Cobbles to concrete

Quite a cultural shift, I’d say.

View from the 42nd floor.

One day you’re among the lush green of this nation’s northwest, by the blue waters where Orcas and seals play.  Almost the next, you’re peering out of an office window from the 42nd floor of a Texas oil building onto the concrete canyon below.

We won’t even discuss the politics of the shift.  The geographic change is plenty enough to handle.

So it is with daughter Meghan, who just left Bellingham, Wash., to start an internship in Houston with a major oil company.

Emerald Lake.

It’s a shift for us parents, too.  A few weekends ago, we were in Belllingham for some final wedding planning.  It was a fantastic trip.  We rented a small house overlooking Emerald Lake on Bellingham’s northeast side.  It was a cold, wet and blustery weekend, so we didn’t get out around the lake much.  But the views were satisfying.

Meghan, Eric ready to sample.

We did the important things:  Checked out the reception hall one more time to size it up for decorations; sampled the reception food; went through a checklist of other to-dos and concerns.  July 14^th is not far away.

And we helped Meghan do more of her school research.  If you recall, she’d been charting the impact of tidal waves on the fist-sized rocks that layer Washington’s coast. She’s done this through an ingenious combination of electronic tags embedded in a select number of the rocks – “cobbles,” she calls them – and high-tech GPS equipment that shouts to satellites high above, triangulating the cobbles’ location far below.

Such research is helpful as scientists assess the impact of rising tides on global erosion.

Meghan unloads the Jeep.

So on our first night, Cindy, Meghan and I hiked to the beach, laden with electronic equipment, dressed in thick layers because of the cold winds, each of us wearing a headlight not unlike what miners wear far underground.

Fiancé Eric, also a geologist, usually helps during these beach visits.  But he was unavailable this night, and it was critical because of the timing of the tides that measurements be done. 

Our job was to find Meghan’s rocks – each named with numbers, like “A05,” “D54” “FB6”  – and once found, Meghan would use GPS to track their movement since her last visit.

In search of "beep!"

It was an adventure. First, as Cindy observed, it gave me my water fix.  For as we worked, the waves lapped ashore as they do in all the places we love … Michigan, the Gulf Coast, and now the Strait of Georgia, part of the Salish Sea near Bellingham.  To me, waves are God’s mantra, the universal pulse.  They calm the soul like a mother’s heartbeat calms a babe.

Interestingly, the rocks hadn’t moved much.  “Piece of cake,” I thought as I steered the yellow ringed detector back and forth like a beach comber hunting treasure.

 

Cindy, left, Meghan chart findings.

The detector issued a soft “beep, beep, beep” when it hovered over a tagged cobble. And the rocks were relatively close to each other, so finding them and measuring them proved easy.

But the night adventure was not our only visit to the beach.  We had to return in early afternoon that Saturday, again because of the tide.  This time, though, we anticipated more severe shifting of cobbles, because high winds and waves had pounded the shore since Thursday. 

We hiked in again.  And it was a different beach.  Markers we’d used that night were now completely gone.  Sure, the basic outline of the beach was the same.  But everything within its boundaries seemed altered.

And so we donned or set up our equipment and established search lines, carving the beach into equal rows like one does cutting grass with a lawn mower. It was critical that we not miss a spot with our yellow contraption, so we dropped small, bright-orange strips to mark the rows.

We walked, moving the detector left and right.  And we walked some more.  Up the beach.  Down the beach.  Near the trail’s end, all the way to the water.

No “beep.”  

I could tell that Meghan was worried.  She took over the detector, wishing Eric was there because of his uncanny ability to locate the cobbles.  The worry was real.  Had the storm moved the rocks too far? Or perhaps even buried them so deep that they’d be undetectable … and her many weeks of research wasted?

Meghan had estimated the waves’ movements based on weather reports.  The storm had come up from the south, but then there was a countering force from the north.  The unknown was the relative strength of each. Would the waves have pushed the rocks farther north than the countervailing waves pushed them south?

That was Meghan’s hunch.  But she had only web-based tidal movements to base those hunches on.

And so we looked at the northern edges.  And got no beeps.

So Meghan had us look south.

“Beep, beep!”

At last, a strike.

I don’t recall the number of that rock.  But I was relieved.  Because I had learned quickly that where one sits, the others usually are nearby.

Lords of the ring.

Meantime, the soft rain had turned to sleet.  Meghan kept looking at us, fearing we were unhappy researchers. We were loving it.  And I had my waves.

We found those cobbles … eventually more than 40.   In fact, they were widely scattered, some buried, indicative of the power of the storm.  And it took considerable time for Meghan to establish each rock’s GPS coordinates.

But Meghan’s research would live another day.

Once done, we headed back up the trail to Bellingham.  The cold and wet left us chafed but alive.  Cindy and I trod up the long hill, but Meghan ran it like a gazelle – her chance at exercise, she said – before we caught up with her for the leisurely walk back to her Jeep.

Now she sits in a Texas office, surveying Houston’s landscape from an altitude likely shared by oil barons. She’s done her homework well … prepared herself for this internship.  She’ll do a fantastic job.

And yet I’m sure her heart is still in Bellingham.  Eric is there, along with the bunnies.  The concrete canyons of Texas might have their appeal, but once you’ve lived the lush green of the northwest territories, little can compare. 

The internship will seem to go quickly, I think.  She'll be back in Bellingham soon.

On Sunday, I gave Meghan a call.  I asked her the address of her office building.  I’m an occasional visitor to Houston because of some trade shows that I attend.  I know downtown pretty well.

She shared the address, so I accessed Google Earth on my phone and zoomed down to take a look.  Sure enough, she was housed in an office tower, not far from where I peddle books in October.

Monday, she texted me a photo out her window.

“Here’s my office view! 42^nd floor,” she said.

“Very cool!” I texted back. “Are you facing north? South? You might see some thunderstorms roll in sometime.”

“Not sure.  I think north,” she wrote.

In fact, using her photo and comparing it to the streets and highways on Google Earth, I figured she was facing northwest …  and Bellingham.  She could have faced south, or east ... who knows the whims of the corporate-office assignor?  There are 360 degrees on a compass. She beat the odds.

Then again, I believe things happen for a reason.

“I think your office faces northwest,” I texted.  “And if you look real hard, you can see your bunnies.”

She texted back.

“That makes me happy.”