evening on the Olympic Peninsula

Ruby Beach, Washington

Ruby Beach

If you’re feeling blue – try painting yourself a different color 💙🩵

Ruby Beach

Washington

All The Time In The World

Hasselblad 500c/m

Kodak Ektar 100iso

ruby beach, wa

Going back to Ruby Beach - Olympic National Park

Various parts of Ruby Beach, Olympic peninsula, Washington.

©️KevinjDixon

By Ken James: This day on Ruby Beach was the gift that keeps giving. Ken keeps going back into his photo catalog and finding photos from this day that are worth sharing. The weird thing is he wasn't even that excited about them and really didn't dive into them for a couple months after.

📸 @Openshutter21

ruby beach, wa

Sherrylephotography. May 2022

Ruby Beach Washington USA

Framed in my mind

Stepping stones of time

I'll never leave you behind

RUBY BEACH II - 101 HIGHWAY- WA STATE

Ruby Beach

In response to Eve Tuck's essay "What Is Your Theory of Change These Days?" (link here)

November afternoon, warm sun slanting through wind-sheared Douglas-fir, pungent seaweed and cedar aloft on salty breeze. I watch gray fog on the far horizon, somewhere out over the continental shelf, stretching as far north and south as I can see. The wind plays with the fog. It billows this way and that, like bellows on a fire, like inhalations and exhalations. Chatter of Steller’s jays and human children mingles with crash of waves twice my height, too tall to bear their own weight. The beach collects driftwood. Elderly trees felled and eroded then returned to the land, bark and cork stripped, sensitive innards salinated, outer layers gray with sunburn.

I have been here before.

March 2020. My girlfriend Sammy and I are removed from student housing to return to our “permanent homes.” We have nowhere else to go, nowhere safe; Juneau is our permanent home. Our car barely survives the trek down the Alaska Highway. We are forced into my parents’ house in rural Colorado. It stands in the middle of a recently razed forest. They hope prairie fire will prove easier to fight than forest fire in the increasingly dry, combustible summers. My body is rounding out and reorganizing from the effects of potent estradiol and antiandrogens; I am just beginning to understand that male and cis privilege were never mine. My parents’ fear of my new body fuels hot and sudden fights. My parents are more dangerous than the virus.

We escape with little more than a backpack each and a car on its last legs. We turn our eyes northwest, as near to Juneau as we can get, Bellingham, Washington, searching for jobs and housing at a time when the world is shut down. We occupy ourselves with day trips as our funds dwindle. Even the entrance gates to Ruby Beach are closed. We park on the shoulder of the 101 and climb over them. The tide is out, and crows play in wind currents above the muddy beach. It is cloudy, the ocean a deep slate color, darker even than the driftwood that dwells on the beach. Strong winds threaten to topple older trees into the sea. Here, in old growth forest, taller trees protect younger, shorter ones. When trees do fall, they become nurse logs. Saplings grow from centuries-old nutrients held in xylem and phloem. In deforested or reforested areas, entire hectares account for just one generation of trees and a single Pacific storm can blow over the whole forest. The wind here is constant, a limiting factor, a factor of death and regrowth.

The head gasket blows; we sell the car for $400. We spend a month saving for a U-haul and a security deposit to a shitty studio on the eighth floor of the tallest building for 900 miles around. But it’s in Juneau. So we return.

September 2021. My parents convince Sammy and I we can get better jobs Down South than in Juneau, where the ecotourism industry is still closed for the pandemic. It is soon obvious that they have invited us not out of goodwill, but out of spite, for the lack of control they have over our lives. They try to regain it, keeping us close in this too-familiar small town.

Jobs here are slim. The closest work we can find is twenty miles away; we spend the last of our savings on a down payment for a new-to-us car. We fight with my parents as much as we work. Wildfires burn in the Front Range, pines and willows scorched, leaving the landscape ripe for fertilization. Lodgepole pines and wildflowers germinate in the temporary heat. Still, scientists and locals call it “unnatural,” “unprecedented.” Smoke chokes prairies and reddens sunsets. Savings replenish until, one day, our bed and the roof over our heads are removed. As the rest of the world convinces itself it’s “going back to normal,” we realize that normal is not static. Unlike Juneau, it is not something to which one can ever return.

We work the gig economy south, following warmth, spending months driving through unfamiliar cities, delivering groceries and fast food to mansions and high-rises, sleeping in stiff sedan seats. I lapse on my medication, an unecessary expense in this time. I am faced with the abandonment of my parents, the threat of homelessness, the mental instability of forced detransition. Eight months I will go without it, body hair and anger sprouting where they hadn’t before. Finally, we have enough to buy a ferry ticket out of Bellingham. We follow the Mexican border west, then the Pacific Ocean north.

The first day of the new year. Snowclouds vacate the sky. Everything is fresh, as if reconstructed overnight. Waves are calm, lapping the snow on Ruby Beach, melting it as the tide comes in. I feel worn, hollow, surprised I am not as gray and eroded as the dead cedar and spruce in front of me. Each gnarled tree is longer than a bus. I cannot imagine the length of time they spent at sea, the process of erosion they underwent. I cannot imagine the splash of one of these trees into the sea after it succumbs to centuries of constant, cold wind. We continue northward, towards Juneau.

November 2023. Ocean wind is quiet and soft on my face. Sammy and I are in another Washington interlude, another time spent Down South and waiting for return to Juneau. For the first time, however, we have savings, a one-bedroom. For the first time, it is of our own accord that we have left. Seattle promises career advancements, a way to find stability, a way not to tumble over in the Juneau winds, blowing stronger in recent years. We sit together on the remains of a Sitka spruce, at least four feet in diameter, smooth and gray. We watch the waves collapse on themselves, watch the fog roll in.

Ruby Beach, WA

ruby beach, wa

Hi I’m alive 👋