![]() ![]() Each cabinet was packed with dozens of drawers, and each drawer held hundreds of fossils in cardboard trays. Metal cabinets filled the basement like library shelves. Sweaty, I would take the dented staff elevator into the basement, where I helped to keep things organized in the invertebrate paleontology lab. A few mornings a week I would pedal up the hill to the university, lock up my bike, and enter the dark brick building. ![]() Which I guess applies less to the house than to its occupants.įor several years I volunteered at the old Burke Museum in Seattle. In the words of a hired coastal engineer, the house’s precarious perch needs not an investment in shoreline armoring but a long-term strategy of “mitigated retreat.” Already there have been nearby landslides. Not only is it built too close to the edge of the bluff, it sits atop a seasonal creek. And we have come to understand that it is undermined anyway by its singular focus on the distant peak. From my writing desk in the corner of the living room, surrounded by concentric scatterings of books, notes, collected shells and bones, toys, plants, paintings, and, beyond the tall windows, wave patterns, cloud patterns, and shorelines, it felt as though I were in the center of the world.īut that hope was not meant to be. The house responded to our breath of life. Before long we were hoping we might buy it. It took time to banish a stale smell we could not identify, something like sun-bleached old clothing. The house had not been lived in for several years when my wife and I moved in. When he walked the beach at night, he would hear rich music rolling off the bluff, mixing with the killdeer’s cries. My uncle told me the house once held a pipe organ. Built decades ago by an interior designer and his musician wife, in the shape of a cross, it sits aslant to the shoreline, oriented neither to sun nor sea but The Mountain itself to the southeast. My own shell, at the moment, is an interesting one. But there sure are a lot of different shelled creatures here. ![]() It does not suggest that it could support a diversity of lifestyles. From a distance, the beach’s geometry is simple. ![]()
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