Jagged white peaks rose, totems of winter: Earth’s Master Carver.

I was merely an apprentice spoken to in passing, on one of those Seattle days when darkness comes at 4:30 in the afternoon and mantles your whole life.

I listened to Van Morrison’s T.B. Sheets as I trundled along the pier, just up from where the cruise ships dock when they pass through Elliott Bay, tourists de-boarding only long enough to get coffee and smoked salmon, see the Needle and the Market, through the sad tourist lenses of not knowing.

The wind cut into me like a halibut’s teeth, oysters moped in brackish sludge, aquatic hermaphrodites fascinated with themselves.

The mountains and I fell for each other, both of us northerners by birth.  Both wreathed in mist, starved for sun.