I am a worm-eaten piece of driftwood.  One of many on a Salish Sea beach.  What story do I have to tell? Like many things in this world we are overlooked and forgotten. Time marches on and those that knew us have come and gone.  Their story too is hidden behind a curtain of years.

Here I am pushed up onto the gravel.  What makes me so special you ask?  Why do I have a story?  Look at these big spikes pounded into my side. Three can be seen by the casual beachcomber.  How in the heck did I get these?  You have to know a tree didn’t just do it to itself.

Batgurrl found me today and started to make up stories of how and why I had these big metal nails.

• She sees an old log raft 100 years ago.  Nearby Seola ravine was used as a log skid and even had a small railroad wind down through its canyon (built 1905).  Early on loggers pushed the logs out into the sound. Then huge floating rafts of logs were pulled to the mills. Was this log part of a log raft?  Were those huge nails part of what held a log raft together? Did a storm break things up and this log escaped to float from beach to beach?

• Another story she thought up is around how the Arroyos area was a large gravel pit. The trucks drove down the beach past where this log sits. They went to the end of Seola road and then the gravel was trucked up the road that had replaced the railroad. Was this old log used in some way for that operation?

• What forest did this log come from?  If it is so worm-eaten how old was the tree? Doing the math she dates me back hundreds of years.  A hundred more or less rolling around the sound getting full of holes and then another hundred or so growing from a seedling.

I will hold my secrets here on the beach along with my rusted spikes that are stuck in my flanks.  I will roll around the beach and maybe float to another place.  There someone else will wonder where I came from and what stories I cannot speak.

Final thoughts – time passes quickly and all around us are things that have lost their purpose. What will a future person think when they see a hundred years from now our plastic and metal debris?  or even this same worm-eaten log with big spikes in it? Will the story of these objects be lost? One has to think so.

Ah the mystery of a rather boring piece of driftwood on a deserted beach along the Salish Sea. I hope this bit of whimsy sparked your Sunday imagination of time and space.