That was very nice. How about some pix?

Gould 0738 wrote:

One of the finer places we visited during our abbvreviated cruise:

Spencer Spit


The oldest drift has smoldered in the invisible slow-fire of radiant summer
sunlight. The solar energy that built the living wood reduces the dead. Icy
claws of dark winter rains have removed rust red and yellow chunks. After a few
seasons, the old logs are softened underfoot, like a luxurious pad beneath a
green and grass-gold carpet. Pioneer stalks and stems sense nourishment here.
They spring from cracks and creases in the bleached wood bones and reach for
the light- until they are eaten by rabbits.

Rabbits. There are hundreds of rabbits. Could there be thousands? They are dry
thatch brown, driftwood gray, and mottled hues of black, red, and tan. In
places, rabbit scat blankets the ground like uniform, coal black peas scattered
from a busted crate. They are crazy in the underbrush and among the tidal
flotsam, browsing endlessly on tender, emerald shoots and roots. The survivors
keep a cautious distance and blend effectively into the ground. They are all
betrayed by beaming signal flashes of white posteriors as they lope from
feeding to feeding across the open ground. Keen-eyed owls, hawks, and eagles
dive on the white flickers to snatch an evening meal. The energy that descended
from the sun, (to be absorbed by the grasses and consumed by the rabbits), is
carried heavenward again by birds.

Birds. Birds abound in the vast salt marsh formed where Lopez Island is
creeping inexorably toward its neighbor, (Frost), with the gravelly tentacle of
Spencer Spit.
Signs prohibit human incursion into the heart of the marsh. Gulls, herons,
ducks, geese, and sandpipers gather to feast on sea creatures served up by the
wash of the highest tides.
Pickleweed, goose tongue, arrow grass, gumweed, stellaria and salt wort
proliferate here.
The mud has a dark, impregnated, smell- like hot peat moss or an ancient duck
pond.
Crusted and dry above the mean high tide line, the mud is copper and bronze,
slate and yellow: scabs atop a fertile ooze teeming with life.

Life. Spencer Spit is defined by life. It is forming, growing, reproducing,
dying, and decaying simultaneously and has, therefore, no subjective awareness
of time. Exempt from time, life can truly be said to be eternal on the spit. On
the south side beach, great harrow rows of eel grass and seaweed toast to crisp
and salty hay on a late summer afternoon. The vacant shells of ten thousand
clams are crushed by waves and footfall to blend and bind the agates, the
quartz, the granite, and the sandstone into a low-sloped bastion that will
surrender to, yet endure the tides. Naked skeletons of wicked winter's windfall
victims are tossed ashore beyond any high tide lines discernable on a laconic,
September day. The forest browns surrender to whites and the whites before long
to silver. Greens will morph to grays among the drift.

Drift. The oldest drift has smoldered in the invisible slow-fire…

We put in at Spencer Spit State Park, off the east shore of Lopez Island, in
mid-September. Past Labor Day, we had no difficulty securing one about two
dozen mooring buoys sited on the north and south sides of the spit. The buoys
here could easily be full during peak season, but there is ample room for
prudent anchoring. Once secured to a buoy, our GPS read 48.32.37N and
122.51.35W.

We rowed ashore. The vivid grandeur of the natural environment is evident well
out into the bay. It would seem almost criminal to fire up a noisy outboard
motor.

Washington State Parks acquired Spencer Spit and the adjacent uplands in 1981.
Theodore Spencer was the original homesteader on the site, and he built a log
cabin on the beach in 1917. The original cabin fell to the onslaught of the
elements, but was rebuilt on the original site and to original specifications
in 1978. Like Spencer's original cabin, the 1978 recreation was built entirely
with logs and timbers scavenged from the tide piles on the beach.

A visit to Spencer Spit allows an insight into an unspoiled time now vanished
from the San Juans. Swinging around the State Park mooring buoys, a boater
views the steep, bald, backside of Frost Island, the barren mound of Flower,
and relatively unpopulated shorelines of Lopez, Blakely, and Decatur. There are
few homes in sight, and no resorts.
Spencer Spit commemorates the pre-human eons in the islands, with little
evidence of civilized "improvements" on the beach except Spencer's log cabin
and the temporary driftwood forts erected by energetic young boys.

We hiked around the park, enthralled with an environment so fecund with
vitality.
When we eventually circled around to where we had beached the Zodiac, Jan
wandered a bit farther down the beach to contemplate the myriad forms and
colors of the gravel gems. I sat on the starboard tube and examined the
intricate dramas in a square foot of sand between my boat shoes.

Scores of sand fleas cavorted between the grains, leaping to altitudes 100
times their own height. Other, mysterious, insects burrowed just beneath the
grit and granite, while buzzing, monstrous, carnivorous yellow jackets carried
away their unlucky or unwary insect prey. Just then, a tiny spider, (no larger
than a pinpoint and red as a neon rose), scrambled daringly across the vast,
exposed, expanse of a single pebble and disappeared safely beneath another. The
red speck of a spider would not, on this day, become a yellow jacket feast.

I gathered a few beach pebbles in my hand. To that small red spider, one
billionth as large as I, do such pebbles seem a billion times as large? Are
they the boulders, the hills, the mountains, and the islands of his
crimson-backed world? Such are the questions one can ponder on Spencer Spit.

Next time in the San Juans, set aside a day to spend a thousand years on
Spencer Spit.