The Woods Distract
The background: Evergreen is nestled in acres and acres of temperate rain forest. We have trails. We have a beach. There are creatures at the beach.
Yesterday I had a meeting scheduled from 4-5pm. An important meeting, though it wouldn't particularly suffer from my absence. Still, an obligation all the same. It was at the meeting before this one (Evergreen is also nestled in acres and acres of meetings, especially on Wednesdays) that I could feel myself gravitating, not toward the seminar room where my next meeting was scheduled, but to the beach. I began to negotiate with myself and soon enough, I had convinced myself of the virtues of walking through the woods, away from my commitments and into that part of Evergreen where nature vanquishes concrete.
I recruited a friend to escape Wednesday meeting hours with me. At the beach, we walked across the sand, pausing periodically to watch the seagulls drop crustaceans onto the ground to break their shells. The sand is usually covered with the vestiges of seagull meals--myriad exoskeletons and fragrant (that is, rotting) crab meat. The occasional dead jellyfish, bright pink and leaking purple, washes up to brighten up the otherwise gray landscape. The beach is also where the geoducks live, and in the right season, you can see the thousands of tiny holes they create in the sand with their jet propulsions. We saw no geoducks yesterday, but we did find the most bizarre part of a creature I've ever seen. I spotted a row of sharp, curved teeth on the ground, attached to what looked like a piece of beach wood. That's honestly as far as we could get in speculating...a row of teeth melded onto a piece of wood.
We extracted our find from tangles of seaweed and sand fleas. Now, we rely on the trusty scientists in the Lab building to tell us exactly what we found--hopefully it's exciting enough to fully justify playing hooky.
Comments
Who's the cool friend?
Posted by: Otis Sherman | March 14, 2008 06:56 PM