This time we start out at around 10:15, early for my mother and I but probably not for her father or any other of his generation. "You probably don't need to leave early," he says, "you probably don't have to check in until noon." There's really no point in explaining that the desk clerk will check you in as late as four and that we typically use all that time to get there.
Instead of driving Barbur through the strip-mall nightmare of Burlingame and Tigard, I drive through the neighborhood to 217 and up to Sunset. Once we're past the 217 exit it's not so bad, and it doesn't seem long until we're cruising past the grass fields and isolated clumps of firs of North Plains. The weather is picture-perfect, but at this time I'm still assuming, even pleasantly anticipating, some rain, hopefully when we take our tour of the Nestucca, a windy byway I saved for the drive back to Portland.
The woods around Gales Creek are covered with hazes of fluorescent green and pale pink, the buds of maples and alders pushing their way out of their husks. The Wilson River is high. There are runs of bottle-green, wrinkled water ending in lines of foam. The trees arch over the road in a tunnel as we drive deeper into the woods. The Tillamook Forest Center is closed again, as it has been the other times we've driven Oregon 6, so we look for the next wayside to stop and stretch our legs.
The State of Oregon recently spent a pile of money restoring old trails, building new ones and constructing all kinds of signs and interpretation in the forest. Most of the money I imagine was well-spent, though there's an underlying philosophy in the government approach to nature with which I have irreconcilable differences. The disagreement makes me sardonic whenever I see an example of this sort of conspicuous consumption in the woods, for example a heavily-built interpretive sign or placard that details all the ways we despoil the environment. I expect this feeling when we make a hard right down a steep access road to the well-marked Footbridge Trailhead.
Instead, we discover a newly-graded trail that leads to a 1930s stone stair, built by some highly-skilled journeymen to guide travelers down to the Wilson. At the head we turn and see a pullout that my mother has been looking for for years, each time we drive this stretch of Oregon 6. We always pulled out there to stretch our legs, she said, and there was a stairway up the creek. It seemed improbable; a stairway in the middle of the woods, by a little feeder creek? But I remembered it too. So we turn to look across the highway and there it is, and even longer than I remember it; in fact I can't even see the end. No doubt the same crew built it.
Buried under the mountain of bureaucratic nonsense and weak language, then, is an enduring need, to share the sensation peculiar to the wild places and to be in those wild places. The stair, more than any interpretive sign or trifold brochure, speaks of this need, because as the springs go by it becomes like the basalt boulders in the creek; after all, it's nothing but stone and sand itself. It greens with moss and softens the violation of a smooth asphalt macadam through the valley, and in its permanence and sober lines there's nobility. But most importantly it leads you to the brink and no further; beyond is the open, the landscape shaped over millions of years, not the doodles we make on the surface.
I think all this while I'm taking the stairs and I'm also a little sad that not only won't there be another stairway like this in a place like this, there cannot be another. Things are too big, too larded with paperwork and cautionary language, too overtaxed. The access is too easy, too smooth, and all that's left is an endless iteration and interpretation of a dwindling core of forest and plain. These and other such gloomy thoughts chase through as I leave the last step. But the river rinses it all away, the great, cold reality of the water and amber mud, the gray-white trunks over the basalt gorges. We're still just apes in a forest, even though we think the forest is of our own devising. The forest doesn't care what we think.
Pretty soon the forest is interrupted by pale green squares of clear-cut, and eventually even this slopes away into a bottomland of wire fences and dairy farms. We're driving through the land around Tillamook and there's a heavy odor of cowshit. In town we wonder where the Mode O'Day is, a dusty storefront that remained incredibly unchanged through the decades, even into the eighties. I guess it was on the northbound of the north-south couplet, hidden from us, if it hadn't closed in the meantime.
In Hebo I pull over, thinking that I've missed our turn, but my memory's faulty; we don't need to turn til we reach Cloverdale, a tiny hamlet marked by a plywood sign shaped like a cow. Coming into town the cow is facing you; when you leave town the sign reappears, this time the rear of the cow. Rural Oregon humor. At a shell shop I turn right and we cross into a back country of winding black water and long, low barns. The woods march right down to the road on the right and we turn towards them at the end of the detour. Along the road now are houses spaced close together and we turn at an intersection of neighborhood streets.
Ahead of us now is the Nestucca, and beyond it Pacific City. We cross the bridge and turn south on Brooten Road. The buildings are shops now, some with new signs. Pacific City has done well for itself. There's the summer people that come to Kiwanda and the new beachhouses, the surfers and all the customers of the Pelican mega-pub between the beachouses and the cape. We turn left at a gravel driveway and stop at the Grateful Bread, a bakery/restaurant that's become a traditional stop. This time I called ahead because we'd visited on off days the last few trips. We both order the cheese nut loaf sandwich, probably the best thing on the menu, and a cup of soup. There's plenty of tables but enough customers to keep the space lively and a drowsy warmth in the south-facing annex where we're sitting. The annex is still fairly new and covered with beautiful yellow cedar tongue-and-groove siding.
In Neskowin we stop at a small but well-appointed wayside where there's a paved path that crosses Hawk Creek. Its lower reach winds through town and you can look down the channel to the sandy beach beyond and a hotel casting its shadow from the south. In the white square of beach are walkers in red and blue parkas and dogs loping with their noses above the sand.
At Lincoln City I turn east at East Devils Lake Road, bypassing the most hectic part of downtown in favor of a quiet little community of well-maintained houses around the lake. There's also a busy campground at the south end of the loop, just east of the junction with US 101. Then it's through Newport and across the magnificent Yaquina Bay Bridge, with its gothic concrete piers and sweeping green supports.
About halfway between Newport and Waldport to the south, where the Alsea River flows into the sea, is Ona Beach State Park and Beaver Creek State Natural Area. The Park, on the oceanward side of 101, is well-established and a routine stop. Beaver Creek is a brand-new park and the main object this trip. The visitors center (closed on our arrival, of course) is about a mile from the highway, on a paved country road. You cross 101 from the Ona Beach parking lot and follow the road opposite, bearing left at South Beaver Creek Road; you turn right almost immediately at the sign and drive up a steep hill to a parking lot and small grey frame building. There's a heavy, sheltered signboard with a park map and description. We walk around the south verge of the hill to see the wetland below, tan and green and cut into large triangular pieces by black sloughs. By now we've already been to Ona Beach and the sun is westering, so we save the hike for the way back.
Ona Beach is changed. A slough of tea-colored water that lined the beach access has been replaced by hard packed sand; when I first see the flat surface I think i'm looking at scum. Then I see the ridges blown by the wind and dog and shoe tracks. The entire 1/8-mile, ten-foot-wide channel has filled. In the picnic area and on two sides of the block toilets is a lake bordered by a beargrass-and-salal marsh, with one picnic table and cast-iron grill stranded in the middle. We marvel at the changed landscape a while, then take the asphalt trail to a heavily-built footbridge over Beaver Creek. Here the channel hasn't changed; the river is still smooth and wide with pine branches and cones visible on the sandy bottom. On the far bank the silver trunks of the pine snags stand over the water. Later a kingfisher or heron will roost in the branches.
We cross the bridge and walk through a saddle of soft sand in the foredune, then onto the broadness of the beach. Beaver Creek makes a vast brown fan to our right, filled with glistening cobble. Ahead of us and receding into haze on our left is the blaze of sun and beach and an orange headland covered with shore pines advancing from the forest by the bridge. We walk south along the packed sand and look at the whorls and chiseled bowls in the cliff of sandstone. Here and there I see the rounded edges of what look like immense sandstone fossils of clams, imbedded in the cliff. On the way back to the trailhead I reiterate my theory, an idea I've bored my mother with several times in the past.
By the time I turn right at Overleaf Lodge's big wooden sign the sun is still high; to us it seems that we still have half the day, so used are we to fall and winter trips whose first days end in darkness or sky the color of lilac. We walk into the lobby and I breathe in with approval; the place still has that sweet, musty smell with an undercurrent of salt. The room, too, has this smell, only closer, and the combination of the warm air, the feeling of carpet under my shoes and the sharp shadows on the rocky beach made me drowsy.
A walk on the beach is the obvious cure; and I'm curious to see the changes in a beaver pond constructed a couple years ago, when they dammed a creek that flowed through a culvert under the trail. The pond had submerged a willow forest and it wasn't long before a heron found the spot and claimed it, huddling on a silver log in the center and staring at the black water. The pond is changed, grown slightly and the higher head of pressure can be heard rushing through the culvert and fanning over the pebbles, shells and beargrass on the seaward side of the trail. The stream quickly thins to a slimy veil over the basalt that slopes toward the tidepools. Past the huddled groups of basalt loaves the ocean gulps and fizzes in vast mussel beds and beyond that the bottle-green waves recede to a blurred line, dotted here and there with the silhouette of a commercial fisher.
We take the beach trail through a final tunnel of salal and sitka and look through the oval to the sandy beach beyond. One winter the cobbles at the base of the foredune had been overwhelmed with sand and the rusty spring and wheel rim of an ancient trailer could be seen jutting out, an invitation to imagine the titanic storm-driven wave that put it there. This time the sand covers everything to the base of the dune.
We wander back to the hotel, stalling to run the clock down to the dinner hour. When it's late enough we walk to the Adobe and past the cluttered gift shop and water-stained USCGS chart of Yaquina Bay. We sit by a window and stare out at the spray and quivering bunches of pink. A big man in a buffalo plaid sweatshirt and battered hat probes in the gravel shoals between basalt boulders with an eight-foot pole with a tiny scoop at the end. When it's quite dark he trudges up the steep access trail and holds an object in front of a giant high-intensity lamp. It is an agate as big as an egg and it glows a brilliant orange in the light.
That night a loutish guest leaves his television on at high volume until ten thirty, but after he shuts it off there is quiet, heavy hotel quiet, broken only by a loud compressor in the tiny bar refrigerator and the boom of the surf.
My phone wakes me up; the hotel alarm clock is a lifeless hulk except for the LCD display, with one button missing to reveal the ugly black stub underneath. Pressing the "SET" and "TIME" buttons does nothing, and there is a suspicious lack of action and depth of play.
The dining hall is pretty empty when we walk in, but it fills up soon enough. I spot a heavy-set man with a distinctly unreflective look wearing too-new wellies and a wife who is basically a female version of himself; I figure this is the guy that was blasting his television last night. I briefly reproach myself; I really have no way of knowing. But I recant. Of course it was him.
The weather is fine, with a cool breeze and bright sun that flattens out the jagged waves. We take another walk on the beach and drive to the local grocery to pick up some cans for a food drive the hotel had joined. My mother banters with a middle-aged woman at the checkstand about the fine weather and inserts that it is her birthday. The woman congratulates her and utters a pleasantry about ordering similar weather for her birthday. This grocery, with its three checkstands and tiny parking lot, is the kind of place that probably witnessed many such exchanges on many such mornings.
William Sullivan, an Oregon writer who specializes in hiking guides and travel books, has been the source for many of our walks over the years, despite a tendency to give confusing and bizarrely-detailed directions and maps. I stumbled on one of his online articles about a new trail in Yachats that connects the bayfront with the network of trails on Cape Perpetua. Featured was a statue of a blind indian woman who had been dragged along the route by U.S. soldiers as a returning refugee from what was then a giant reservation. She had been grabbed from a ranch where she had lived as the guardian of a young girl. At a bridge in the wooded foothills over US 101 is a small statue of her and a placard that excerpts one of the soldiers' journal. It is a place the horror seems to have leached out of completely, with grey-green shadows on the water's surface and a pleasant, musty-sweet smell. But the marker is there with the journal entries in black and white. Someone had hand-lettered a sign laminated with plastic: "War is Over/ Peace if You Want It" and lay it at the foot of the statue.
The trail is a legally ambiguous "conservation easement" that crosses several private lots; while I'm toiling up a narrow dirt cut I wonder how many years were spent negotiating. A good third of the trail follows neighborhood streets. You turn on a 1/4-mile stub at the south end of town and cross the highway after a careful study of a blind turn to the south. Then the trail follows several steep ridges and crosses a wooded headland before intersecting a wide gravel road and making its descent to the creek. From the woods there are many fine views of the gray and white basalt shelves that jut into the water and an improbable Richardsonian Romanesque house recently built that's hidden from the road. The sea boils under its square of lawn. Farther north, in the neighborhood segment of the trail, is a view of a futuristic beach house that's built like an airport control tower or a salad spinner with its eyes out to the ocean.
Normally we would drive over the next headland and up a steep grade to the Cape Perpetua Visitors center, walk in the carpeted lobby and glance at the books and maps, then back out and down one of the paved trails through the salal, perhaps to a churn to listen to the water socking into some hidden reticulation in the rock. This time we're fatigued and sit at one of the picnic tables by the parking lot and eat our spread cheese sandwiches and apples.
In Portland I bought a bag of groceries to carry us through those inevitable stretches through the mountains and between towns where there's nothing but byways or lonely pullouts. Even in the towns the choices are few for those who like to eat in restaurants. In Yachats the choices for years were limited to four or five restaurants, two for food a cut above a burger or chicken fried steak. One was the Adobe, a short walk from the hotel and the standard resort, or La Serre, a more expensive, though not necessarily better, restaurant by the post office. It did feature a couple reliable menu items and a guitarist who sounded in his singing and playing a bit like Glenn Yarbrough. A couple years ago it closed and was replaced by a more standard expensive restaurant. We stopped there their first year and were basically unsatisfied, though maybe not finally.
The plans for the day we stopped at Cape Perpetua were predicated on this lack of variety in the local restaurants: couldn't we at least try to eat someplace besides downtown Yachats? The weekend before our trip I searched online for restaurants near the Lodge and settled on a locale that seemed to offer restaurants in bunches, as opposed to any particular eating place. I'd been disappointed before by tiny, full dining rooms and long waits with no other place close by. Florence was the winner. This was not too difficult: there were plenty of short walks and state parks between Yachats and Florence (as there are up and down the entire Oregon coast) and specifically there was the Darlingtonia wayside, a botanical area that featured a boardwalk through a vast bog of pitcher plants.
That morning I had found a Sullivan hike at Sutton Creek, just north of Florence. It followed a twisted creek in the middle of a dune terrain that had captured my imagination during a visit to Clay Myers Natural Area out of Cloverdale. That trail had wound through sand hills covered with manzanita, salal and giant rhododendrons; in places the growth was so thick and high that it made a dark tunnel over the trail. Where the branches opened up again the trail continued as a river of yellow sand.
The access road to Sutton Creek is unusually long; I hadn't really studied the route and my mental map was based on a careless reading of the hike description that morning. The parking lot at the trailhead is unassuming, with a weathered wooden sign and block toilet at the base of a ridge of salal and shore pine. On the north side of the lot the pines advance on level ground to the curb and sand trails snake north and east. We choose the short hike that follows the river a ways and loops back through the forest. The going is easy at first, with gentle grades and plenty of curves to break the monotony. Pretty soon the trees are replaced by salal and rhododendron and we can see Sutton Creek through the clearings.
The trail eventually finds the river and follows its windings to the south and west. After a longish walk through tall rhododendrons the trail opens up and leads to a small footbridge over a dry stream. On the other side of the bridge and around a shoulder of rhododendron is Baldoc's Meadow, the site of a busy resort in the '30s, long given over to the grass and termites. The meadow is a wide strip of grass on the west side of the creek, with broad curves venturing over the water. Along the meadow the creek takes on the dimensions of a river, with a flat surface and a bottom of amber sand. A covered wooden sign marks the meadow and features a short history of the resort. Here, according to Sullivan's directions, we could continue on a much longer hike or loop back through the pines to the parking lot. What I took to be a few hundred feet is actually a good third of the hike, around endless curves and sand hills through a forest of giant rhododendron and pine. At the place the trail leaves the meadow there's a short path that ends in a heavy steel gate painted yellow. Beyond the gate is a concrete curb and asphalt road, in fact the access road. The winding trail through the woods follows the road but never passes close enough to break through.
The day after we returned I discovered that there was a path from the meadow to the Darlingtonia bog we had visited before the hike, but the memory of what we'd seen of the bog made the discovery more of a sad reminder. Some workers had cut several of the pines that grew in the bog and made a brown and yellow desert of a good third of the plants. Here and there you could see paths of flattened plants, and others that leaned tiredly. The size of the destruction was abrupt and shocking and it was the first time I'd ever seen the bog like that. I assume that the State would use judgement in managing such an important botanical area, and still do despite the appearance of butchery. I'm tempted to visit in the fall to convince myself that the ugliness was only temporary.
When we return to the car there are still hours of daylight before we have to be in downtown Florence. We drive down 101 thinking to stop in a wayside or find an interesting drive; I had thought to visit Tahkenitch Lake south of town, but now that seems too far to go. Then it seems wise to drive to the restaurants and complete our mental map of the downtown.
They are on a row along an old commercial street under the south end of the Siuslaw Bay Bridge, set in among 1900-era white and pale yellow wooden storefronts. I remember a certain long, low fish house standing out on the dock; this time, too, it is nearly empty. We find the highway again and turn south. In a tall stand of spruce about two miles south of town we see the brown sign marking Woahink Lake; on the strength of the name alone I turn in. The park is large but unremarkable apart from the lake, and there's no auto tour apart from the access loop. There is a route around the lake, so we turn off the highway and into a sleepy neighborhood like the one around Devil's Lake in Lincoln City. Not for the first or the last time, I fantasize about a trim ranch style on the shore, with perhaps a small boathouse with a well-worn eight-foot aluminum motorboat.
The light is a rich yellow grading to gold when we turn back onto the highway; time enough for one more stop. I had seen the sign for Honeyman Park opposite the Woahink access road and remembered some snapshots I'd seen of the lake and some grand log shelters there. We turn at the sign and drive a short leg through the woods. The trees open up a bit to reveal a long, curving park loop anchored by a massive stone lodge with shake roof and log roofbeams. We park in front of the lodge and I admire the great stones in the walls and the pine beams. A short trail to the beach leads to a wood equipment shed and new swimming dock shaped like a T and pointing to a heavily-wooded shore opposite. South and west the water disappears in a storm of light and a distant line of floats resembles a glittering necklace.
Back at the parking lot I had seen another shake roof just north of the lodge, peeking out of the trees. We make for it and find a stout hexagonal shelter around a stone chimney venting three stone ovens that project like spokes on a wheel. Opposite the ovens and under the eaves of the shelter are sinks set in countertops made of eight-inch-thick beams finished and doweled together with glue, so that the sinks are completely contained within the wooden block. The grain is a rich yellow, made glossy by years of spar varnish. Today we see no one and only one other car in the lot, a full-size brand-new red pickup. I imagine the shouting and screaming, the echoing voices in the lodge (actually a dining hall and concession), the crackling sound of tires down the access road, the buzz of insects high in the spruces that would fill the space in a few months.
In Florence we find a place to park just off Nopal Street at the docks and take a walk to a tree-shaded city park in the shadow of two opposite storefronts. Back of the walk is an old grandstand with a whale weathervane, and beyond that the green and gold of the Siuslaw and a few rotting pilings. We walk to the seawall's edge and look out at the water and the distant arches of the bay bridge.
At Ona Beach I had held out the promise of a kingfisher, a bird I'd seen often perching high above the slough between the 101 bridge and the beach, or clattering downstream. We had looked and listened but found no sign. And then again at Sutton Creek I had said that this was prime habitat for kingfishers: a lazy river through a forest of tall spruces and woodpecker snags. Still, no clattering call, no flash of grey-blue and white along the river.
But now, at the last moment, as we stand looking out at the pilings and the calm water, he finally makes his appearance, sitting on one of the pilings and looking unconcerned. We watch him for long minutes; he's obliging and moves his head occasionally, but stays essentially motionless. He seems to be sunbathing. When we walk back toward the street and down the ramp to the marina we hear him clattering on his run upriver. We stroll down the pier and admire two big, no-nonsense fishing boats moored there, then back into the bright sun on the permanent moorages and the sailing and working boats.
I'm vindicated at the restaurant; they are full with no chance of a table in the next hour and space only at the bar. The manager is alert and friendly and gives us a recommendation for a sister restaurant and a hastily written note to give us ten percent off any entree. This place is across the street and we find it nearly as full, but with a table by the window and tucked away in a corner under a conventional painting of a deer in a forest and in front of an unused door. The bar is just a few feet away and the crowd is partly tourists, partly voluble locals shouting at each other over the background noise. We have some fish that is very good and my mother amuses herself with the shouted comments of a certain compact salesman type at the end of the bar.
The sky doesn't darken until we're rounding cape Perpetua; the air is clear and we can see the giant lens eye of Heceta Head light turning in its glass tower. We pull out at a concrete wall and I take some high-speed snapshots. Back at the room we eat a hunk of chocolate cake from the restaurant; in the mundane setting of the hotel room it loses most of its luster. We finish it though.
The television thumps and mouths cottony vowels til ten forty-five this time, but after a few isolated bumps and sounds of running water the hotel is quiet again.
The weather continues fine and warm the next day. After breakfast my mother thinks to walk down a sandy saddle to a broad shelf of basalt that ends in a few warm tidepools. Normally I walk down to the sea as soon as we've checked into our room, but this trip had been one of forests and streams, with hardly a thought given to the ocean. So we pick our way over the rocks, peering under ledges and out to the distant rocks completely covered in mussels and barnacles. At their base you can see purple and orange starfish hunting for anemones. In the last line of breakers is a chain of orange floats dragging someone's crab pots across the submerged rocks. The clusters of floats are scattered in a broken line far down to the south. A few pelicans skim the swells; a cormorant stretches its neck into a spike and dives into the jagged green.
On the way back we pass several guests walking their dogs; one man with two full-sized grey poodles and a woman with an impatient sheltie. In spite of the heavy dog traffic there's very few of the piles of shit that are so common on the grass parking strips in Portland. The optimist would say that this is because the guests and residents want to keep the beach the way it is and pick up after their dogs, but the reality is probably a worker in hotel green questing around with a scoop and bag.
Some of these same workers are suited up in jumpsuits and on ladders leaned against the building, maintaining the ever-deteriorating trim and siding. Large orange patches of new cedar shakes are visible on the upper floors, and I see a few shingles with ragged edges. The second a building is completed here the aging begins, and it shows almost right away.
The packing is suspiciously easy and I have a correspondingly longer moment of anxiety about leaving things behind, about eight miles north of the lodge on 101. But after a stop and a cursory check of the baggage it goes away. The sun is high and bright and as the anxiety lifts it seems to draw the outside in; I can finally study the nodding shorepines over the road, the darkened windows of the flea market in Waldport.
At Ona Beach we turn right and up Beaver Creek Road to the visitors center. The doors are locked again, not to open until noon. I'm exasperated. At least there's a map on the sign. So we study it and mentally swing it around to match the landscape. The trail begins to our right and leads down and to the left. It amounts to a grass road, wide enough for a car. It cuts through the alders and blackberries down to a spruce wood. About halfway down a few peeps rise to a confusion of peeps and chits and the branches of a large but fragile shrub are filled with chickadees and kinglets. We watch them hop from branch to branch and hang upside down to get at the mites and tiny beetles there.
At the bottom of the hill we walk through a cloud of acrid odor, the product of some giant skunk cabbage growing in a ditch under the road. The trail narrows and continues under a layer of chips. On either side tall, narrow sitka spruces grow. After a big bend in the trail and a tiny footbridge the trail climbs again and we step on crushed rock. The trees are behind us and we're walking on the shoulder of Beaver Creek Road above a skunk cabbage bog fronting a hedge of undergrowth. Beyond is the wetland. The ditch fills and rises to meet the road; the shoulder widens and merges with a lawn bordered by big basalt stones. On the lawn is a covered sign. This is the eastern access to the wetland, with space enough for several cars.
We follow the mowed trail into the sedge. At first the trail is firm if damp, but pretty soon the grass disappears under a layer of cratered mud and black water. My mother complains that the water has risen above her thick soles and is seeping into the uppers of her new walking shoes. I suggest we turn around, but by now the damage is done, so we push on to a hastily-made plywood dock and molded plastic float and look around. Somewhere to the side of the trail a violent dispute is going on in the language of red-wing blackbirds, rapid and liquid and punctuated with weird clicks and whirrs. I can see with a kind of frustrated resignation our wellies, safe and sound in the rear of the car. It's not worth it to climb the hill, put on the boots and walk back down, so we determine to wear them next time.
After this stop the landscape is familiar: Newport, Lincoln City, Devil's Lake. The giant green cables of the Yaquina Bay Bridge and the glassy hieroglyphics of the tidelands below are still startling, though, even after all this time.
About three and a half miles north of Neskowin we make our last turn from the coast. Then it's through the fields of Pacific City and Cloverdale, with the woods pushing in from either side. At Beaver we swing right at the Shell station instead of turning north to push on to Tillamook. Today we're taking the Nestucca River National Back Country Byway, a twisting and ostensibly paved route through the dripping woods of the Nestucca River.
At first the road is remarkably good, and I begin to think that it will stay that way for the duration. The campsites, on the other hand, are typical BLM constructions: very plain with a minimum of signage and the amenities that car campers in Oregon State Parks and National Forests come to take for granted. These are the places used by fishermen and hunters, who care more about the location of the site than things like faucets and new vault toilets. The car campers who are jealous of their privacy and want solitude, too, look for these sorts of sites. Three of the four we visited had no water or garbage pickup.
On the other hand, only one had any visitors, and they, besides one or two other cars, were the only human beings we saw during the tour. And at Alder Glen you can camp by a spectacular cascade of worn basalt that flows into a pale green rapid.
About a third of the way along the route the road begins to buckle and exhibit broad patches. My expectations are brought down to the ground again, but I have good reasons for thinking the pavement will continue to our exit from the mountains and beyond. At about two thirds along, though, I see a yellow sign that reads "Pavement Ends". I feel betrayed and actually curse out loud. I pull out the forest map and study it. Sure enough, a good ten or twelve miles is shown as a grey dotted line: improved gravel, but still gravel. How could I have missed that? My mother suggests turning around, but that means at least twenty miles back to Beaver. I can see three-quarter gravel whizzing up like bullets and creating tiny craters in the new silver paint on her Yaris. I curse and hem and haw; my mother ends it by saying that she doesn't mind the gravel if I don't.
After about three miles of hard packed dirt and a little gravel the pavement appears again and continues to the highway. Even forest maps can be wrong, or if not wrong, out of date. We visit one last campsite: Dovre, at the end of a big bend the Nestucca makes to the south to skirt a mountain. This site is more commodious than the others and a fitting punctuation mark to the drive, with a big, solid shelter by the river covering a couple tables and a concrete fire pit. We walk the camp loop to find a faucet, but we see none. Then, as we walk back to the car, I see a brass faucet on a small roofed structure that looks like an outhouse. There's no door, though, so we assume it's a pump housing.
Pretty soon the woods open again and we're driving on the hogbacks, with patches of tall trees fronting clearcuts on the lower slopes. In the distance we can see the valley with its squares of pale green and pink, cut by roads and ditches. To the south is the giant McGuire Reservoir, at the head of the Nestucca. At its little brother Haskins Reservoir the road becomes a rural route and straightens. The next town is Carlton.
At Carlton we decide to head south to McMinnville and investigate McMenamin's Hotel Oregon, a squat but handsome old brick hotel in the center of town. I'd seen ads for the place and its terra cotta and tan turn-of-the-last-century flavor appealed to me. It's shockingly easy to find a place to park and we walk into the bar. It is impressive, with great square columns and elaborate stem-and-bowl lighting, with the bar running about forty feet down one wall and a doorway at either end. The stereo is playing oldies, but oldies that I listened to when I was a student at Linfield in the early nineties. I've long since ceased to notice when mass media outlets pander to my demographic, but here, in this setting, it's more than a little weird, to be the geezer and the target of all this sophisticated marketing. On the other hand, it's a slow day in this big, empty bar and the waitress is listening to her music. I can accept that both scenarios are equally true.
She's nice and the food is adequate if not spectacular. My mother talks to the concierge and we get the key to a room and look around. It's just my kind of place, with uneven floors that actually creak, a great soft bed and big double-hung sash windows that actually open. We take the stairs to the rooftop bar and scan the rooftops. Somewhere, southaway, is the college. Suddenly I just want to get the hell out of there. There's nothing for me here, nothing at all. And when we leave I'm actually relieved that I didn't have to see the college.
Tigard is busy, but not too bad by metro-area standards. But all I can think about are the byways and rolling dairy farms, the sandy tunnels of rhododendrons and the docks by Nopal Street. Compared to these scenes the traffic is ugly and it's like swimming through a syrup of everyone else's petty anxiety. The cars are all following unnecessarily close and taking stupid chances and it's a sharp reminder of why we left in the first place.
My mother says as much a couple days later and I realize aloud that some of that calm that presides over the hazy creek in the dunes is portable, and in fact is not a thing that you have to carry at all but resides just underneath in what is, not what you're trying for or what ought to be. Apparently it is a reduction, a cutting through the things that obscure.
I did keep one of the fossil clams, not a gigantic one but one about the size of an ordinary steamer. There's an arc of white and a fan of faint ribs and the stone is smooth and light grey. The whole thing fits nicely in the palm of your hand.
View Trip to Coast in a larger map
