About Walking the Tideline: Loss and Renewal on the Oregon Coast Trail
In Walking the Tideline, Caroline Kurtz solo hikes the rugged, beautiful Oregon Coast—an expedition of isolation, adventure, joy, and grief inside the emotional wilderness of finding one's identity after the death of a loved one.
In her third memoir, Portland-based author Caroline Kurtz travels the Oregon coast on foot in her late sixties, tracing the boundary of sand and salt water, rock and forests, carrying her shelter and food as she navigates the edges of solace and resolution after the death of her husband. As she negotiates the adventures encountered on the trail—leaky tents, hitching rides, chance encounters, and beautiful landscapes—she intertwines historical events with her spiritual experience, giving space for the shattering of an old identity and the planting of a new self, nourished and enlightened by the depths of a profoundly complex and considered life.
Caroline Kurtz lived in Ethiopia from ages 5-18. She returned to teach for six years in Addis Ababa. That story, including boarding school, three armed changes of government, and the shaping of her adventurous personality, is told in her first book, A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing up in America and Ethiopia. She received the Presbyterian Church's Award for Debut Writers for the book. In Today is Tomorrow, her second biography, Caroline and her husband move back to Africa with their family under the umbrella of the Presbyterian Church to work with South Sudanese Refugees. By 1996, millions had been killed, died of starvation, or fled the decades-long civil war ravaging their country. A deeply personal examination of South Sudan at war— and a woman at war with herself—.