Distance makes the heart grow fonder

I was about 8 years old when I first saw a tide pool. I was 33 when I found out what it was called.

My mom and dad might challenge this a bit, but as I remember it, my first tide pool was a blind and random stop along the coast of northern Oregon during one of our visits to Kennewick, Wash., where we lived for the first four years of my life.

We stopped randomly to stretch our legs and look at the ocean, climbed down a steep slope to the seashore, walked over to some rocks towering out of the ocean. And there were starfish! And these plants that grab on and collapse around if you poke them with a stick! And all this other stuff that I thought you only saw if you were scuba diving, if I'd ever thought about them at all.

A couple of weeks ago, Shonda and her friends took Eva, Isobel and I from Concord, Calif., Shonda's (old) home to the Redwoods. Her friend knew where some tide pools were and when low tide would expose them.

Low tide! I'd driven along the Oregon and Washington coasts a thousand times since that first day, wishing I could see starfish and those collapsing things -- I had no idea that they were called sea anemones, these didn't look much like Nemo's home -- again, but I'd never once thought that maybe they would only be visible at low tide.

So we camped in one of the Redwood state parks that border Redwoods National Park and headed north to the tide pools the next morning. After breakfast and an hour drive, we didn't get to the tide pools until about 10 a.m., 1.5 hours after low tide. So the water was coming in, but we found the spot.

Eva and Isobel needed a hand to leap from the sand, over the water, to the rocks. But there they were: Tons of starfish (I hear it's more correct to call them sea stars, since they aren't fish) and sea anemones that tried to swallow the sticks we pressed against them. Isobel was very excited. Eva looked mostly at the waves crashing on the rocks around our feet.

We poked around out there for a few minutes while the waves crashed around us, then decided we better get back on shore before the gap got too wide and stranded us there.

On the way back, Eva clenched her fist tightly around my finger, and kept saying, "Dad, let's go up there."

So we went up away from the ocean. "Let's go up there." Then up onto the next sandy shelf. "Let's go higher." Then the shelf of gravel.

At one point, I saw a big crab shell that I wanted to look at, so I broke free and dropped down a bit toward it. Eva said, "Dad. Dad, come back."

When I did and she had fastened herself back onto my hand, she said, "I didn't want the ocean to take you away." I was never closer than 20 yards to the nearest wave.

Soon she said, "Let's go back to the trail." At that point, I was kind of disappointed. That little tide pool experience 25 years before was one of my fondest vacation memories from childhood, and Eva just couldn't wait to leave.

But as soon as we got on solid ground, with brush and trees on either side of us and no sand or waves in sight, Eva woke up.

"We saw the SEA! Me and Isobel saw the sea! We never seen the sea before. That was super cool! And we saw starfish, too!"

Then she talked about it, just like that, for most of the 20 minute hike back to the car.

(Note: To see a tide pool, go at low tide, and look for exposed rocks near the waterline -- unlike sand, the rocks hold water so these sedentary sea creatures can stay there through all tide levels.)

(Note II: I left my camera at camp that day.)