Hues at the Edge of Darkness, on the Edge of Land

I wake to a dark and colorless sky. My tangled dreams are hard to shake, corridors of leaves and lost bears and fading words. An hour later, still returning to some semblance of myself, a band of sky above the eastern horizon clarifies to a shade of periwinkle. It grows pink. High clouds cover the rest of the sky, preventing much light from reaching our shore.

And it happens. The rising sun, still just below the horizon, hits the far side of Mount Rainier and projects its shadow, upside-down, toothlike, across the underbellies of the clouds. Everything is orange now, except the sky around the base of the mountain, which melts to liquid gold, too hot to handle. The mountain shadow stretches westward.

This phenomenon happens only rarely, when the clouds are positioned just high enough, and only at this time of year, when from our vantage the sun rises behind the mountain.

To my amazement, a secondary, smaller shadow tooth appears, attached to the north flank of the main one. I realize it is cast by Little Tahoma, the spire of remnant volcanic rock that stands above the meadows at Summerland. On its own, Little Tahoma is the third-highest peak in Washington.

At the edge of dark, color. From the forge of molten sunlight, the peaks stretch their rarified air our way. And within minutes, the gray light of day washes it all away.

A few mornings later, I watch another doozy of a pastel show with the kids, identifying hues, and soon they are talking rainbows.

OK, I pose, thinking I have found a good scientific riddle to ponder. Why does a sunrise have every color of the rainbow except green? I’m thinking I will wow them with stories of the legendary green flash sailors claim to see just before sunset, or the sickly green pallor of tornado weather.

Da-ad, they say. The whole bottom of the sky is green! They laugh at me. What are you talking about, Dad?

I peer back at the sunrise. Below the illuminated clouds is a swath of clear sky. My mind has categorized it as blue, a dingy, chaotic-wavelengths kind of blue. Could it be green? I stare long and hard at it, and it does look greenish, maybe, until my eyes lose reference and all the colors start to morph and blend.

Ever played Uno in low light? Blue and green do sit side by side on the light spectrum. The ocean, which swallows the rest of the spectrum, washes the two together. Why not the atmosphere? Maybe it does? Is what I see up there the result of being programmed to expect every clear-sky hue to be blue?

Later, well past a sunset that cannot hold a candle to the sunrises, past the disappearance of children and chores and the return of dark dreams, I bundle up and make the drive to the Purdy sandspit. It is winter, and that means beach monitoring.

Wind lashes the spit. Everything is wet. The rocks look freshly tumbled, like post-storm clouds, as I move down the beach on barnacle-scratched kneepads. The team led by Dr. Michael Behrens of Pacific Lutheran University and Stena Troyer of Harbor WildWatch does this twice a year, during the lowest tides of summer and winter, at eight local beaches. Winter low tides are at night. The team measures the geometry of the beaches as well as the diversity of sea life along preset transects.

We start at the top of the beach. To a passing car, we must look like a bobbing constellation of dim lights. In each successive 5-meter-by-3-meter rectangle as we descend, we call out every bit of life we can find. At first, to pay our dues before we get to the treasures down by the dark waterline, the stuff no casual beach walker would see, we muster enthusiasm for every beach hopper and barnacle.

Periwinkles, red algae, unattached eelgrass. My own schtick is to call out every leaf I find. It’s a good variety tonight: alder, ivy, fir needle, madrona. Troyer humors me when I throw these wrenches into her data. I find a chestnut leaf. We wonder where the tree could be. Then we remember that the Purdy spit is the backstop for every southwestern wind’s volley of waves and detritus. The tree could be anywhere along the length of Carr Inlet.

It is a long transect, the longest of the eight beaches, and the team’s least favorite. Beyond the rocks is muck that wants to swallow us alive, then a stretch of barren, hard-packed sand. But the roving circles of our headlamps summon some intense patches of color from the darkness. Cockle shells. Young shore crabs. Squirming green gunnels. Red polychaete worms. Blueish sea stars. Or are they greenish? A collection of pastel-tinged dogwinkles and their hanging yellow eggs. The protruding rims of sand dollars as deep purple as the far side of the sky. The color palette is fleshy, sunrise-like, as everywhere water streams through rocks and life.

In the wee hours, after the data have been collected, when even the road is empty of passing cars, we continue to follow our circles of light, combing the beach for the rarer finds that make being out here at night so thrilling.

Here is a salmon skeleton. Here is a pink-orange ghost shrimp. Here is a silvery sand lance with its pointed snout for burrowing. Here is a moon snail operculum, the horny plate that covers the opening of the snail’s shell when it needs to hide. The operculum has spiraling layers, like the shell itself, a record of its growth. I hold it up, and it appears like amber or agate, turning a headlamp’s beam into an ancient yellow-orange light.

In the end, the thing my fingers won’t drop is a leaf. It blazes orange and burgundy when it enters my circle of light, like an ember. It is mostly round, with a slight drip tip. I feel I should recognize it, but something about its shape is uncanny and floats just beyond the edge of my mind’s circle of light, until my fingers reach down and touch it. Then I don’t need sight or color to know it. By texture, it’s obviously salal. I hold it and gaze across the blackened beach.