Falling in Love with the Ocean
Four is awfully young to fall in love, but that's when I did. The year I was four my parents rented a cabin at Kayak Point on the part of Puget Sound called Port Susan. The resort had docks and boats and endless beach to play on, logs and rocks and fish and crabs and seaweed, and most of all, salty water.
My older brother, Art, and I would explore tide pools, turning over rocks to find little crabs and other sea creatures. Logs became forts and boats, as we played for hours in and out of the water. Late afternoons, in bathing suits, rubber beach shoes, and towels, we marched to the resort store, each clutching a nickel for candy or an ice cream bar.
After supper, dressed warmly in coveralls and jackets, we sat with our parents and others around a beach campfire roasting marshmallows as waves lapped the shore. We sang old songs our parents taught us, "She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain," "There Is a Tavern in the Town," and "Ate a Peanut." It was heaven and I fell in love with salt water.
As I grew, I learned to fish, dig clams and catch crabs. I remember sitting in a rowboat with the salmon running so thick that my Dad and uncle threw out hand lines with treble hooks and weights, snagged fish, and hauled them in.
One summer we stayed in a cabin on the Tulalip Reservation on Puget Sound. We watched tribal members fish with beach seine nets. On a day with a very low tide, one young man rolled up his rubber apron, tied it with its strings, making a crude football. Art and I, barefoot on the wet sand, joined in the game. Going out of bounds meant getting very wet!
God knows that the first people and places we love are the ones closest to us. So at first it's our parents, our families and the place we know as home. Then, having learned to love, we mature as new people and places find places in our hearts. If we stop expanding the circle of our love, we stop growing.
God wants our love to increase until we see each person we meet is a child of God, deserving our love. That's a tall order and so, knowing we have to start small, God gives us a few people in a certain place to be our first loves. And we never forget them or love them less, no matter how many more people and places come into our hearts.
Having lived all over the west I've come to love the beauty of the great fortress mountains of the Rockies, the endless, grass- covered prairies, and immense, ever-changing sky of Montana, Colorado and the Dakotas. Each was truly my home when I lived there. Each tugs at my heart now in a distinct way.
But the first place I called home, this place where inland sea and mountain and forest create such a singular environment, this place always calls me back. I am still in love with salt water.