Ebey's Landing

Author's Comments

The bluffs do something to scale that I have not quite seen elsewhere on the Washington coast. You walk up through prairie grass that has been bending in the same wind since before the farms went in, and then the land simply ends, and you are two hundred and fifty feet above the strait with the Olympics across the water and a freighter sliding through the channel below you so slowly it appears not to be moving at all. I come in late September. The grass has gone to gold by then, the summer haze has burned off, and the light at the end of the day rakes across the prairie in a way that turns the whole landscape into something layered and strange. The bluff trail is a loop and most people walk it counterclockwise, climbing first and descending to the beach. I have come to prefer the reverse, walking the shoreline in the late afternoon when the tide allows and climbing up into the last of the light. You arrive at the high prairie just as the Olympics start to catch the alpenglow. The wind is real. I have been pushed sideways here more than once, and on bad days the camera is not steady even on a tripod. Check the forecast and check the tide chart, because the beach portion goes underwater and the loop becomes an out-and-back if you mistime it. What I keep photographing is the relationship between the cultivated fields and the wild edge. Fence lines running to the cliff. Barns in the middle distance and the strait beyond. It is a coastline that remembers being lived on, and that is rarer than it sounds.

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