A western border of bounty and beauty

ALONG THE WASHINGTON COAST — Vast, powerful, primal, both ancient and ever-changing, the sea has an elemental pull.

"It's a sense of excitement, a mystique," says Alan Rammer, aka The Man With the Yellow Bucket. The marine conservation and education specialist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has taken school kids on beach walks for 18 years.

Together, they collect flotsam and wrack that tell of shipwrecks, shifting undersea tectonic plates, the birth and death of sea creatures, their migrations and molts.

"Every day is a new adventure. Sometimes you are here and it's like glass; other times it's ferocious, smashing and breaking and moving things," Rammer said.

"What keeps me coming back is the sense of rejuvenation. It's all about the celebration of the cycle of life, and the continuity of life. Life comes from the sea, it goes back to the sea. There is an inner peace here. It is almost more nourishing than food."

The air we breathe, the water that gives us life, the weather itself, all begin here.

About half of the world's oxygen probably is produced by vast pastures of microscopic phytoplankton that manufacture the very breath of life.

The hydrologic cycle, producing the rain, begins with moisture rising from the sea to the clouds.

Washington's coast Washington boasts about 342 miles of coastline, including sheer, rocky cliffs and soft sandy beaches. THE SEATTLE TIMES

Washington's coastline has many faces. The northern coast, from Cape Flattery to Point Grenville, north of Copalis, is wild, with the bared teeth of sea stacks, sheer cliffs, rocky shores and glassy tide pools.

South of Point Grenville, the land lies down. Soft, sandy beaches form an open coast that stretches to the fecund estuary of Willapa Bay, and farther south, to Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia River.

The seacoast is where many rivers meet, opening their mouths wide for the ocean-bright feast of salmon, an annual gift from the sea.

Washington has 342 miles of marine coastline from Cape Flattery to the Columbia River, including the longest remaining stretch of wild beach in the Lower 48.

The rocky coast

Jiggling wads of sea foam pile calf-deep as Rialto Beach takes a pounding. The wind rips chunks of fluff loose, rolling it up the beach like tumbleweeds. The foam is created by the churning action of waves that emulsifies the slime of sea creatures to a creamy froth. Big storms like this throw clots of it into the trees, riming them like heavy frost. Waves roar as their tops are torn and flung backward in the wind, and gravel leaps black and shining in the edge of waves that muscle it up the beach.

Jon Preston, information specialist at Olympic National Park, remembers the last time he dared surf the wild, winter Pacific: Caught in a wave full of swirling cobble, "All I could think was 'Get the heck out of the water,' " Preston said. "It was like being in the washing-machine spin cycle with a bunch of rocks."

Split-lipped, ears and nose bleeding, Preston checked his teeth to see if they were all there. Clambering up the beach, with the tide sucking at his legs, and two more waves barreling in at his back, Preston remembers, "I just felt so small."

The Pacific is good at that.

Six waves a minute, 8,640 waves a day, the Pacific pounds this rocky coast. Rialto used to have two parking lots; a storm in the winter of 1995-96 took care of that, burying the western lot under beach logs and tons of cobble and sand.

The coastal forest, too, is under ceaseless attack from the sea; trees older than 250 years are rare, and the forest floor is lumpy with giants toppled by winds that can top 100 mph.

Seacoast trees are flagged back by the wind, their life literally lived on the edge. The sea is claiming the land.

Sea stacks that stud the waves are testimony to their ceaseless chewing.

The coastline used to be some 30 miles west; melting glacial ice raised sea levels and moved the beach back.

Yet the rocky coast is rich with life: Offshore rocks hold some of the largest seabird colonies in the United States. Twenty-nine species of whales, dolphins and porpoise visit the Olympic coast to feed on nutrient-rich upwelling of deep ocean currents.

Ochre sea stars and giant green sea anemones glow in cold, clean tide pools. The rocks are paved with tenacious life: barnacles fasten themselves with glue produced on their heads; limpets stick fast with their large, muscular foot; and mussels tie themselves down with strong byssal threads.

Beach walkers look pleased with themselves, braving this wild coast.

"There is a camaraderie that is based in humility," Preston said, his face wet with sea mist and rain. "I come out here to be around other people that don't feel like they should conquer it all.

"There is a language here I long to understand I think I lost generations ago, so much of it has been lost or suppressed. But here it is in its ancient Aramaic. It speaks to me."

The open coast

Great swirls of sandpipers turn in gyres over this soft sweep of beach at Griffiths-Priday state park, north of Copalis Beach.

Survival is about digging in here: With no rocks to cling to, these broad, sandy beaches are busiest below, where they team with worms and clams, especially the wily razor clam.

Some say this beach is boring by comparison to the rocky coast, but it's about knowing where to look.

Rammer sees a glinting dark rock in the beach wrack and suspects it's anthracite coal, perhaps left from the wreck of the Ferndale in 1892, a ship that left London loaded with coal and bound for Portland. It missed the Columbia River and wrecked about 15 miles north of the entrance to Grays Harbor. Heavy, dense clumps of sand, fused by tremendous pressure and studded with fossilized shell, are chunks of the ancient seabed. Crab shells with empty eye sockets and leg shells are the calling card of molted crabs.

A smooth patch in the rain-dimpled sand tufted with feathers is the death bed of a sandpiper devoured by a peregrine falcon.

Pale gray stones, small and lightweight as birds' eggs, are pumice from the eruption of Mount St. Helens, carried here by the Columbia River and washed northbound on spring currents. Rammer has found 11 notes in bottles on the beach, including one written in Chinese.

And he can read the beach like a calendar, recording not just the monthly and daily tides, but geologic time, shown in fossils bared on eroded beach bluffs.

Rammer discovered the femur from a relative of the northern sea lion, carbon dated at about 30,000 years old, jutting from a bluff at Washaway Beach at Grayland. But then each high tide brings a beach without footprints, a renewing of the promise of discovery that has lured people to the ocean since before Lewis and Clark made their way to the sea.

"It's like you are the first one ever to travel that beach," Rammer said. "All the secrets are yours to discover."

Estuaries: protected, productive

At the tip of the sheltering arm of the Long Beach Peninsula, the Willapa Bay country opens wide to nourishing ocean currents.

In its embrace of the sea, Willapa Bay, between Cape Shoalwater and Leadbetter Point, is different, says biologist Jennifer Ruesink of the University of Washington. Unlike other estuaries that take their nutrients primarily from rivers pouring in from the land, Willapa also is enriched by the sea, Ruesink's research with oysters shows.

There are several reasons: First, annual summer drought reduces freshwater flow to the estuary. Second, there is nutrient-rich upwelling from the sea wash into the estuary at its mouth. Finally, Willapa Bay is shallow, allowing high tides to exchange as much as half of the bay's water.

The result is a clean, nourished soup pot of an estuary, warmed by sunlight that can penetrate to the bottom, where green pastures of eelgrass thrive. When the tide pulls back, shorebirds feast on mudflats teaming with life.

More oysters come out of Willapa Bay than anywhere else in the country. And they get most of their nutrition from ocean currents. Oyster growers have always known this, from the so-called "fattening line." Shifting with the whims of the sea, this line demarks oyster beds to its north that fatten from the nutrients of the sea. Beds south of it don't grow as well.

Even deep within the embrace of the land, this country, like us, is washed clean and nourished by the sea.

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com