Serpentine Bluffs

Between woods and water lies a realm inhabited by resilient creatures. Vagabonds, outcasts, and the free-spirited call this thin strip of land home. We stand and listen as our instructor — Jazmen, though I prefer botanist extraordinaire, or one who has survived many bug bites — shares her tale with us naive adventurers.

She tells us of serpentinite. The soil here weathers from stone that was once the earth's own mantle: peridotite and dunite, born deep beneath an ancient seafloor and hauled into the light a hundred million years ago, when a slab of oceanic crust collided with the continent and refused to submit. What remains is a rusty red dirt, its color the fingerprint of iron, laced with magnesium, nickel, and chromium; a chemistry that poisons most plants and starves the rest of the calcium and nitrogen they crave. This is the edge of tectonic plates, forever marching forward, pushing back the sea. I learn that this land accepts only those privy to the secret of living in so hostile a place.

I crouch to peer at a purple flower that spills into a dome of small violet blossoms, the whole head bowed toward the earth. I learn its edibility through experience: delicious, and its name from our guide: nodding onion, it bows before me.

Nearby there are others, both people and plants. Gumweed, a well-mannered weed-and-daisy-like plant, has a bright yellow flower so sun-struck it would vanish into the light if it reached a few hundred million miles higher. We rub its sticky residue between our fingers; it smells of Vicks VapoRub. I inhale, and imagine the day's anxiety draining out through the soles of my Tevas.

A call from the group pulls me back. It is time to gain higher ground above the Salish Sea — to find, I assume, the true treasure hidden within the bluffs. Jazmen says it is to marvel at juniper and madrone. I presume we are both right.

The path climbs through a verdant catacomb walled in with sword fern, salal, and rattlesnake orchid; a partial mycoheterotroph that charms vast mycelium networks into surrendering their energy, a most mysterious school of magic. The trail carries us through woods infested with elves, trolls, and pileated woodpeckers. The last of these keep a pact with the elves: the birds chisel deep into the snags after carpenter ants — I'm told it's their bread and butter — and once a woodpecker has eaten its fill and moved on, an elf, most certainly, moves into the cavity it left behind. Jazmen could neither confirm nor deny.

The apex of the bluff opens onto expansive views of the Salish Sea, and the cold, water-washed air lifts the weight of the sun from my squinting eyes. This place earns little reprieve from the elements, storm or solar radiation, and its inhabitants have paid the toll. Seaside juniper twists its warped branches to literal ninety-degree angles and Pacific madrone reach out to snatch a snack, devouring unsuspecting goblins and amateur botanists alike, both equally unappetizing to my human palate.

Each step crunches; crisp moss and dry grass snap and disintegrate underfoot. The red serpentine dirt lies bare for us weary travelers to see, and where many boots have polished it, the rock shows a bluish sheen. It is beautiful and so are the Hooker's onions (named for a person and not a profession) and so is the gumweed. Ah. More Vicks.

We stand among flowers and bees, a brilliant kelp forest shimmering just offshore. No sound reaches us but the rhythmic calling of gulls and the soft sway of junipers in the coastal wind.

When we finally turn to descend, I carry the bluff's marks with me: red serpentine dust ground into my knees, gumweed resin tacky on my fingertips. Somewhere beneath my sandals an old seafloor holds fast against the water that once made it and lets a few stubborn, free-spirited things live on its back.