A humpback whale surfaced a hundred feet away, so close that whirlpools and waves rocked my paddleboard. For several days, I had hoped for a close encounter with a whale. While kneeling on my board and clutching its sides to keep from capsizing, I felt something I hadn’t expected: fear. The humpback surfaced and blew three times, lifted its flukes …

After three years of avoiding COVID, it finally caught me. I got a Paxlovid prescription and went backpacking on the Olympic coast to battle the COVID demons at the ocean’s edge. Was it my fevered brain, or was the shoreline at Cedar Creek with its wave-sculpted sea stacks surreal? Did I actually see multiple orca pods hunting on two different days, …

Near the High Divide of Olympic National Park, I entered the sapphire waters of Hoh Lake and snorkeled with thousands of pollywogs. These tadpoles were all squiggling in the same direction: clockwise. I matched my swimming pace to their movement, and together we traveled through the shallows along the shore. Being part of this mass migration was as thrilling as …