Cairns

Cairns have started appearing on the Coos Bay beach where Elmer and I walk every morning. These are no ordinary New Age-inspired cairns of palm-sized, flat rocks you might come across on a hike in the desert or woods or a yoga retreat.

These cairns are constructed with massive rocks, some that must weigh over a hundred pounds, if not more. Many of the rocks are not flat, which is highly irregular in cairn construction. Typically there are five or six cairns for Elmer and I to dodge around. Elmer always chooses the tallest one to mark with a whiz.

They never last a day because high tides never leave one fully standing.

Their appearance would seem to represent the handwork of a two-person team. It would also seem homeless men and women from the nearby encampment are the cairns’ creators, although I have never observed anyone making them. It just stands to reason because I have observed residents from this encampment making sculptures with driftwood and scratching designs in the sand with sticks and garden tools washed ashore.

If my tidal calculations are correct, the cairns are built during the night, possibly well past midnight, when favorable low tides uncover rocks used for construction.

At night, the sounds and smells of an estuary, heavy lifting, conversations of collaboration, angles perceived, imprecise placement, then a balancing act.

Were the creators addled during the construction? Conventional wisdom would suggest that, but unconventional is often the best adjective that describes the doings of homeless people, at least in my experience. So maybe the artists, if indeed that’s who they are, just felt like making art and used the moment and materials at hand.

In ancient times, and it some remotes places on the planet today, cairns served (serve) as directional markers for travelers, signposts without words or numbers. They also can designate boundaries and spiritual sites.

When I pass by the cairns I do wonder if they are marking some direction in our culture, a direction I can’t discern yet, let alone understand. That these cairns never last is the tricky part of this meditation. Many cairns in arid climates last for hundreds of years. These Coos Bay one only last less than 24 hours and are by far the heaviest and most strangely shaped cairns I have ever seen.

That’s a potentially powerful metaphor if I could ever solidify it.

I always place a rock atop one of the cairns before leaving the beach and I have no idea why. Something subconscious is perhaps telling me to contribute.