Is it enough to exist in this moment?

It is enough for now that you and I exist in this moment – Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Lately, I’d been quoting Marquez. At some moments with good reasons, other instances to help me through a sadness that fell upon a group of people I admired and loved.

Whenever I travel to the Pacific Northwest, as I step off the airplane, there’s always a tinge of my existence circling me. Random instances where I’ll detect the scent of coffee that permeated into the ceiling tiles and infamous carpeting of the airport. In the air is a sniff of salty spray that has absorbed the metal and clay of the jory soil after the winds have swept water in all forms east over the coastal mountains to land at my feet. As Mark and I disembark from the plane, my senses are heightened by these scents. Usually, I’ll say, “Smells like home.” Or “can’t you smell that air (as if there is only one air)?” The utterance reinforces the reasons why I’ll travel nine hours seated on stuffy planes and trudge through stale airports to land in a place where my heart beats in tune with that air.

This time, I kept my proverbial line to myself. Only hours later, Mark commented jokingly, “Can’t you smell that?” to which I replied, “I didn’t say it, because by now, you know.”

Later, I found out our son’s dog, Bandon, had this same sense. Whenever his owner’s car turns toward the ocean and the windows are rolled down or the air turned to “recirculate,” Bandon’s nose knows what I know.

It is enough for now that you and I exist in this moment.

*

Our son and his wife live in Oregon, along with our new grandchild, Harper. Only some of that is the true reason I am home here.

For me, the beginnings start with work. Work to make a new life, work it took to mourn the loss of that life, work to rebuild it, work to keep up relations back in the place where our bills are delivered. The work to touch my feet to the ground wherever our adult children live across the US. The work to write from a place where I am simply transcribing the words already written on the waves and wind, I’m only meant to capture them and set them down.

One day brought us the opportunity to take a sea life excursion. This too would be work, as I’m prone to sea sickness.

The plan was for the ship to depart from the local bay, navigate the jetty and the bar that one crosses to get to the ocean faring waters, and for passengers to hold on to the four points - two hands on rails, two feet on the ground. The adventure was headed by a maritime captain with 57 years of experience up and down the Pacific Coast, from Baja California to Alaska, as Captain Jim later informed us. But as the young marine biologist on board said, “Why leave Oregon when this passage of ocean holds the most diverse ecosystem” due to cold waters that brush up out here and constantly replenish themselves, feeding the animals and ourselves.

Why would anyone leave?

The day before, we’d already consumed pink scallops, butter clams, and oysters from Netarts Bay, that for as long as I lived close to Netarts Bay, I never imagined so many types of oysters available to me. All presented by an award winning chef-in-residence at Local Ocean seafood, Jacob Harth, who will show off local foods in a place all his own in BayOcean, the sight of a town lost of the sea. Bayocean is also where a wife and young son and parents said goodbye to their beloved along the lone stretch of sand by scattering ashes and knowing how each wave that washed up was his spirit nudging us through thick fog and thin rains, through the sunshine we’ve met on that stretch and the sunshine we’ve met when back home.

We’d eaten of local black cod, sourced straight off the docks, dipped in batter, at a local food truck. And later, learned to purchase whole fish and live Dungeness crab from those same docks.

Yet nothing prepared me for the part of the trip where our ship, the Discovery, went “over the bar.”

I did too.

*

I stand on deck of the stern. My legs shake as the boat plows out into an ocean I can only dream of swimming deeply in, of immersing myself in the Pacific like the fisherman around us in their shrimp trawlers and salmon haulers. I’ve developed a special kind of sea sickness that always been with me. More of a love sickness.

This day out, the swells have reached 6-8 feet at depths of 170-180 feet. Slick harbor porpoises make their presence known with little rounded nozzles. The common murres flutter over the sea like hummingbirds on land. I watch from the starboard side, where I could still see land to stabilize my sightline and my stomach. Gradually, I come to be one with the rise and fall of the ship, my knees adjust, my insides too. I greedily join the climb and plunge of the sea. The relentless pushing forward and upward, and pulling back and down, that symbolize all stages of our lives.

So many nights I stood on land and imagined fishing boats that waved their lights toward me, toward them, toward their way of life. In those darknesses, I watched stars shoot up over the water into formation, getting me high on the their kind of drug.

I am smitten. There is a wildness to letting go of all on land. To exist only in this moment.

*

In the end, there was only a tinge of sea sickness that passed quickly from brain to body. Thankfully, I was sufficiently hydrated, (except we had eaten that fried black cod and fries before loading), and stayed on deck in the fresh air the entire time. For two hours, feet planted firmly on the ship’s deck, the marine biologist shared stories of a gray whale pod of 200 that broke away from their peers that migrate north and south in the spring and winter up to Alaska, and down to Baja, about the Stellar sea lions whose females stay down in sunny California (can you blame them?) while the males make their home here, and the dungeness crab female, always released when caught, whose abdomen contains over 2.5 millions eggs.

The Oregon Coast contains multitudes when it comes to solitary marine animals, like the Northern elephant seal, giant green anemones, the giant Pacific octopus, and transient Orcas (killer whales). And harbor porpoises who remain close to shore and in river estuaries and bays. Even along the intertidal zones, the coral appears solitary in the collective. For all, they take the approach, it is enough for now that you and I exist in this moment.

For the first time in a week’s worth of morning walks on the Oregon shore, the wind knocks at our noses, the fog rolls through the vales of a hiking peak called God’s Thumb, like steaming pouring forth from the mouth of the mountain gods. Walking side by side with my husband, the wind plasters our thoughts to ourselves. The fog blots out other walkers or the occasional overnight camper.

This moment of existence in solitary is enough.

Summer is halfway over. Is that possible? I’d better get busy with enjoying the rest of it. In the interim, below are my programs coming up at the end of summer and into fall.

July 28 - Caring for the Caregiver Writing Experience

Virtual, FREE. REGISTER. Contact Kara Pierson Harper. Phone: (513) 244-5494. Email: kpierson@muchmorethanameal.org.

September 1 - West Virginia Italian American Festival, 5:30 p.m. Clarksburg Public Library. Details coming soon.

Oct 15 & Oct 29 - LitCleveland - Finding Memoir in Food. Sign up for LitCleveland, or return here for details.

October 21 - Lloyd Library and Museum in partnership with Fotofocus, Presentation - Chestnuts: The New Comeback Kids. More details to follow.

November 14 - Mark your calendars. Books by the Banks presented by the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is back! Visit the website for more details.