Editor's Note: Musings on a sunset stroll

Enough to rouse me from the television set for a low-tide stroll that, for all its twilight beauty, was most remarkable for what it lacked. At the time of day when bluster is almost a given on the coast, the sea was holding its breath Sunday evening.

My plan for a quick down-and-back dissolved. The second half of the Steelers game could wait. I’d been watching it in bizarre fashion anyway, with a chair pulled close to the TV so I could follow the action on one of eight miniature video feeds on what my satellite provider calls a “sports mix.” This is thanks to the Eureka NBC affiliate refusing to grant a waiver allowing me to watch its network on an L.A. station since DirectTV doesn’t provide the local channels, but all that seemed trivial in the pink-hued surf.

After gazing at the spectacle from above, I started along the sand determined to take in whatever the darkening sky had left to show. The stillness was almost eerie, as if I were on a tropical island. That thought took me back to Wednesday, when an earthquake in the South Pacific swamped the Samoas and prompted a tsunami alert here.

I passed a beached pelican that had taken its final plunge. There’s always something dead on Pebble Beach, where sea lions and even bigger marine mammals wash ashore after their lives have played out on the outcrops of Castle Rock.

The flat expanse of South Beach has always seemed more civilized. I wondered how Saturday’s wind and Sunday’s stillness affected the Noll Longboard Classic. I should have stopped by, but a laziness had kicked in when I awoke to a weekend alone. So I rationalized that I’d done my part by making sure the surfing extravaganza got prominent space on the front pages in advance.

The illusion of a craggy mountain range beyond Castle Rock and her attendants persisted. A first-time visitor might even think them more than clouds lit up by the departed sun, a notion that set me to musing about how we all define reality through our own limited perception.

What would it be like to again confront life through the eyes of a newborn? A birth, after all, was the reason I’d be trudging back to an empty house. My wife Laura was in Spokane, where her first grandchild was born Friday. Perhaps my becoming a step-grandfather had as much to do with this philosophical stroll as the world-class sunset that was fading fast.

It was time to go home and make sure the Steelers maintained their halftime lead. Then I’d make calls to check on the two age extremes of my family, an infant in a Spokane hospital and my parents in a Salem retirement apartment.

I can’t be staring at the ocean all the time.