He lost his wife, Barbara, to cancer last spring. She was a lovely woman with more spark than a 12-cylinder truck engine. Cancer took her anyway, and of course Mike was devastated. When an old friend shows up and wants to spend some time talking and walking – when an old friend needs healing and a hug – where do you go? What do you say or don’t say? Without saying much, I took him to the beach.

I took Mike to the North Jetty, to the park now called Cape Disappointment, just out of Ilwaco in the southwest corner of the state, on the Washington side of the Columbia River. Of course, we might have gone to the South Jetty at Fort Stevens. The two parks define the river mouth like falling confetti ramps up the enthusiasm of a crowd. Both beaches remain natural treasures, and how lucky we are.

Between rain squalls, the sun emerged, gracing our winter bodies the same way Barbara could light up a room with her sparkling personality. The sky suddenly was the soft blue of a blonde’s eyes – hers, if I remember right – and wispy scattered clouds raced by seductively, like Rodin’s painted dancers.

The crab boats were fishing shallow water off Peacock Spit, the last resting place of so many sailing ships captured by the unrepentant tides and storms, nautical disasters that punctuate the river like bad scores on a terrible night of bowling. From time to time a piece of mast, wooden ribs or slabs of metal spring from the sands on Benson Beach, that spit of fragile and eroding beach formed by swirling eddies behind the two-mile jetty that marks the deep water channel separating river and sea.

We climbed up on the jetty and moved with determination, further and further west, along the massive quarried-rock jetty, toward the westerly tip defined by 20-foot ocean combers that rock and roll with swash-buckling ferocity off the Pacific.

The further we scampered, the more rugged the path became. We were now jumping across those massive boulders once barged from Castle Rock to their present resting place, here, on the edge of sea. Even stones of this dimension are eroded and pummeled by ocean force, worn down not by eons but by decades.

The jetties on either side of the river are constantly being repaired and replaced as tide and storms etch away their shape and size, scattering them, like so much flotsam. And so too, mere mortals – oh how fallible we are! We come and go like the tides, our loved ones, neighbors and family.

On this day, the ocean was performing. And so were the sea lions. They appear so at home in the salt sea, rising and descending, slicing through the whitecaps as effortlessly as the gulls that ride the silky air currents, never pushing the moment in their symbiotic relationship with ocean and sky. How casually they swim, turning work into play. Oh, that we are so lucky to share in the bounty of this stunning landscape, and one so close to home.

Mike sat on a rock and told stories. Of course they were about Barbara, and, of course, they were cathartic. I listened quietly. All I could ultimately offer was my own story, about losing a lovely friend to cancer at age 42. How a wise spiritual lady helped heal my wife and me with these words: “Your friend was an angel. Sometimes God sends us angels to teach us about impermanence.” That was all I could offer my friend, a hand-me-down lesson on the waves of life.

All the while, the combers rushed to shore, rising and spilling in mountains of translucent water and white-headed spume. Eyes wet, we hugged and scampered back along the jetty – more slowly this time – back to home and our daily chores.

“See you in the spring,” I said, hoping for a rendezvous in the desert, his home away from home. Mike loves the Pacific Northwest – always will. I knew he would probably return before I found my way to Nevada.

A large sea lion rose and barked. We turned in time to see the giant mammal slip away, slip into the blue abyss. Someday we might go that way ourselves, but today – this glorious blue-bird day – the world seemed healed and at peace. We got in the car and drove home, already wishing for more of the same, wishing for ocean and sky and the wild things that shape the planet, as sure as our pretty dreams.