Driftwood pieces at Oswald West State Park.

Giant spruce trees swayed in a sturdy southwest wind. Glittering water jewels dangled from pine needles as the sun wrapped about and through them. Below, a well-used trail snaked alongside, meandering from U.S. Highway 101 down to the Pacific Ocean.

Gravity compounded the swirl of a winter freshet, swift, full and galloping along. Sight and smells wafted through the landscape, enhanced by the inviting bouquet of ocean air, salt and seaweed.

Welcome to Oswald West State Park, to the Oregon Coast on a blustery day. The oceanfront gestured just as it must have to the Corps of Discovery and the Native peoples who lived among the great trees and along these sandy beaches for centuries.

The Tillamook and Chinook people seldom felled conifers for purposes other than borrowing select cedar planks for their longhouses. A few tall, straight cedars became totems and canoes. Clearcut logging was not in their vocabulary.

Exploring the park, we walked downhill on a cold winter’s day. The weather broke suddenly. Some divine force shined down upon us, warming our hands and faces, illuminating body and mind after two days of heavy rain. The trail meandered beside a swollen stream, and natural sounds ricocheted through the understory.

Ahead, one heard the glorious crown of breaking waves. The ocean was near. We took our time, drawing our cameras like six-shooters, here, there and anywhere when opportunity presented itself.

Beyond that, the forest opened a door, offering warmth and friendship like an extended hand. Maybe it is a mile from the well-marked parking lot, west to the ocean’s edge. There, hard round stones had come to rest. There, a heavy surf pounded the sands where ocean waves relinquished their hold upon the sandy shoreline.

The clouds remained dark gray, a pewter color. Sun motes broke through. My wife, Laurie, was looking for the perfect rock. She found one shaped like a heart. Around us, others had been stacked into small stone middens. No surfers today on Short Sand Beach. The combers were wild and unapproachable.

We gawked at the tall, stately trees, hundreds of years old — ascending from a single cone, from a single seed dropped from the mother tree, poking up from the ground and pushing skyward, inch by inch. Old forest to new forest as the elders fell and crumbled into rich, fertile dust and loam.

Along the creek, I discovered an uncommon mushroom, an admiral bolete. There were a few others that I couldn’t identify, fingernail-sized but brilliant in the low forest light. On this coast there are hundreds of delicate species. We eat but a few.

This park, given by some person with vision and generosity, is ours for the pure enjoyment of time and place. Ours to protect and ours for the sheer joy of catching the illusive and the finite, a green cloak of magic right before our eyes.

That is, if you take a short walk in the rain. Yes, cover yourself with warm clothes and a secure hat. Wrap up snuggly. But you have to step up, step out into it. It’s so close, just down the road a few miles from River City, from Brian Doyle’s imaginary Mink River.

I thought to myself: I could be home drinking hot coffee and enthralled in a good book. Shakespeare’s Lear on the heath: “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” All this appropriate on a windswept day. Or I could be there, outside in the rain at Oswald West, wrapped in a cocoon of majesty we frequently take for granted.

Indeed, I hadn’t walked this trail for years. The last time I showed it off was to friends from Pennsylvania. They stood transfixed. “How,” they said, “can you be so lucky.” I shrugged. “Every day,” I said, feigning indifference. The gods of storm, forest and ocean know this truth: every day, here in our backyard, we are surrounded by wonder.