“I believe everything has a soul,” the poet Mary Oliver writes in “Staying Alive,” an essay from the collection “Upstream.”

I picked it up one rainy afternoon at Powell’s Books on an errand run in Portland, and started reading downstream in Astoria.

She is writing about dogs and foxes, chasing one another on a frozen pond, but also about children who cope with life circumstances beyond their control by immersing themselves in the written word and in nature, and about those children who become adults.

Sitting on a bench at the coffee shop where I’ve worked through January and February on a magazine of words about people and nature here by the Columbia River, I put the book down and look up.

There are two sea lions, curling whiskers over the blue surface by a bar pilot boat. Ducking under, popping back up again. Basking in a rare stretch of March sunlight.

A bald eagle lands at a familiar perch, on the top of a radio tower over by the Columbia River Maritime Museum. Starlings light up and pass by in shadows of silver.

I think of a time here weeks ago when a crowd gathered by the windows after someone had announced they’d seen a river otter. Then I wonder what otters think about people in windows, or about the river, or if otters or starlings or sea lions think at all.

At least they’ve never thought about federal job cuts, I conclude, and haven’t swiped on a notification that appeared at their side over a black screen.

I take a sip of coffee and open my laptop. A song plays faintly in the background that I’m sure will remind me of this season in a few years, and the two sea lions dip back into the river’s depths.