My dog is a terrier, that comes from terroir, earth, and sounds like terror

Today the ocean looked like the beast revealed, dark inky gray, but transparent enough to suggest the threat of suffocating depth, with a skin of oily black surfaces promising tactile superiority. What it offered, so much was clear, stood in excess of anything you could sacrifice in return. This afternoon, we saw rain fall for the first time in months — sudden, brief rain that failed to soak anything well. It did manage to send clouds so low that I suppose the sea felt safe and veiled enough to shed its garments, its reflected glory of colour. No more blues and greens, all tossed away now, stripped naked to ink, unfathomable, the heaving surface suggesting an abyss of extreme weight. It wasn’t lovely at all, although it was attractive in a perverse way: what if you tried to match your puny size to its heft? What if you fell into this?

Melancholia, the personification, has a blackened complexion, even though she is typically represented as a European. A choleric fit also causes the skin of whites to change colour, to darken to purple. I suppose they’re twins, melancholy and rage: girl and boy, perhaps. If oceans were the earth’s face, then masks dropped away this afternoon in the Juan de Fuca Strait.

Yet I was in a great good mood as I walked my dog along the cliffs, flinching at the lightning off the shores of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. I can feel the solid ground between the ocean and me through my soles; and besides, it’s been a long time since it last rained.