The Sublime

Yesterday Chris and I drove to the coast to watch the arrival of the big storm that is drenching most of the Pacific Northwest. We drove to Seaside and then up the coast to Astoria before coming back home to Portland.

We stopped at this state park just north of Seaside. There was a look out platform erected by a breakwater at one of the viewing areas. As soon as we got out of the truck the wind was whipping our clothes and hair flat against our bodies. We couldn't see the ocean from the parking lot, but we could see huge clouds of spray flying up above the breakwater rocks and hear the crash of the waves as they exploded upward. We climbed the wooden tower to a flat platform and from there we could see the full scale of the roiling ocean before us. The rain had stopped for the moment and the sun was making one of its rare appearances that day. Everything was gold and silver. The ocean seemed to go on forever, an overwhelming, angry mass in constant motion, massive waves breaking one over the other before meeting their end on the jagged black rocks, their spray hitting our faces and making our clothes damp and salty.

It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. When I was in college I studied the romantics - they wrote, especially Percy Shelley, about this concept of the sublime. Essentially the sublime was an aspect of nature that was so incredibly overwhelming that it stunned the senses, literally left humans feeling powerless in its presence, immobilized by the sheer awesomeness of the natural world...a cliff, a mountain, caves or forests, anything that left you feeling so incredibly small in the face of something so massively powerful and encompassing.

Yesterday, I saw the sublime in that ocean. I had always understood the concept in the abstract sense, but standing on that lookout yesterday staring into the golden, frothing depths of the Pacific Ocean, I felt the sublime. I felt it as we descended the platform listening to the ocean's roar, making our way across the sandy parking lot and back to the safety and warmth of our car. It stayed with me all the way home and still sits in my chest, gently rolling in and out of my consciousness.

I could have stood on that platform forever. I'm still there in my mind, watching the waves come in, whitecaps crashing, sun shining in the ocean's mist and on the broken rocks, everything golden and sparkling, the sheer power of the water and the earth forever burned in my memory.