Travels With Nadia
We are on the sand dunes of Oregon doing a little West Coast swing. I have my idea of what a coast looks like. But you look out from the coast here, you see as far as humanly possible until the planet curves over, and the horizon line created has water on one side and sky on the other. No mountains. The coast I’m used to feels like a facsimile. And the scale of the waves and the horizon’s distance is so much larger than at home that it looks like everything is moving in slow motion. It’s so slow that the bright strip of ocean right under the sun looks like a swift glacier. Or a slow wave.
Nadia bought some porcupine quill earrings from a guy in a shack. His wife makes the jewelry from the materials he gathers. As a part time carpenter, he says he can make anything he’s told to make. But she creates. She can drill a hole into a beach pebble quicker than he could imagine. He considers this a feat of creativity. I think I get that. He’s new to Oregon. Bought a house after looking at a picture of it. His old life was that of a ranch hand in the eastern Sierras. Freeze in the winter and scorch in the summer. Then for reasons he couldn’t fully articulate, he went from ranching 6000 feet up a mountain to sea level selling jewelry out of a wooden shack. The ocean has been nothing but good for his body and brain and heart and he often repeats that idea quietly. Maybe this quiet repetition is his version of “who knew?”
A chunk of conversation while looking over some teas:
Nadia – … Oregon Marionberry tea. Is Marionberry from Oregon?
Jae-Ho – I think it’s from Washington DC.
Turns out Marion Barry is not a household name. At a restaurant in Washington state a few years ago, the waiter recommended the Marionberry pie. I giggled. Turns out he had never heard of Marion Barry and when I informed him of the Marion Barry story, he and other staff Wikipedia-ed him. Sounded made up, I guess.
This reminded me of another exchange we recently had when Nadia asked me about some purple Silly Putty I have:
Nadia – Where is the purple one from?
Jae-Ho – Minneapolis.
Jae-Ho
