Rainbows often appear this time of year along the Oregon coast. While this region is portrayed as consistently gloomy during the rainiest seasons (November – April), I’ve found that the rain is punctuated by breaks of sun lasting a few hours to a few days. This time of year, the receding shower-clouds render a perfect canvas for single or double rainbows to form as the low winter sun strikes the raindrops, sketching high-arching radiant bows.

The beach at Gearhart, where I now live, evokes a feeling state that is not immediately evident, yet after spending considerable time here, I’ve come to believe that it feels like the last beach, the final destination, where and when culture has expired and there is literally no one else alive (or, at least, in sight). I think of Sam Elliot’s character in the show 1883, where Shea Brennan, after a long, arduous wagon train journey across the country, finally arrives at the Oregon Coast and stands before the Pacific Ocean, and knows he can finally die in peace.

Directly south of Gearhart beach is Tillamook Head and the Necanicum Estuary, teaming with wildlife, and the start of a 20-mile-long stretch of beige sand and water. A decade ago, before we lived here, my wife and I took a walk on this beach in the middle of summer. Both from the East Coast, we expected to see families, umbrellas, and kids running around. Instead, on the weekend before the Fourth of July, there were three people a mile up the beach and a half-dozen a mile down the beach. It felt like an existential destination, a place with no meaning, an environment that didn’t offer choices or purpose. This is a place where time stops: the waves repeat, the sky does vary, but it changes in a repeated pattern so that time seems to be on a loop.

I walk this beach daily now, and mostly it is an uninhabited place where one cannot even see the summer houses that border the dunes because they are very far from the shore and hidden behind the first line of dunes. I find that I joyfully photograph the same types of things again and again, patterns in the sand, the play of light on the water, creatures that have washed up on shore. I am not trying to find anything new, but I repeatedly feel renewed by reconnecting with what I find essential here: the sound of the constant rush of the waves and the light on the water and sand as the ocean retreats. And a horizon that allows an extraordinarily long view (20 miles) looking north to Cape Disappointment, Washington, where dunes, beach, and water almost seamlessly merge and blend.