Gratitude
Visiting Our Local Ocean (and Returning Home)
Thoughts on a vacation to Long Beach, Washington
Where I live, just north of Seattle, it’s a short drive (maybe five minutes) to a saltwater beach, but our beach is quite different than an ocean beach. For starters, we can see land on the other side of the water, and the waves are less intense.
Our Puget Sound is part of the Salish Sea and ultimately connects to the Pacific Ocean, but we have just one mile of shoreline in my suburb. In Long Beach, Washington, where I just went on vacation, there are over 25 miles of ocean beach if you include the whole Long Beach peninsula.
Not to go all geography lesson on you, but the Long Beach peninsula is a thin strip of land located in the most southwest corner of Washington state. When you’re in Long Beach, the expanse of the Pacific Ocean is to your west, and Willapa Bay is to your east.
The drive there from the Seattle area is a pretty one: follow a tree-lined highway over and around the marshlands of the bay to get out to the coast. The peninsula itself is a collection of little towns, and Long Beach is the most popular one. It’s overtly touristy and full of gift shops and fish & chips restaurants. It has stuff like a kite museum and a cranberry museum (Ocean Spray gets a lot of their cranberries from farms along the bay side of the peninsula).
We visited the state park named Cape Disappointment, located at the confluence of the Pacific Ocean and the Columbia River. Its name comes from a sea captain who couldn’t find the entrance to the river at first. The park has two lighthouses, and you can read about lots of shipwrecks. It’s also on the Lewis & Clark trail.
Oh, and Long Beach is home to what used to be the world’s largest frying pan, before the pan’s status got usurped by some other up-and-coming place on the map.
I felt so grateful that my girlfriend and I had the time and resources to take a short vacation, and I also found myself appreciating life in my own hometown, in a home that doesn’t have a view of Puget Sound or anything fancy but is close to the people I love. I’m grateful to feel comfortable here, rather than out of place or champing at the bit to move.
My dad’s mom would always go on about her love for our town. The chamber of commerce came up with the slogan, “It’s an Edmonds kind of day,” and when I was a kid, I’d see it all over on bumper stickers and mugs and t-shirts.
They designed a special logo, too, with the slogan blending into an image of the shoreline and the ferry that comes and goes from the terminal at the beach. I don’t see the slogan as often anymore (it’s actually kind of a treat when I do see it), but I think a lot about how my grandma totally agreed with that marketing campaign.
I spent a long time feeling quietly at odds with my grandma (she’d said a lot of homophobic stuff, and I chose not to come out to her), but in some ways, I connect deeply to her homebody self. She truly loved things like choosing marigolds to plant in her yard, and walking slowly through the grocery store with her full-page list written in careful longhand.
The older I get, the more I embrace who I am and who and where I come from rather than trying to fight against it. I change and grow, and meanwhile, I’m always going to look like my dad and smile to watch the ferry coming in like my grandma did.
Luckily, there’s plenty of poetry in the contrasts of life — and life can bring me just as much pleasure in returning home as I can find when I take a vacation from it.
Nancy Blackman’s story about gratitude for her travels and some of the natural and human-built wonders of our world helped inspire what I wrote here. Thanks, Nancy!
For more reflections on gratitude, I invite you to read my story about the ongoing process of understanding and practicing self-love.