While making arrangements for my father’s funeral a week ago, I walked down at dawn to the mouth of Simm’s Creek, on Eastern Vancouver Island. No, this is not rain.
Four years from now, with some incredible luck, this plucky little salmon will be coming home.
Others like it will be returning to the fire forests (note the smoke) over the mountains to the east. Fire, water and fish: it is enough.
If your country started out as a chain of volcanoes …. 
…very exotic volcanoes…
… in the tropical Pacific, very different volcanoes ….
… in five different island chains over 150 million years …. 
… and if they then drifted across the sea and crashed into North America, lifting new volcanoes up into the clouds …
… and welding the bits together …. a
… and then if super-cooled, subglacial water had blasted all that away and the sea had a go at it for 10,000 years ….
… why, then your beaches might look like this, too.
All beaches are beautiful, of course, but these are the beaches of Cascadia.
To be more specific, these are the beaches of the newest chain of islands to crash on the shore, Islandia.
And if you lift your head and look across the last water to the previous chain, now uplifted and ice-carved and creating rain, why it might just look like this…
…and if you lived there, and if you knew that, you would never see a mountain again. You would see the earth, alive.
