How is it that mist becomes an archway over Coos Bay? How is it that worries mist away here almost within view of Charleston and the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology? As if I could fly under the mistbow on kingfisher wings, swift and low to the unfurrowed brow of salty waters. Spreading my arms wide like a double-crested cormorant in sunrise salutation, I breathe in the renewing, decaying, and enriching life of the intertidal.
The sound of the sea is a slight lapping of tongues upon barnacled rocks. A distant foghorn mingles with sea birds. At my feet, fossil scallop shells protrude from sandstone, messengers of the Miocene era, some 10 million years ago. I mingle with the past as an ephemeral feather rests on seaweed. The feather pools diamond droplets on a filagree of interlocking barbs and barbules. I am reminded that birds are dinosaurs and feathers changed the course of evolution.
The mistbow lingers in the gradation of a single day. I like the ambiguity. Now, the rising sun casts her westward gaze upon certain barnacle reefs and shadows others. I follow where I’m directed to look as a crow squawks over my left shoulder from a Sitka spruce. A belted kingfisher trills notes in triple time from the edge of bay and stone.
Drop down. Rock back on my heels. Touch barnacles. Read the braille. Trace the air sacs of a rockweed–Fucus ditrichus. Think of the one I drew in my Coastal Biology Journal in 1980, which I have brought with me. All those words penned by my young fingers after studying the swollen terminal branches as sites of egg and sperm production… I wrote of their “great profusion in the midlittoral zone” and noted “the air-filled bladders bring the thick, moderately drought resistant blades closer to the light.”
Time shifts backward to the best semester of my entire education at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology under the tutelage of director Jerry (Paul) Rudy who will turn 90 this month. Visiting him in December of 2021 at his home on the California coast, I was struck by his prodigious knowledge, twinkling inventiveness, spry step, and the prevailing winds of his sails that still fill mine with that Rachel Carson “sense of wonder:”
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years … the alienation from the sources of our strength.” ― Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
Jerry Rudy shows me his ingenious leaf waterwheel invention, December of 2021.
OIMB Director Jerry Rudy in 1980–beach ecology transect.
For Jerry’s undergraduate class in Coastal Biology, I filled 159 pages of a hardback journal with handwritten entries, charts, illustrations, pasted photos, and pressed seaweed and dune plants. Over that summer, Jerry introduced us to the open ocean, rocky coast, beaches and dunes, and estuaries. He took us into the field for hours at a time–with his long stride and uplifting expectations. I felt so alive, so empowered, and curious curious curious. Often, I lingered long into the night in the laboratory staring through a microscope, discovering I could actually draw after all with enough attentiveness to detail and practice. I immersed like never before, a prelude to my sojourn following belted kingfishers far away on Rattlesnake Creek in Montana that would lead to my book, Halcyon Journey, In Search of the Belted Kingfisher.
Forty-three years after the Coastal Biology class, I linger at a tidepool not much bigger than a kitchen sink near the tip of a jutting mini-peninsula into the bay. Aggregating anemones flex their tentacles. Striped shore crabs shuffle sideways out from under stone ledges. Four sculpins remind me of tadpoles, but skilled in the ways of disguise.
I met one other woman strolling by. Her shoulder-length hair was a silvery match for the mistbow we observed together. She told me she wondered if her vision had become temporarily black and white. What is a rainbow without shimmering colors of red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, and violet?
Maybe this is the mistbow that whisks us back in time…a portal without any distraction of colors? Overhead, a western gull rows the river of sky. When I look up, I see the waning half-moon I would have missed. Birds have that way of perspective shift. I return again to the tidepool. Notice waving crab claws, limpets clamped tight to rock, and the spiraled shell of a turban snail. Stay. One little pool. One eye opening to another era when I was 20 and transformed by the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology and Jerry Rudy. Long live a sense of wonder.
#
Note: I was SO transformed that I had the great gift of returning to OIMB to serve as Jerry’s teaching assistant in the summer of 1982. (I’ll add a photo of the group from that year at the end).
A mistbow is also called a fogbow–like a rainbow but with smaller droplets.What I wrote in a section of the journal in 1980 (then under Deborah Richie).
