I put mine up to my face, touch my fingers against my nose. But I can’t see a thing. What would it be like to sit in this deep darkness for an hour? For a day? 

We don’t have to find out.

Soon enough, the lights come back on and we make our way through the different caverns, careful not to touch the rock, not to harm the cave. 

I think of how during the visit to the San Antonio caverns I’d reiterated the rules to my five-year-old nephew and four-year-old niece as we entered, saying “Remember don’t touch.” And how my niece had looked at me and said with all seriousness and some indignation as if she thought I’d thought I’d caught her doing so, “I didn’t touch!”

At some point, a drop of water hits my head, a cave kiss it’s called. The ranger tells us cave kisses mean the cave is still growing. 

Growth and growing.

I think of the trees growing upward toward the light in the redwood forest. The rock formations growing water drop by water drop deep below the earth. The sea reaching for the shore and retreating, over and over again, moving around the rock formations that rise up above the surface of the water. 

I marvel at the tiny hairlike tendrils pushing through the layers and layers of rock which the ranger says are the end roots of some great tree far above us.

Here inside the cave—even though it’s not the sea—as the words of the song said, here, also, are the wonders of the deep. 

Fractal in their nature, too, I’m sure.