Should you be walking along
a beach in Neskowin, Oregon,
you'll see countless monoliths
rising up from the sea
as the waves drift
effortlessly around them.
Mists in the distance
hide some from view;
others sneak out of the fog,
seemingly dancing
in the sea spray.
Those closest to you let
the waves explore their bases,
rooted deep below the mud
and the earth.
Some are hollowed out,
and small sea creatures
flit back and forth
from their secluded pools.
Some are a little,
like jagged mountains,
weathered by time,
craving the blue skies above.
These strange sarcophagi
were once trees,
and they represent
a beautiful, ethereal memorial
to the great cataclysm
that came before.
People have understandably
come to call this place
the Ghost Forest.
And the tale
of how it came to be is,
as you'd expect, haunting.
One day,
just over 300 years ago,
this family of Sitka spruces
were suddenly
and violently wiped out.
Sometime in the year 1700,
the ground shook, water raged.
The slither of rock
at the surface of the world
warped and shifted.
The only thing
that didn't fall that day
was the sky itself.
In Japan, 5,000 miles away
from present-day Neskowin,
a wall of water crashed into
the eastern seaboard at night,
sweeping ashore
from the deep and empty darkness
like an ancient,
all-powerful force.
Around 620 miles
of coastline were flooded.
At the same time, hours earlier
in the Pacific Northwest,
devastating rumbling and
a similarly gargantuan tsunami
slammed into the shores
and rushed uphill.
Earth's tectonic plates
are like jigsaw pieces
constantly bumping against,
running away,
or grating alongside each other.
Forests, among other things,
sometimes sit at the top
of continental plates,
which themselves sit atop
oceanic plates.
Those dense, submerged plates
can head towards
the continental plates,
before sinking beneath them
and falling into
the annihilating conditions
of the lower mantle.
As those two titanic
geological beasts clashed,
stress built up
as the downgoing, doomed plate
got increasingly stuck
on the North American plate.
Eventually,
this caused the two plates
to become bound together,
and as the oceanic plate
continued to descend,
the overlying continental plate
buckles backward.
For centuries, the land
and the forest rose upward,
the seas receded,
and for a moment,
a blink in geological time,
there is ascendancy.
Then, when the stress
became too much to bear,
a cataclysm unfolds.
The continental plate
violently snapped back
into its original position
out into the sea.
The earth shook
as all that pent-up energy
was suddenly unleashed.
Like a gigantic Slinky toy,
the sea was pushed both outward,
into the Pacific Ocean
toward Japan
and back toward
the Pacific Northwest coast
at incredible speeds.
Many trees at Neskowin
were annihilated by the tsunami,
and 2,000 years of natural
history were obliterated.
At least,
that's how it looked at first.
Not before long, the decapitated
remains of the Sitka forests
were smothered
by mud, silt, and sand.
It cut them off
from the surface;
from all the critters
that would soon recolonize it,
and from all the chemical
and biological alchemy
that would normally, over time,
erode and annihilate
the long-dead remains
of life at the surface.
Normal operations
were interrupted, and the trees
-- at least,
what was left of them --
remained, preserved
beneath this blanket of earth.
Centuries passed.
The Sitka forests destroyed
by the tsunami in the year 1700
were all but forgotten,
even if the legends of the
inexplicable tsunami in Japan,
and the Thunderbird
and the Whale,
continued to be passed down.
The winter of 1997
changed all that.
Storms began to brew offshore
of the Pacific Northwest,
including near Neskowin.
Powerful winds began to blow.
They crashed into the shore,
carving up the beach
like a gigantic shovel,
flinging debris and mud
and earth in every direction.
It was savage,
an act of destruction,
but one that revealed a secret
buried and nearly lost forever.
Forests live and forests die,
and their deaths can range from
the prolonged to, in this case,
the sudden and dramatic.
If the sun sets
at just the right time,
and there are enough
clouds in the sky
and plenty of mist
resting just above the sand,
the air turns purple.
Today, Neskowin's ghost forests
are nothing short
of jaw-dropping.
At the break of day,
the sun shines
on the diamantine waves
that drift around the frozen
remnants of that fateful day.
As the sea gently crashes
into them, they remain silent,
gazing up into the fires
of our local star,
or perhaps looking up
at the billions of more distant
stellar lighthouses
that come out of hiding
at night.
