One Man's Beach
Commentary
By Matt Love
[Learn more about Matt.]
Time to fit "Dr. Beach" with a malpractice wetsuit?
[Posted June 23, 2009]
This May, a man who calls himself Dr. Beach announced his choices for “America’s Best Beaches 2009,” including number one. The announcement made headlines on the Web and no doubt the good doctor toured the morning chit chat shows and giggled with the hosts.
Here is Dr. Beach’s list (and you can read it for yourself at www.drbeach.org):
Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii
Siesta Beach, Sarasota, Florida
Coopers Beach, Southampton, New York
Coronado Beach, San Diego, California
Hamoa Beach, Maui, Hawaii
Main Beach, East Hampton, New York
Cape Hatteras,Outer Banks, North Carolina
Cape Florida State Park, Key Biscayne, Florida
Coast Guard Beach,Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Beachwalker Park, Kiawah Island, South Carolina
Notice anything missing?
Doctor Beach, whose real name is Dr. Stephen Leatherman, is the author of America’s Best Beaches. He is also professor and Director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University, and since 1991, has issued his list.
Below are his picks for the number one American beach going back to 1991:
2008 Caladesi Island State Park, Dunedin/Clearwater, Florida
2007 Ocracoke Lifeguard Beach- Outer Banks, North Carolina
2006 Fleming Beach Park- Maui, Hawaii
2005 Fort DeSoto Park - North Beach, St Petersburg, Florida
2004 Hanauma Bay, Oahu, Hawaii
2003 Kaanapali, Hawaii
2002 St. Joseph Peninsula State Park, Florida
2001 Poipu Beach Park, Hawaii
2000 Mauna Kea Beach, Hawaii
1999 Wailea Beach, Hawaii
1998 Kailua Beach Park, Hawaii
1997 Hulopoe, Hawaii
1996 Lanikai Beach, Hawaii
1995 St. Andrews SRA, Florida
1994 Grayton Beach SRA, Florida
1993 Hapuna, Hawaii
1992 Bahia Honda SRA, Florida
1991 Kapalua Bay Beach, Hawaii
Notice anything missing?
From what I can tell from his inadequate web site, Dr. Beach makes his choices based on whether or not the water is warm enough (for humans without wetsuits) to recreate in and if there are nearby amenities for beachgoers.
Wrong Dr. Beach. Very wrong. May I share Dr. Love’s second opinion for what constitutes a “Best American Beach?”
It’s really quite simple: The beach must be publicly owned, free to use, access guaranteed by law, and remote and rainy enough so that if a person desired, he could walk, run or light a fire in total solitude (meaning no other humans around) at any time of the day or night.
I just pretty much described all of Oregon’s ocean beaches.
I can’t tell from Dr. Beach’s web site if he has in fact ever visited Oregon and experienced this state’s “great birthright,” as former Oregon Governor Oswald West called our publicly-owned beaches.
Really, Doctor, you should come west. I’ll be happy to tour you around and tell you the heroic stories of Oswald West, Samuel Boardman, Tom McCall, Matt Kramer, Bob Straub and the other Oregon immortals who saved our ocean beaches from privatization, cabanas, espresso stands, fast food carts, and arrogant security guards patrolling for trespassers.
I might even take you to my favorite Oregon beach, Nestucca Spit. It truly is sacred Oregon ground.
But Doctor you will have to rise very early if you want to ramble with me and the dogs. And by the way, bad weather never deters us; the harder the rain falls, the more we dig it. Oh, and I should warn you: should you pop open an umbrella or don an iPod, there’s going to be big trouble. The sight of either one of these on the beach triggers something savage in the dogs.
Of graduation rites, and rights
Newport High School seniors celebrate ‘Oregon’s great birthright’
[Posted June 10, 2009]
I parked in front of my favorite place in Newport — the Fishermen’s Memorial — in Yaquina Bay State Park. It was 5:17 in the morning and drizzle fell. The sun seemed as hidden in the closet as the shag carpet in a coastal motel room, which was just about right on the first day of June. I turned off the headlights, exited the cab, and drank black coffee while I waited.
Minutes later, Ross and India drove up in his Honda and emerged with a dozen donuts baked fresh from JC Market. Then Brittany skidded her Plymouth Roadster to a stop across from me. More cars raced into the parking lot, coming from the north, south, virtually all of them nicer than my truck. Shouldn’t a teacher own a better vehicle than his students? And doesn’t anyone take driver’s training anymore?
We gathered near my truck, 40 seniors, my English students, on the last Monday of their high school careers. The first annual Newport High School Senior Walk was about to begin. We would take to the holy sand and freely recreate on what former Oregon Governor Oswald West called “our great birthright”— Oregon’s publicly owned beaches. These students might have paid $3.50 for latte on their way here, but they didn’t have to pay a cent to walk on an ocean beach.
They knew the story. They knew how decades ago West and other politicians steered Oregon on a different course, a better course, to protect beaches from privatization. And here these Oregonians were, most of them half asleep, primed to exercise their great birthright.
Yes, they knew the story well because I had beaten it into them like a propaganda minister from a fascist state. They had asked me to shut up about the sanctity of Oregon’s publicly owned beaches but I never would. How many words had we written about it? Not enough!
It was time: 5:30. Let the walk begin! Onward to the sea! To quote Marvin Gaye, “Let’s get it on!” If I saw an iPod or a cell phone in use, someone wasn’t going to graduate.
But before we began, I asked someone to repeat West’s famous quote: “No local selfish interest should be permitted, through politics or otherwise, to impair this great birthright of our people.” Jessica tried and butchered it, but that hardly mattered. What mattered was that my students were here at dawn!
We descended the stairs and passed a homeless man asleep in the sand. India and Brittany ran ahead and carried something in a bag. Out came a cylindrical object I couldn’t make out that Brittany staked into the sand. She kneeled down to it and her hand went to a pocket. Seconds later, a bottle rocket lifted off, screamed, exploded, and sparks lit up the sky and scattered to the ground. Great! We had just broken the law!
When the cops arrived, we’d quote Oswald West as our only defense. We would need no other and no Oregon jury would ever convict us.
We walked to the North Jetty in no discernible formation. Serena ran to the water’s edge and stared west. Alex’s dog went nuts. Light began to defeat the darkness and the lighthouse almost looked sexy as she came into full view. We talked and laughed. A few girls skipped. Anna made a goofy face. Five species of birds flew around us and I wanted to run wild so I did. Others joined me. We ran with no particular place to go, the finest way to run.
It was time to leave. First period, you know? We rallied at Pig N’ Pancake and ate together as friends, Oregonians, and countrymen. I bought them all breakfast because they were seniors graduating in five days, because they had worked so hard and so well for me this year, and because they had woken up very early and met me on the beach.
Peace on Alsea Spit
[Posted May 27, 2009]
[Check this week's story about the Newport High School literary review. Matt Love serves as NHS English and creative writing teacher.]
One of my favorite Oregon coast stories unfolded near Waldport come 70 years ago and most people have never heard about it.
But they should.
It is a little-known fact rarely, if ever, presented in high school history textbooks: during World War II, 43,000 men declared themselves conscientious objectors (COs) and refused combatant military service. Almost half of this total came from the historically pacifist Quaker, Mennonite and Church of the Brethren denominations located primarily in the Midwest.
This astonishing 43,000 figure included 25,000 non-combatants (many who served as medics), 6,000 prisoners (men refusing service officially denied CO status), and 12,000 official COs who ended up in the Civilian Public Service. The CPS was established to put COs to work in a variety of public works projects for the duration of the war. In the West, this work entailed planting trees, fighting fires and building roads. Several COs died performing these dangerous labors.
The National Service Board of Religious Objectors, authorized by the government to administer the CPS, established 143 camps across the United States to incarcerate the COs. CPS Camp 56, known as Camp Angel, was situated south of Waldport on the central Oregon coast, near Alsea Spit. Camp Angel earned a unique designation in that it was chartered as the only Fine Arts Program camp in the entire CPS system.
During its three years of operation, Camp Angel’s 25-30 active members of the Fine Arts Program oversaw the production of many original plays, crafts made from a loom and wood lathe, and publication of mainly small press runs of handsome poetry books from the inmates, but also anthologies and literary reviews that included contributions from pacifists incarcerated in other camps. In essence these temporarily stateless men pledged allegiance to an ideal, not a country, and made their own culture, a culture almost entirely distinct from the United States, and consumed it themselves. One of the Camp Angel men, William Everson, wrote a collection of poems titled “War Elegies.” In 1944 it was the first volume published the camp’s Untide Press and contains some of the finest anti-war poems ever written by an American.
The CO camps officially closed in 1945, although some men were held over until 1946 so they wouldn’t compete for jobs with returning veterans. Several of the Camp Angel Fine Arts Program participants, most prominently Everson, writer Kermit Sheets and dramatist Martin Ponch, relocated to the Bay Area, and there ushered in what’s now known as the San Francisco Renaissance, seeding much of the Beat Generation and all the counterculture rest that followed. Just think about that: the Beat Generation born at the wet and sandy Oregon coast.
In recent years, I’ve visited the old Camp Angel site out of sheer curiosity. It’s a Job Corps training center now, and the last remaining building of the World War II-era Camp Angel was moved to Waldport in 1988 and now serves as the Waldport Heritage Museum, which does hold some CO-related material, and is a great little place to learn about history.
As I leafed through this material, the word ‘counterculture’ sprang instantly to mind, as in an authentic American counterculture undertaken at great personal cost to its practitioners. They had no notion of irony or that their stand would turn out for the best in the end. In one of the more stunning photographs from Camp Angel, a tall thin man named Glen Coffield appears with his hair in dreadlocks. Other prisoners wore their hair long tied back in a ponytail. In 1944! Who were these men?
It moves me to the extreme to imagine Everson, Coffield and other men earning some release time from Camp Angel and exploring the beaches and woods around Waldport. I imagine them hiking down Alsea Spit, then nothing but a long stretch of sand without European beach grass, paved streets, houses and satellite dishes. I imagine them carrying books, paints and musical instruments and wine to end of Alsea Spit. They probably would’ve ignited a bonfire clearly visible to anyone from downtown Waldport looking to the ocean. Everyone seeing the fire would’ve known the men who sat around it and wondered what they talked about. They must have considered these unarmed men very dangerous.
Back to the Beach
Sonny returns to the sand
[Posted May 14, 2009]
On March 10, I was driving to the Lincoln City Goodwill with Sonny my husky and Ray the old shepherd in the back of truck. As I neared Siletz Bay I took a peek in the side mirror and saw Sonny’s black and white head poking out the canopy window. She sniffed aggressively at the sea.
Now’s the time.
I cranked the steering wheel hard to the left, crossed Highway 101 in front of a honking UPS truck, and pulled into the parking lot of The Bay House restaurant. I looked out to the bay, saw the tide rolling out and noticed a short stretch of soft mudflat and wet beach not more than 20 yards away.
This is it. Sonny and I are going to the beach.
Six months ago, as regular readers of One Man’s Beach know, her freak injury and subsequent loss of mobility ripped apart my relationship with the beach. Serious reading and writing had stopped, I was barely sleeping, my teaching suffered, my fitness vanished, and I found it impossible to carry on a romantic relationship or travel anywhere. Almost my entire life was devoted to caring for Sonny, and the effort, mental more than anything, had exhausted me to the point where I nearly fainted in class and had to seek medical treatment.
After trying various rehabilitation strategies that all failed, and deciding against the surgical insertion of metal plates, I ordered custom braces from an animal orthopedist in Colorado who constructed the devices using moulds of Sonny’s legs.
Sonny wore the braces when I killed the truck’s engine in the parking lot. They’d arrived that morning and it took 20 minutes of her howling and squirming to attach them. When I fastened the last strap in place and coaxed Sonny to stand up, I looked at her teeter like an amateur wino and thought “there was no way in hell this was going to work.”
I opened the tailgate and told Ray to back up. Sonny came forward, leapt into my arms, licked my face, and I kicked the tailgate shut. I carried her down a steep and rocky path to the beach and recited all my goofy names I’d invented for her over the years. Back at the truck I heard Ray barking.
Driftwood littered the sand and I hopped over a couple of big bleached logs and kept walking until I found a nice spot with plenty of room for Sonny to maneuver. I set her down gently, checked the braces, stifled my expectations, and then backed away. Sonny stood there awkwardly for a minute and then walked toward me like a bumble bee flies. I turned and started striding away and Sonny followed. Seconds later, I began to jog and she broke into a weird lope to catch up.
It was on. I fell to the sand and let her jump on my chest. She began to talk her sacred husky talk and I reached out, grabbed a stick, and tossed it a few feet. She bumbled over, grabbed it with her mouth, and brought it back.
I started crying and couldn’t stop. Sonny and I played on the beach 10 minutes and then I carried her to the truck. I called my ex wife, who had chosen Sonny as a runt puppy to herald the new Millennium, and sobbed her the good news.
March 10th was my birthday, my forty-fifth, and I hadn’t felt that happy in a long, long time. The next day, after school, Ray, Sonny and I went to the beach. We were a team again.
(I want to thank all the readers who responded to my first column about Sonny. Your kinds words of encouragement and advice helped me cope.)
The most important Oregon story, on film
[Posted April 30, 2009]
In November 2005 I gave a presentation on the history of Oregon’s famous 1967 Beach Bill to the Cannon Beach Historical Society. At the time, I thought I was the expert on the subject because my research had debunked the popular myth that Governor Tom McCall almost single-handedly steered the bill into law and saved our ocean beaches from the sinister forces of privatization.
In the audience that afternoon was a man in his thirties named Tom Olsen Jr. He came up to me after the presentation and introduced himself as someone from Portland who owned a cabin in Cannon Beach. His family had a long and distinguished history in the community and he shared my passion for the Oregon Coast. Tom told me he was a filmmaker with a documentary to his credit, “Killingsworth,” which chronicled the rise of Portland’s African-American gangs in the 1980s.
As I recall, he said my presentation intrigued him and that he might have an interest in making a documentary on the hard fought legacy of Oregon’s publicly owned beaches. Might I be interested in helping him out? I was intrigued and gave him my card and never expected to hear another word.
But I did hear from Tom, and three years later, he not only made the film, called “Politics of Sand,” but he went so far beyond my original research that I must now give up my self-appointed title. He now reigns as the official expert on the incredible history of Oregon’s Beach Bill.
Tom Olsen can also claim another title: he has made the best film about an Oregon historical subject in the state’s history. It’s simply a must see for everyone who has ever recreated (for free!) on a publicly owned Oregon ocean beach. Isn’t that everyone reading this column? If you love this glorious tradition, you owe it to yourself to see how it all came about, and more importantly, how close it came to not happening. And it was close, harrowingly close, as the film shows.
You might also want to see the film if you need a little inspiration to help protect Oregon’s beaches and oceans today. Forty years ago, Oregon citizens and politicians looked to the future to protect a natural resource for their children’s enjoyment. Can we honestly say that’s happening today? Watch this film and consider that question.
Yes, I’ll say it again. “Politics of Sand” is the greatest film about Oregon history ever made. And you can judge for yourself this Sunday, May 3, at 2 p.m. when the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport hosts a free screening of “Politics of Sand.” Tom will attend the event, discuss his documentary and sell copies of the film. If you have other plans, change them.
This is Oregon and a native Oregonian who loves the Oregon Coast made a film about Oregon’s beaches. Learn how and why we did it different back in 1967. Then after you seeing it, go up and thank Tom Olsen for his role in keeping this important, maybe the most important Oregon story of all, alive, and in play.
Springtime: season of budgets, cycles
The other day, I saw one and he was alone. The next day I saw three grouped tightly together. Two days later, I saw two more, strung out by 50 yards.
They are here, the first of many to arrive, the bicyclists pumping down Hwy. 101 in rain or fog or sun, on the world famous Oregon Coast Bike Route, to connect to our beaches in a way utterly inconceivable to someone driving a vehicle listening to angry talk radio or Kenny G.
And to think it all started because a lawmaker nearly got run over by a car.
Once upon a time in 1971, a Republican state representative and avid bicyclist from Southern Oregon named Don Stathos was riding tandem with his daughter on a highway to Medford with no shoulder. As vehicles zoomed by, forcing Stathos dangerously off the road, he thought to himself: “Here we are, the richest nation in the world, and we have constructed our environment so we can’t keep in physical condition.”
Stathos then asked, his daughter Jenny Hill of Wilsonville remembers, the simple and eternal question in a democracy: “Why can’t there be a better way?” He answered his own question by introducing House Bill 1700, which required the state to set aside at least 1 percent of the highway fund to build bicycle and pedestrian facilities.
In the beginning, there wasn’t much support from either party for a bill that was, and still is, a radical piece of legislation, the first of its kind in the nation, and quite possibly the world.
Stathos prevailed, barely. It might have helped that he was seen riding his bicycle around Salem. Or that he had a mini bicycle in his briefcase that he would take out and assemble when he lobbied other lawmakers. At each step of the legislative process, the bill passed by one vote. Initially, Gov. Tom McCall didn’t favor it, but he changed his mind because he came to believe it was good for Oregon and all Oregonians, now and in the future. And he came to believe this because he listened to Don Stathos.
On the steps of the Capitol, McCall signed the Bicycle Bill on the seat of a bicycle. Soon thereafter, taxpayer funds for bicycle and pedestrian paths began trickling in. Construction began. Less than a generation later, the bill had put a permanent dent in the automobile’s hegemony, transformed transportation planning, helped citizens stay fit, became a national legislative model, and made Oregon the most bike friendly place in the country. Furthermore, it created unique, multiple and safe recreational and commuting opportunities that led many of Oregon’s citizens, including this writer, to practice a healthy cultural life.
One of the crowning achievements of Stathos’ vision is the Oregon Coast Bike Route, considered one of the premier touring rides in the world. I’ve bicycled it three times, most recently in 2001. It was during my first ride, back in the fall of 1991, that I really “saw” the Oregon Coast, stopped at nearly 50 beaches, and experienced the danger of riding Hwy. 101, with all its RVs, log trucks and teenage drivers.
Soon, bicyclists from all over the world will regularly appear. Motorists, give them some room, slow down, and never, ever, pass on the right into a shoulder. A cyclist could be right there.
Author remains hinged -- thanks to being 'Henged -- on a Newport beach
[Posted March 31, 2009]
A couple of weeks ago, the mail brought two more literary rejections. It seems I have no luck (or talent) attracting a national publisher for either one of my two non-fiction manuscripts about Oregon.
In combination, the rejections plunged me into total defeat. I felt licked and needed to see my therapist immediately.
Naturally, I went to beach. The doctor was in — she always is. And she never charges me a fee or demands I fill out paperwork.
I can honestly say that the availability of Oregon’s publicly owned ocean beaches means more to my mental and physical well-being than the health insurance I virtually never use. I think I’d go insane without this special Oregon outdoor custom.
After reading the second letter, Ray, the old shepherd, and I walked to my beach at dawn.
Art was on my mind, as in: what does an artist do when he submits his art to the national artistic establishment in hope of reaching a wider audience and the establishment consistently rejects his art? Does he quit? Does he retrench and keep trying? Does he take his art in a new direction hoping to please the establishment? Does he embrace the role of maverick and put out his art his own way?
Ray and I took our familiar path to the beach. I looked out to the ocean and noticed the tide was coming in fast, churning brown with lots of foam for extra measure. We jogged out to the sand and I pivoted north to the lighthouse.
But the lighthouse never came into view. Instead, I beheld a series of some 50 sculptures and altars of varying size and shape, all made from driftwood, burnt or barnacled or slimy smooth, all constructed with elaborate care and artistic intent, and spaced within a 40-yard stretch of sand at the base of the cliff. As I approached this marvel, I also noticed large words etched in the sand.
Sea God
Beware!!!
Dance!
In all my years of rambling Oregon Coast beaches, I’d never seen anything like this and I pretty much thought I’d seen (or done) it all. Less than 18 hours earlier, I’d visited the same spot with Ray and nothing like this existed. Most likely, the marvel had been constructed overnight.
I moved closer to inspect. I gave a gentle kick to one of the driftwood pillars, expecting it to budge easily. It did not. It was buried 3 feet deep, as were most of the other sculptures. We are talking about nearly 100 pieces of wood all firmly anchored in the sand.
Suddenly a wave swept into the area and soaked my shoes. I didn’t hear it coming. In a half hour, the incoming tide would batter the installation and, in time, collapse it. It was then I realized I might be the only person lucky enough to see this treasure of pure and undoubtedly spontaneous art. Someone didn’t care if they reached a wider audience. Someone didn’t care if another person saw his art. He made it because he felt like it. Or had to. Who had the time to do this? Who had this great notion?
I called for Ray and we started for home, but not before I took a couple of photographs to capture the moment for myself, as a reminder of why I write.
To the person or persons who made this: thank you.
Tidal character earns praise
Novelist Jim Lynch comes to Newport March 21
[Posted March 18, 2009]
In “The Highest Tide,” published to phenomenal reviews in 2005, author Jim Lynch achieved a literary Triple Crown: 1) best coming-of-age novel set in the Pacific Northwest; 2) best novel to resurrect the writing of the visionary Rachel Carson; 3) best novel to educate people about that awesome place where freshwater meets the sea under tidal influence — estuaries.
And I am pleased to report that Jim Lynch is coming to Newport on Saturday, March 21, to read from “The Highest Tide” (and his new novel, “Border Songs”) as part of the Nye Beach Writers’ Series at the Visual Arts Center at 7 p.m.
But even better than that (at least for me), Lynch has agreed to visit my Newport High School Creative Writing class and talk about the book, the writing craft, his interesting personal story of becoming a successful novelist in middle age, and his obsession with estuaries.
Estuaries. Those of us who live at the Oregon Coast interact with them on a daily basis and understand their magic, their pull. What I like about them is having learned that no two views of any estuary are ever the same. I don’t really feel that way about the ocean or sky.
“The Highest Tide” is set specifically in Olympia, on Puget Sound, vaguely in an era when alternative rock begins to matter to young people and television news reporters start acting like fools, meaning probably the early 90s.
In “The Sea Around Us,” Rachel Carson wrote, “There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.” It is a line, indeed a book, that Lynch’s protagonist Miles O’Malley, has read aloud, practically memorized, and treats as scripture.
Miles is a 13-year old boy, barely five feet tall, who exhibits an almost supernatural connection to the estuary he lives on with his parents. He also seems utterly indifferent to teenage popular culture and would rather spend time alone in his kayak, frequently in the dead of night, exploring the tidal flats and collecting species for an aquarium and restaurant.
Told through his voice some time after the story unfolds, the novel opens as Miles sums up his unusual summer: “I was ambushed by science, fame and suggestions of the divine.”
The plot begins when Miles begins finding sea creatures that have no business being found in Pacific Northwest estuaries. Lynch, an award-winning journalist in his previous literary life, dazzles the reader with exquisite detail about the creatures that Miles comes across. It’s not a stretch to say that once you’ve read “The Highest Tide,” you’ll never look at a tidal mudflat in the same way again, if you are one of those people who notices such things at all. And most of us who live at the Oregon Coast are such people.
By virtue of his freakish discoveries, Miles becomes a local celebrity, a scientific wunderkind, and when asked what it all means by a reporter, he says, “Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something.”
This ambiguously ominous statement attracts the attention of a nearby cult, whose members look to Miles as an oracle. As the media scrutiny of Miles’ findings intensifies, he struggles to understand the separation of his parents, the physical decline of an elderly woman who is his best friend, and his crush on a neighbor, a depressed and volatile punk rocker chick. Then he makes a prediction that the highest tide in 50 years will hit the area, which is of course impossible according to the tide tables. This prediction drives the last third of the novel and hints at one of Lynch’s most powerful themes: we don’t really understand our natural world and this ignorance is fraught with perilous consequences.
Lynch has written a compact, lively, timely, ecologically insightful, and spiritual story. In Miles, Lynch has created an unforgettable adolescent character strongly rooted to nature, a personality trait that study after study concludes is becoming a rarity in American teenagers.
Miles prefers to be outdoors, noticing, investigating, getting dirty, rather than be entertained by something electronic and remote. Once again, that sounds like a lot of us here at the coast. Homework assignment for March 21: read “The Highest Tide” and come out and hear Jim Lynch read from his minor masterpiece.
A Sapphire in the rough: Dr. Bob Bacon
[Posted March 5, 2009]
A true Oregon hero died in January at the age of 90. His name was Dr. Bob Bacon and back in 1967 he helped fight for passage of the Beach Bill, one of the most important laws ever passed in Oregon. Everyone reading this essay benefitted from this law but I doubt very many of you have heard the story of Dr. Bacon’s heroism.
The Beach Bill forever preserved the dry sands areas of our ocean beaches for exclusive public use and is why Oregon is Oregon. It’s also why we all love the coast and get to do all the crazy things we want at the beach and some prudish trophy home owner or fat security guard wearing a headset can’t tell us to knock it off.
The law was nearly tabled in the House of Representatives by a cabal of coastal Republican lawmakers, but through sheer, hard, unpaid labor, an uncompromising attitude, and a stroke of luck, Bacon, who worked full time as an anatomy professor at OHSU at the time, fought successfully to keep it alive. Without him, our beaches might very well look like Malibu’s minus all the bikinis and palm trees.
Exactly what kind of labor? He helped start a grass roots organization known as the Citizens to Save Oregon’s Beaches (the SOB’s as the developers called them!) that became the public face of opposition to those who wanted to privatize our public beaches. He hit the rubber chicken circuit and gave speeches to any civic group that would have him. He testified in Salem. He went on the radio, made phone calls and met sinister legislators in dive bars who told him to compromise or he could forget about the Beach Bill passing (he refused). He was told by his employer to lay low and not get involved in politics. Bacon refused and nearly sacrificed his medical career. He did all of this and much more and wasn’t paid a cent.
Eventually the Beach Bill passed and created one of the unique relationships in the world between a state’s citizenry and a natural resource. Had the Beach Bill not passed, I doubt I would have become the Oregon writer I did. I also know I would most likely be spiritually dead.
It was my great honor to interview Dr. Bacon in Gearhart back in 2003 for my first book, “Grasping Wastrels vs. Beaches Forever Inc.” Below is a brief excerpt:
Love: Did you guys celebrate when you found out the Beach Bill got signed?
Bacon: I don’t know. There was such a sense of relief and the reduction of pressure. I think everybody sort of collapsed. I strongly suspect that there were a few martinis. I was known amongst some of my students as martini maker back then too.
Love: Was that your drink of choice back then?
Bacon: Yes.
Love: Gin or vodka?
Bacon: Gin, the only true martini.
Love: And what brand was your favorite?
Bacon: Oh gosh, I don’t remember.
Love: Were you a Tanqueray fan?
Bacon: I don’t recall that in those days there was Tanqueray. I am a wine person largely today, but the only real cocktail is a martini. True martini. It’s called a Sapphire. Bombay Sapphire. A Bombay Sapphire martini is really something wonderful.
After the interview I took Dr. Bacon to the Sandtrap Inn in Gearhart for a drink. I bought an Oregon hero a Bombay Sapphire martini and I insisted it be a double. I had one too. When they came, I raised my glass and toasted this excellent Oregon man for all his effort on preserving Oregon’s ocean beaches. As should you.
But a toast is only one way to honor Dr. Bacon. In the last years of his life, he fought hard for the establishment of marine reserve areas in Oregon’s offshore territorial waters (0-3 miles out). The fate of these reserves is currently unknown and in the hands of the Oregon Legislature. The story of the battle to pass the Beach Bill and the story of the battle to establish marine reserves have fascinating similarities and some of the same stock characters. Should the reserves program gain legislative approval, one of the areas should be named after Dr. Bob Bacon. People should read his name on an Oregon map for the rest of the time Oregon is a state.
A first kiss sparks a lasting love affair
The author digs into the history
of his love of
Oregon’s beaches
[Posted Feb. 18, 2009]
Over the years, many people have asked me when and where my love affair with Oregon’s publicly owned beaches began.
Let me offer the probable genesis moment: It was 1977 and “Saturday Night Fever” had swept the country. That summer, a girl named Shelley and I held clammy hands as we broke away to find a makeout fort in the driftwood maze of Short Sand Beach in Oswald West State Park, named after Oswald West, the former Oregon governor who helped save the state’s ocean beaches from privatization back in 1913.
West had ridden a horse through this area in 1912 and later claimed the ride inspired him to write his ingenious 66-word bill that declared the wet sand areas of Oregon’s ocean beaches a public highway, and thus in the public trust forever. It was quite possibly the most important law in Oregon history.
I didn’t learn anything about West in school. We got a steady dose of Lewis and Clark and the Oregon Trail but nothing about the real Oregon heroes who preserved nature so all of us could enjoy it today.
Shelley and I disappeared from view. No one noticed. The other Christians in our youth group from Oregon City Church of Christ roasted hotdogs or played Frisbee. No one read the Bible. I probably should have brought one along. I was a preacher’s kid and supposed to set an example.
It was my first adolescent outing to a beach on the Oregon Coast unaccompanied by my parents. Shelley was in ninth grade, blonde, and often wore yellow. She also wore a shell necklace that I could not get out of my mind, the way it dangled over her cleavage when I saw her pass me in the halls and smile. I was in seventh grade in Oregon City and thought Shelley the most beautiful unobtainable girl in the world. Thus, it utterly astonished me to learn on the bus ride over to the beach that she liked me. By the time I smelled the ocean, I sailed rapturously on unchartered seas.
We found the fort and took cover. I went to kiss her. What lips and eyes she had! After the kiss, I peered through a slat in the fort’s crooked walls, past the smoke, up the cliff to the Sitka spruces and hemlocks swaying in the background.
Sixty-four years earlier, Oswald West rode right through here. Without his ride, I would have never kissed Shelley the way I did, on a beach, for free.
And that’s where I think it all began.
One citizen's mark on the beach
The Letter of the Law
[Posted Jan. 23, 2009]
When I ramble an Oregon coast beach, I always thank former Oregon Governor Oswald West because he was the “First Lawgiver.” His 1913 law declaring the wet sand areas of Oregon’s ocean beaches a public highway led to the creation of a unique cultural relationship between a state’s citizenry and its beaches not found in other coastal states. It established an utterly distinct tradition that absolutely astonishes then delights visitors from other places where beaches are privatized.
A question: Is there anything culturally more sacred to Oregonians than their right to freely recreate on their ocean beaches? No, nothing comes close. Forget skiing on Mt. Hood. It costs too much money and has precluded an entire class of Oregonians for generations. Every Oregonian has a beach story. Not every Oregonian has a mountain story. I don’t.
Having grown up in Oregon in the 1970s and 1980s, and conducted various rites of youth passage at the beach, I might have answered “no” to the aforementioned question back then. Now that I’ve lived at the Oregon coast for the past 11 years and observed what regularly goes down on our publicly-owned ocean beaches, I know the answer to my question is even a more solid “no!”
I also know, back in 1967, the special cultural relationship at the core of my answer was nearly destroyed. Frankly, Oregon was lucky it didn’t go the other way. It had everywhere else.
Oswald West’s law protected the wet sand areas of Oregon’s ocean beaches, but there was no such safeguard of the dry sand areas, the space where virtually everyone recreated. In the summer of 1966, an elderly couple and their nephew were kicked off the beach by a motel owner as they picnicked in front of the owner’s Cannon Beach motel. They might have been the first Oregonians in the state’s history to experience such a shock. And the nephew, a graduate student in biochemistry at OHSU named Lawrence Bitte, didn’t like it at all. Bitte wrote a letter, excerpted below, to then Secretary of State Tom McCall.
Dear. Mr. McCall:
Tuesday morning, August 16, while visiting the Oregon coast near Haystack Rock (South Cannon Beach) I came upon an area of beach outlined with driftlogs and posted with signs claiming this particular section of beach was reserved for guests of the Surfsands Motel. Upon venturing into this “restricted” area on the assumption that the Oregon beaches were public property (under supervision of the state highway department), we were confronted by an employee of the motel who told us that the beach was owned by a Mr. Bill Hay and that we would have to leave. This brings several questions to mind:
Does ownership of the beach property extend seaward to a point of mean high tide?
Does the owner of beach frontage have, with his title, the right to build earth fills out over previously sandy beaches?
Who issues building permits which allow a private structure to be built on a previously sandy beach beyond a point of natural terrain?
What legally constitutes a beach and can this term be widely interpreted?
I am greatly disturbed by the situation at the Surfsands Motel, because I feel it establishes a precedence which will lead to the eventual defacing of all Oregon beaches and the take-over by commercial enterprises which profit from public use of the sandy areas of the beach. Since tempers are presently running high among those who are aware of the situation, at the Surfsands Motel, would you please answer my questions at your earliest convenience?
As incredible as it may sound, this letter by an Oregon citizen touched off the epic 1967 legislative battle that culminated with passage of the landmark law known as the Beach Bill. This law, which nearly died in committee due to a group of coastal legislators, reaffirmed the public’s domain over publicly owned beaches. The statute empowered Oregon “to forever preserve…ocean beaches of the state… so that the public may have the free and uninterrupted use thereof.”
I’ve written extensively about this legislative battle in previous One Man’s Beach columns, and all the unsung political and journalism heroes who helped win perhaps the greatest political victory in the state’s history.
But I think it’s worth noting that it all began with one citizen speaking up, going on the offensive when a narrow interest threatened to privatize Oregon’s “great birthright,” the memorable phrase Oswald West used to describe our ocean beaches. Think about that citizen the next time you ramble the beach for free.
Listen to the coyote
[Posted 1.7.09]
A month ago, I seethed in anger over the U.S. government’s desecration of a special natural place on the Oregon coast that I had spent a majority of my adult life restoring to ecology. To voice my opposition to this desecration, I planned a very public act of civil disobedience that would quite probably lead to my arrest.
On a 38-degree morning, I walked my dog to the beach to plot my mission. In 18 hours, in the dead of night, just hours before the desecration officially opened with a ribbon cutting ceremony, I would execute my mission. The perpetrators of the desecration would never see my statement coming. But they would know its maker.
After a half-mile walk from the house, I approached the beach from a winding and descending path that cut through salmonberry and willow. Soon the path leveled, led into an opening, and I looked west, across a creek, out to a Pacific of perfect surfing waves and perfect blue sky.
Suddenly, a large brown, orange and white-colored coyote entered the foreground. He was running north down the sand not more than 50 yards away from me. At almost the exact moment I noticed him, he stopped and turned to me. I’m certainly no animist but I instantly identified the coyote’s presence as some kind of urgent personal message, although I was at a loss to fathom its meaning.
A few seconds later, the coyote resumed his northward course and disappeared from my sight. I felt compelled to follow. I unleashed my dog, crossed a bridge, and jogged down the path to the beach. The dog lagged behind to sniff around and mark his territory.
A high tide had swept the beach clean of all markings except the coyote’s footprints. I followed them for a few seconds and then looked up and saw 75 yards down the beach the coyote sprinting closely parallel to the rock and sandy cliffs that rose 60 feet high in some places.
Then the coyote abruptly halted and turned around. He looked right at me and I was transfixed until my dog zoomed by me in pursuit, if a 14-year old partially epileptic canine with two bad hips can be said to zoom. I marveled at my old dog’s burst of energy and watched the spectacle for a couple of minutes until I realized the coyote hadn’t moved and seemed to be waiting for the dog.
I took off running and when the dog closed within 10 yards of the coyote, I saw the coyote scamper up a nearly vertical 20-foot rock wall, and then, surprisingly, sit up instead of disappearing into the Scotch broom and shore pine thicket. The dog went to the base of the wall and started barking and making short aborted attempts to scale the wall.
By now I had closed within 30 yards and was calling to the dog. He turned his head and then I saw the coyote slide down the wall to within several feet of him. The dog made no move toward him, nor did the coyote advance on the dog.
As I came within 15 yards, the coyote scampered back up the wall and sat up. I went to the base and looked directly up at him, into his white and orange face. We stared at each other for 10 seconds and then I disengaged, leashed up the dog, and headed home. A few seconds later I turned around and the coyote had slid down the wall again and appeared to be following us. I stopped, he stopped, and I began to listen.
Here’s what the coyote told me: let go. The coyote told me to have the courage to not do something out of anger or disgust or vainglory.
And that’s exactly what I did, with my dog by my side, this morning, on the beach, at dawn, a few hours before the ribbon was cut. I listened to the coyote. Others, the desecrators, never heard him.
Sonny's Tragedy
[Posted Dec. 23, 2008]
On Sept. 17, 2008, at approximately 5:30 a.m., fate intervened with my cherished relationship to Oregon’s publicly-owned ocean beaches, the most sacred place in the world to me, and shattered it.
Starting out that clear morning, I expected a routine ramble down the sand with Ray, my shepherd, and Sonny, my husky. I say “routine” because I’d rambled this way nearly 1,500 times over the last decade and it is no exaggeration to claim that these moments with my dogs evolved into my entire spiritual and physical fitness life and helped me compose first drafts of virtually everything I’d eventually see published. In other words, my time with my dogs was my church, my gym, my office, and I might add – my therapist.
We began in typical fashion. Ray lagged behind sniffing and urinating, while Sonny, a fantastic and manic runner, bolted ahead out of sight as she always did, but to no alarm, because she always returned.
But this morning she didn’t return. At some point I stopped rambling and began searching for Sonny. Ray jogged behind me as I called out to her, wondering where the hell she was.
I called for ten minutes. Twenty. Nothing. Desperation mounted in me like never before. Had Sonny been swept away by a sneaker wave? I’d heard of this happening.
Half an hour later, I headed for home and prayed, screamed, aloud that Sonny might await me on the path leading back to the road. Approaching the path, I heard, over the incoming waves, a strange yelp, then, seconds later, an even more bizarre, agonizing cry. I sprinted up the path in almost total darkness and saw something moving awkwardly in front of me. There, I beheld Sonny splayed on the asphalt, drooling, convulsing, and unable to walk. I quickly felt her body all over and she seemed paralyzed in the legs. I picked her up and began running the half mile home. At some point, crying, exhausted, I set Sonny down on a lawn and sprinted with Ray back to the house to get the truck and bring her home. As all of this unfolded, I sensed that my wonderful routine with my dogs, something I’d worked very hard to maintain, was coming to an end. And I was scared.
Thirty minutes later I dropped Sonny off at the vet. She still couldn’t walk, but was lucid, so a stroke seemed unlikely. I couldn’t conceive of what was wrong with her. She had no bruises, cuts, or punctures of any kind. How does a dog simply become paralyzed in the legs?
In a daze, I taught four periods at Newport High School and then rushed over to the vet’s. He informed me that Sonny had contracted coonhound paralysis syndrome, a rare virus originating from raccoons that is apparently passed through saliva. I was told her condition could last four days or eight months or forever.
For the next few days, Sonny barely moved. Then her paralysis ebbed, and she was somewhat able to walk, offering me some hope she might recover.
But one afternoon as I worked in the yard, Sonny jumped off the deck and landed awkwardly on her front legs, which, because of their weakened condition due to the paralysis, could not safely bear her weight. Imagine a man jumping off a roof and landing on his hands and you get the picture. Sonny severely strained, but didn’t rupture, her ligaments, and since that day in September, I’ve immobilized her to allow the ligaments to heal. This has meant no walking at all and carrying her in and out of the house.
In the subsequent three months, I’ve tried various traditional and non-tradition rehabilitation strategies and nothing has worked. Sonny still cannot walk properly, let alone run. One vet has recommended a splint for six months to allow the ligaments to heal. Another vet has recommended Sonny have surgery, which entails inserting metal plates in her legs for support. Other people whose pets have suffered similar ligament damage have suggested something else. Contradictions abound and I’m not sure what to do about her condition.
Since Sonny went down, my whole routine and attitude have changed. I was on such a superb high with a new teaching job, a new book coming out, and my new life here in Newport. Then, the horrible setback occurred and I can’t seem to shake off this feeling of utter dread. This last month, I’ve experienced the worst depression of my life and my physical fitness has nearly disappeared. I don’t write all that much anymore either.
And I barely go to the beach. And never in the morning. And when I do, I often start crying.
Finish the party
[Posted 12.10.08]
Orange and red streaked the sky as the dogs and I made our way to the beach on a recent frosty morning. It was Sunday and I doubted I’d encounter another human being — half the state was on their way to church and the other half was hung over from celebrating OSU’s last second football victory to keep their Rose Bowl hopes alive.
We hit the sand — no one there! We headed north and as a few gulls fed at the wrack line, I came across the remains of a party: a single log still burning, a liter bottle of Coke, and 1.75 liter bottle of Evan Williams (green label) bourbon.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with drinking either Coke or bourbon at the beach, especially around a fire with friends or family in celebration of something wonderful. And especially if you walked home after the party to wherever you are sleeping for the night, which I suspected was the case here because of the proximity of many vacation homes in the area.
But here’s what struck me as wrong with the scene:
Obviously, the revelers inexcusably and criminally left garbage on the beach, about the uncoolest Oregon thing you can do — and that includes using an umbrella or drinking bottled water. Undoubtedly worse, however, these miscreants drank Evan Williams green label, a terrible tasting spirit better used for cooking than drinking. At least go with the 86-proof black label, a decent meat and potatoes spirit and a bargain to boot in these recession-wrought hard times.
Another problem: I don’t like to judge, but the fact that garbage was left behind suggests the presence of vastly inferior human beings and thus, they probably did drink their bourbon with Coke — a desecration on the order of using an umbrella and drinking bottled water while walking down an Oregon Coast beach.
Finally, and most outrageously: the partiers didn’t finish the Evan Williams! At least six or seven shots remained.
C’mon! Finish the party! This is Oregon, home of Oswald West’s and Tom McCall’s publicly owned beaches, where we demand the right to freely recreate and raise hell with the same zeal the 49ers raced to California to strike gold.
Naturally, I gathered up the garbage and brought it home. The Coke bottle would be redeemed for a dime and, as for the bourbon … I couldn’t bear to pour it out, even if was Evan Williams green label.
Plenty of recipes call for whiskey.
Giving Thanks
[Posted Nov. 25, 2008]
This week at Thanksgiving, most families will participate in some kind of ritual before eating the big meal. Well, at least I hope they do. It might be a blessing, a verse, a statement from the patriarch or matriarch, or even a moment of silence. The ritual may or may not follow a religious tradition.
At my family’s Thanksgiving, my mother always says a short ecumenical prayer of thanks. Afterward, during the meal, the men try to catch glimpses of the Dallas Cowboys game silently unfolding on television a room away. My family hails from Texas and once lived or died by the Cowboys’ fortunes on Thanksgiving.
I say “once” because a couple of decades ago, the game’s sound was turned up during the meal. Thankfully, we’ve matured as a family since then.
My mother says excellent prayers, but I prefer invocations above all else to precede the meal. An invocation is a short speech appealing to a higher power. The phrase “higher power” invokes different meanings to different people. Define it anyway you like – this is America, you know, and we enjoy that privilege. In my invocations, I like to count my blessings and give thanks.
This year, I’ll read an invocation after my mom’s prayer. It will go something like this:
I give thanks because I ran down my beach this morning with my dog and not another human was around.
I give thanks that Oregon’s ocean beaches are free, publicly owned, and that I have the fitness to run down them as far as I want to run.
I give thanks to Oswald West, Samuel Boardman, Matt Kramer, Sidney Bazett, Tom McCall and Bob Straub for fighting successfully so many years ago to keep Oregon’s ocean beaches free and in the public trust forever.
I give thanks to my parents, who always supported me when I struck out to see the world and came back broke. Their patience and generosity helped me become a writer.
I give thanks the 18th Amendment was repealed so I can enjoy an excellent Oregon wine with this meal.
I give thanks to my Newport High School students for their passion, creativity and hearty coast sensibilities – no umbrellas!
I give thanks to Newport High School Principal Jon Zagel for letting me run with my ideas.
I give thanks I can hear sea lions barking from my classroom window.
I give thanks to Café Mundo in Newport for its rocking Thursday night open mic sessions and liberal editorial policy.
I give thanks to my great dogs who keep me sane.
I give thanks I live at the Oregon Coast and not Southern California. On business there recently, I saw Santa Monica’s beaches: $13 to park, fences, no dogs.
And of course, I thank Oregon Coast Today for running my columns. It’s the best writing gig in the state.
Amen.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re thankful to Matt Love. Thanks for writing!
Forgo the straight line
[Posted Nov. 12, 2008]
“Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Several years ago I saw a man on Nestucca Spit, in Bob Straub State Park, who I cannot get out of my mind.
I was cruising south down the spit with one of the dogs when I noticed someone a hundred yards away coming toward me, riding a bicycle in the wet sand with his right hand on the handlebars and his left hand clutching a bag. Attached to the banana-styled seat was a white fiberglass rod decorated on top with an orange flag swaying limply in the breeze.
I said audibly, “What is this?” At the time, I’d never seen anyone ride a bike down a beach. As of this writing, I’ve seen only one other person. (When she passed me at dawn near Ona Beach, she told me she was riding from Newport to the Oregon Country Fair! Apparently the route was: bike to Florence, turn left.)
The man rode closer toward us, pedaling his one-speed, paint-peeling, contraption of a bike, nonchalantly zigzagging his way down the sand. As he came into complete view, I could see his plastic bag held bottles and cans. I noticed something else too: his face and dress bore the unmistakable hard look of a person who might sleep under a highway on-ramp or camp out year-round in the forest. He wasn’t wearing any shoes.
He passed me and I waved. He gave me a nod and raised the bag in my direction. For a few minutes, I watched him ride down the spit carrying his loot and particularly marveled that, when a wave rushed in, threatening to swamp his bicycle’s chains, he never once altered his course to evade the water; he never once rode in a straight line and the water never grazed him.
Back in the parking lot, the dogs and I encountered a young couple in wet suits unloading two wooden kayaks. I went over to them as they struggled to lift the shiny vessels off a gargantuan blue SUV.
“Can I help you guys?” I asked.
“No, I think we’ve almost got it,” said the man.
“Just out of curiosity do you mind me asking how much the kayaks cost? They look spectacular.”
“They’re four grand each.”
“Wow.”
The next day, I brought my old mountain bike to the spit. The dog chased and barked after me all the way to the mouth of Nestucca Bay. There, we spooked 30 or so harbor seals hauled out on the sand. They splashed hurriedly into the water and sent up a charming chorus of snorts and grunts. I apologized to them profusely, turned the bike around, and we made our way north, zigzagging with no particular place to go in mind and a lot of time on my side. I never once rode in a straight line.
Wings generate impressive lift
[Posted Oct. 29, 2008]
Recently, after receiving a literary rejection from a New York editor, I headed to the beach with the dogs to determine a possible course of action. I needed to see the ocean and wanted answers to wash ashore.
Quitting was on my mind. I mean, at what point do you pack it in?
As I walked out on the beach, Nestucca Spit in Bob Straub State Park to be exact, the dogs split off in different directions and the wind nudged me to the water’s edge, where an extreme low tide revealed odd undulations in the sand. To my left, 20 yards away, I noticed an elderly couple standing wordlessly together, vacantly staring at the ocean. A large white box roughly the size of a golf bag rested near them between pieces of driftwood.
Curiosity got the better of me, so I veered toward the couple. As I drew nearer I saw a picture of an airplane with a propeller on the box. A few steps closer and I could read the box’s bold energetic lettering. An explanation of this mystery began to coalesce in my mind when I asked the man, “What happened?”
“I forgot to raise the antenna,” he said in monotone without looking at me. “The antenna on the airplane. I don’t understand how I could have forgotten.” The woman said nothing. She was still searching the horizon.
“Well, you seem to be taking it well,” I said. He didn’t respond.
I asked him more questions and he freely answered them all without a shred of emotion or ever taking his eyes off the water.
It was the airplane’s inaugural flight, brand new out of the box. The plane had lifted off flawlessly from the wet sand runway on a perfect low tide. It had barely cleared a wave and then flown a straight line out over the ocean until a gust of wind rose up and banked it toward Haystack Rock.
“I went to move the stick on the remote controller,” he said, “and…nothing. A few seconds later, the plane somersaulted, then stalled, and then plunged nose first into ocean.”
The man’s wife chipped in a few details and she was equally dispassionate. She never once looked at me either. His stoicism in the face of a comic fiasco entirely of his own doing struck me as nothing short of incredible. The average American man, in a similar situation, would rage and curse until an embolism threatened to form and travel upward. Yes, how refreshing. How unlike me, when I received a letter from a New York editor.
It was time to leave them alone and head down the spit with the dogs. Ten minutes later I turned around. The couple still looked west. Five minutes later I turned around again and saw the woman sprint toward the surf while the man hesitated. She waded into the water and he ran toward her. I made her out picking up a part of the plane, a wing, it appeared. He joined her in the water, and for the next few minutes, they carried out a joint salvage operation. I watched all of this from a half mile away. I could not take my eyes off them. Finally, nothing else washed ashore and they started to leave the beach, each holding parts of the plane.
I had more questions. I called out to the dogs and we hustled to the parking lot. As the man loaded up the wreckage into his camper van, I walked up to him. His wife was inside straightening things up.
“You found it!”
“Yes, but it’s shot. The motor is ruined.”
“I admire your patience in waiting.”
“Well, I was ready to leave but my wife said she would wait a while longer. Then she saw it wash up.”
The wife emerged from the van, petted the dogs, and we all chatted for 10 minutes or so. They had both just retired and had bought the van, a tricked-out beauty I coveted for a literary road adventure some far flung editor would never understand. I also learned the couple planned on spending Christmas at the beach in a campground; they had expected to fly the plane every day at low tide, weather permitting.
I drove away feeling I wasn’t ready to quit the literary dream—not quite yet.
The Tillamookian Id rules supreme
[Posted Oct. 15, 2008]
Sometimes, a man needs more than nature, more than just rambling the beach with the dogs at dawn to keep his mind active. Sometimes, in the course of human events, it is necessary for a man to experience a mind-blowing human event to maintain a healthy psychological balance.
I know of one such event in South Tillamook County.
On Saturday, Oct. 18, the annual bacchanal known as the Hooker’s Ball unfolds in all its outrageous glory at the Sportsman’s Pub and Grub Tavern in Pacific City [Map It!]. Over the years, I’ve witnessed several balls and afterwards always felt at a loss to describe or analyze what occurred there.
Now I don’t even try.
At a certain seasoned point in life, many people claim to “have seen it all,” and thus no longer cultivate the possibility of being surprised or enlightened.
I say for the record here that if you haven’t attended the Hooker’s Ball, then, in fact, you have not “seen it all.”
Exactly what is the Hooker’s Ball? Let me offer a clinical definition: for over two decades, one night a year, local men have dressed themselves as stereotyped female prostitutes, assumed the characters of those prostitutes, and then partied in plain view of their friends and partners in a tavern decorated with erotic female undergarments, including some hanging from the ceiling. Might I add that photographs are taken and that patrons have been known to dance on the tables?
No doubt Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey would feel quite professionally pleased by these developments, since the Hooker’s Ball represents almost irrefutable confirmation of their various controversial theses.
And speaking of Dr. Freud, if you plan on attending the Hooker’s Ball, you might do well to bone up on his famous psychological concepts of the Id, Ego and Superego. You can forget about seeing the latter two in action at the Sportsman’s on the 18th. They get checked at the door. A collective supercharged Tillamookian Id will rule supreme instead.
You might want to take a calming walk on the beach after experiencing this kind of intensity, and thankfully, Bob Straub State Park is a quarter mile from the Sportsman’s front door.
The cross-dressing party hour begins at 9 p.m. A DJ provides the music and first-time visitors should expect the unexpected and be prepared to draw upon Jesus’ wisdom: “Those without sin can cast the first stone.”
The Throw
[Posted Oct. 1, 2008]
I saw something on the beach a while back that I can’t get out of my mind, although I’d like to. It was yet another reminder to me that not everyone goes to the beach for blissful reasons.
The salt and brine smelled especially stiff that afternoon. For five minutes I walked south with my dogs down the sand and gazed upon the incoming tide’s multiple white layers. The sun came and went but that hardly mattered. I had skipped work and had the place to myself.
I turned around to take in vistas from the north. A hundred yards down the beach I saw a smallish barefooted woman saunter at angles toward the waves. She almost appeared to be dancing.
Then I clearly saw her remove a ring from her left hand and clasp it with her right. She stopped at the water’s edge, let the tide wash over her feet, hesitated for a moment, then cocked her right arm back and threw the ring west with all her might. I know the throw didn’t come from a jilted fiancé. Only married people throw like this. Or soon to be unmarried people.
This was no reality show. No one else was around to egg her on or get her to say something contrived or clichéd to the camera. For all know, she could have driven from Pendleton to make her throw. I doubt, from wherever she originated, that it was planned.
She retreated from the water, no longer sauntering. I thought about a line from a Richard Hugo poem, “On this dishonored, this perverted globe / we go back to the sea and the sea opens for us.”
[Posted Sept. 17, 2008]
You can’t Beat dining like Kerouac
“I was guts and juice and ready to go.”
– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”
Fall on the Oregon coast is the perfect time to visit a favorite beach in combination with enjoying the special pleasure of consuming good food and drink there. This year, in what may be a radical change for you, I suggest eating at the beach the way the famous Beat writer Jack Kerouac once ate when he went on an outdoor adventure. Aren’t you game for something new in your life? You just might like it.
OK, I admit some of Kerouac’s writing hasn’t held up well. Frequently, his sentences plod along and much of his work feels dated and unimportant. But when Kerouac is on and riffing, like in many of his letters (“Her face is all moonlight and Keats, man. To live like Jesus and Thoreau, except for women.”) And in “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums,” his words are scripture for how to be “gone,” how not to conform, how to live right with very little want or need, how to interact right with the American outdoors, and how to cross the country subsisting on bologna sandwiches, apple pie and ice cream.
So, for your next beach adventure, I offer a certain Kerouac-styled recipe with the hope you’ll give it a try.
Jack Kerouac’s Recipe for an
Oregon Coast Beach Experience
Serves: As many who are worthy
Notes: In “The Dharma Bums,” which he defined as one of his “true-story novels,” Kerouac recounts a few scenes where he (sometimes with a buddy) experiences a physically and emotionally demanding situation, like a hobo ride in a box car or a grueling mountain climb, that pushes him to a point of total exhaustion and hunger. Immediately afterwards, he restores his energy and celebrates his achievement by preparing simple but hearty food and eating it with gusto – in the field. The food must be cheap and you must revel in it. Thus, it obviously can’t be a vacuum-packed meal from REI.
For example: in the beginning of the novel, Kerouac rides a freight train on a cold night along the coast near Santa Barbara, jumps off, and decides to camp out on the beach. He goes for a swim and then: “I cooked hotdogs on freshly cut and sharpened sticks over the coals of a big wood fire and heated a can of beans and a can of cheese macaroni in the red hot hollows, and drank my newly bought wine and exulted in one of the most pleasant nights of my life.”
Later, after almost summiting a 9,000-foot mountain in Yosemite in tennis shoes, and camped on a rock outcropping at the snow line, Kerouac eats a bulghur and vegetable stew with chopsticks and real chocolate pudding (cooked on a fire then cooled in a snow bank) for dessert. The meal over, he declares, “It was the most delicious supper of all time.”
So the idea is to plan a brutally tough, inexpensive beach adventure, say hiking the length of the Bay Ocean, Nestucca, or Nehalem sand spits, take yourself past your physical and psychological limits, pack along food, and cook up a simple and grand supper in the field immediately after concluding the adventure.
Ingredients:
• 1 cup outdoor adventure that pushes you to total exhaustion.
• 1 cup solitude. Bringing a friend is OK, but he can’t whine, bring shiny, trendy gear or a phone. He should not want to talk much, especially about his job or college football.
• 1 cup of self-righteousness. You are copying Kerouac and that sets a person apart.
• 1 cup of perseverance. You can’t quit.
• 1 cup of unpretentious food that can be cooked or prepared in the field: I like two fried egg, onion and tomato sandwiches with a cold beer, or canned vegetarian chili with fresh garlic and white wine in a plastic bottle that can chill quickly in a stream. All meals have to be cooked in the field or it isn’t properly Kerouacian. Don’t cut corners and bring something from a deli!
• 1 cup of being absolutely in the moment when you are exerting and eating. Think about nothing but the experience, your fatigue, the landscape, and the taste of the food you chose, hauled to a spot, prepared, and savored.
Directions
Mix this all together on a fine summer day and you will be compelled to say, and in fact you must declare, as Kerouac always did: “This is the best meal I’ve ever had.”
And always for dessert, if you can’t cook up chocolate pudding, try Kerouac’s favorite treat: a chocolate bar washed down with port wine.
'It isn't everyone that has an ocean.'
Remembering Samuel L. Boardman
[Posted Sept. 3, 2008]
Every now and then, when life becomes blue or bilious, it helps to hear a good hero story to get one’s self through the day … or week … or month. I prefer hearing the great stories of Oregon heroes where the hero did something courageous that ended up making my life better. I especially like the stories where the heroes later wrote about the experience with the intention of inspiring me to care about Oregon and the preservation of its natural resources.
Samuel H. Boardman is one such Oregon hero and Samuel Boardman was an excellent and passionate writer with the power to inspire.
From 1929 to 1950, Boardman served as Oregon’s first park superintendent. He once took a pay cut to keep his office going during the Depression, when the idea of the state government buying private land for parks was inconceivable, practically dangerous. He is rightly considered the “father” of the Oregon state parks system and almost single-handedly preserved more natural spaces in Oregon — 50,000 acres — than anyone else. Fifty-thousand acres!
If the U.S. Constitution didn’t prohibit the states from issuing their own currencies, Boardman’s face and one of the great places he saved from concrete would be on both sides of our $10 bill. I rank him as one of the greatest Oregonians because of his zealotry for establishing a system of coastal state parks that ended up as a showcase for the rest of country, if not the world.
The state honored Boardman in 1951 by naming a park after him on the Southern Oregon Coast. Samuel H. Boardman State Park, a narrow, 12-mile strip in Curry County, is a priceless gem of a park and a fitting tribute. In the 1940s, Boardman had wanted this land to become part of a larger national park that would have been Oregon’s second, after Crater Lake. Boardman toured federal officials around the area and the deal nearly went through, but a few local stockmen objected and helped kill the necessary Congressional appropriation.
Shortly after he retired, Boardman wrote a fascinating unpublished memoir of his experiences acquiring private land for state parks. It’s more of an extended sermon rather than a memoir. I came across the manuscript in old issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly and read it one memorable sitting.
Boardman wrote about Oregon:
Keep it immaculate for the whisper in the treetops tells you what men can’t tell you at Lake Success. Keep things immaculate that there may be a few places open for communion. The quiet of a wooded lake takes you from the hum of Main Street, and the spiritual side of your being is atoned. Never sacrifice His works that the commercial hot dog and its odors may take over.
Boardman on parks:
The value of a park cannot be based on a monetary value. Its scenic spiritual assets are beyond computation. Might not the answers of a distressed world be found in the God-given sermonettes of a park system?
And my favorite lines from Boardman’s memoir? Naturally, they are about the Oregon Coast.
Too much time of a life is spent in the valleys.
The beach is noted for its singing sands. May it ever be a melody of pleasure for its visitors.
It isn’t everyone that has an ocean.
Are you spending too much time in the valleys? Do you need to hear the beach’s music? Oregon has an ocean. You should visit as much as possible and remember the important work performed by an indefatigable Oregon civil servant named Samuel Boardman. Without him, you might not have enjoyed Oregon’s world famous access to hear that music.
The Coolest Literary Place in Oregon
'One Man's Beach' - by Matt Love
[Posted Aug. 21, 2008]
Every
time I am in the vicinity of Mt. Neahkahnie, I am compelled to stop at
Oswald West State Park. How can I not, knowing it’s named for the
governor who wrote and steered to passage an ingenious 66-word bill in
1913 that declared the beaches a public highway, and thus in the public
trust forever?
I also dig the existential vibe evaporating off the
surfers who dominate the scene, the towering hemlocks and cedars, and
that people have to hike a considerable distance to reach the beach.
Together, these qualities push Oswald West State Park into the top 10 list of Coolest Oregon Places.
But
what makes this park number one for me is a certain obscure writing
attraction that, I declare here, should be visited by every citizen of
Oregon, especially any writer.
The attraction is called the Matt
Kramer Memorial and it amounts to a plaque tucked away on the route to
Cape Falcon. It is so utterly remote and unpretentious that it took me
two hours to locate it after I learned of its existence several years
ago from a footnote in a book purchased at garage sale.
The plaque, which overlooks Short Sand Beach, reads:
“The
people of Oregon hereby express their gratitude to Matt Kramer of the
Associated Press, whose clear and incisive newspaper articles were
instrumental in gaining public support for passing of the 1967 Beach
Bill.”
Just who was Matt Kramer?
He was veteran reporter
covering the Capitol beat and the 1967 session of the Oregon
Legislature. His dispatches on the early, near-fatal legislative fate
of the “Beach Bill” that appeared in newspapers around the state helped
keep the bill in the public eye and secure its eventual passage.
Indeed, my research indicates that one story in particular, one that
Kramer wrote during the May 1967 death rattle of the bill, may be the
main reason Oregon has open beaches without fences and security guards
wearing headsets.
One journalist. Meager pay. God-awful boring hearings in a legislative
subcommittee. No environmental pros from Portland feeding Kramer canned
goods. No received wisdom from television or talk radio. Kramer just
wrote some straight news of the clarifying inverted pyramid type
extinct in contemporary American newspapers. The man simply wrote
40,000-50,000 words in five months (I’ve read them all) and his
sentences awakened a sleeping giant—the people of Oregon—to the
shocking news that their publicly-owned beaches in the dry sands areas
were imperiled by privatization.
My favorite Kramer sentence is:
“There has been a public outcry to preserve the beaches since some
private owners began claiming the beach down to the high tide line and
began barring the public.”
Clear and incisive. Just like the plaque says. And with his sentences and stories, Matt Kramer made Oregon history.
Looking down to the surfers below the memorial, taking in the Pacific
Ocean, looking north to Cape Falcon, I always feel ethereal when I
realize the state erected a plaque to a journalist for his work on
behalf of protecting Oregon’s beaches. It would be all I could ever
dream of achieving from the writing life.
Every journalism school student from an Oregon university should visit
the Matt Kramer Memorial as a requirement to graduate. Next fall, I
plan on taking my Newport High School journalism students there to lay
hands on the plaque and pledge fealty to the power of reporting the
news without bias and agenda. We’ll bring some tools and trim back the
foliage around the plaque. It’s the least we can do. Then we’ll jog
down the path and hit Short Sand beach and play with wild abandon — for
free.
Matt Love is the author of the Beaver State Trilogy and publisher of
Nestucca Spit Press (www.nestuccaspitpress.com). He lives in South
Beach and his books are available at bookstores along the coast. He can
be reached at lovematt100@yahoo.com
Tides, and luck, can change on the beach
[Posted Aug. 6, 2008]
Not too long ago, I pulled into the parking lot of coastal state park at dawn on a week day. I saw a large and shiny red truck parked there, which surprised me, because it’s rare to see another vehicle at this hour, but occasionally one appears.
After I let my truck’s tailgate down, the dogs flew out and headed toward the beach. I took a quick detour toward the other truck to investigate what I already knew I’d find. Sure enough, some dude was asleep in the cab.
Back in the days of my purposeless twenties living in Portland, when rock hadn’t died and you didn’t need a credit card to buy a pitcher of Oregon beer, I lived in a large house with several other purposeless men, including my cousin Darin, who, to that point, was the unluckiest person I’d ever met in my life. He also handled defeat and setback harder than anyone else I’d ever seen.
Darin had always been cursed with bad luck and misfortune. As a teenager he’d lost a coin flip to his younger brother for a ticket to see Game 6 of the 1977 NBA Finals, when the Portland Trail Blazers defeated the Philadelphia 76ers for their only championship. He would let a friend borrow his truck and the friend would fill it with the wrong gasoline and ruin the engine. He would seemingly always get beat on the long touchdown pass in the family’s Thanksgiving football games. A severe reading disability eliminated any chance of academic success. And when the bad luck and misfortune rained down on Darin, he would invariably handle it by brooding with extreme intensity and keeping all to himself, which was bracing to witness because Darin had one of the biggest hearts and kindest dispositions manifest in a young man I’d ever encountered.
During the short time I lived with him in Portland, I remember two, possibly three instances, where he suffered some bad luck or misfortune, and reacted by immediately driving to the ocean. It didn’t matter if it was 2 p.m. or 2 a.m., raining or dry. He would drive to the nearest beach, two hours away, and sleep in his truck until he felt prepared to return home and deal with the problem, typically girlfriend-related. When he arrived at the beach, I’m not sure he ever left his vehicle. I don’t know because I never asked him why he made these impulsive westward dashes. I do know I thought them ridiculous.
Now that I live at the beach, I understand Darin’s impulse. I frequently see people sleeping in their vehicles at coastal state parks in the early mornings the same crumpled way I imagine Darin sleeping 20 years ago. I also occasionally run across someone in the dunes, positioned fetally in a sleeping bag. These people, these Oregonians, had to get to the ocean. During the last decade living near the sea, I’ve felt lucky I didn’t have to drive as far as they do. It now takes me seven minutes to see the marine therapist.
At some point, Darin’s luck changed and now he’s living a full life with a great family in Washington. I like to think an Oregon ocean beach had something settling and pivotal to offer him when he needed it. I know the beach offers the same to me every morning. And of course, in Oregon, it doesn’t cost a cent.
Matt Love is the author of the Beaver State Trilogy and publisher of Nestucca Spit Press (www.nestuccaspitpress.com). He lives in South Beach and his books are available at bookstores along the coast. He can be reached at lovematt100@yahoo.com
Seal, its fate, occupy one man's thoughts
At 6:10 a.m. Sunday, on my regular beach walk with my two dogs, I discovered a harbor seal pup resting above the rack line, some 70 yards from the ocean. He or she was alive and writhing, apparently waiting for its mother to return. I was the only human being around, which normally I prefer, insist upon, but not this time.
The dogs approached the pup but I herded them away and watched it for 10 minutes from 30 feet away. At one point it looked directly at me, blinked twice, and raised a flipper to me.
I began to feel a mounting distress. I know you are never supposed to touch pups in situations like these, but it seemed a long, long way from the water. I was sure the next high tide would never reach it, although, despite walking the beach every morning, I knew practically nothing of the tides.
Finally I left and ran home with the dogs. I grabbed a camera and drove back down to the beach. I went over to the pup and took some photographs.
I saw a woman and her dog down the beach and jogged over. I told her about the pup and we discussed its possible fate.
“Let’s see,” she said, “high tide was at 4:40 a.m. and then next one is at around 11:30 a.m. What time is it?”
“7 a.m.”
“Just wait and see. If no one bothers it, the mother will come back. Most of the people around here know not to touch a seal pup.”
I don’t like to wait. I feel obligations in moments like these. It is hard to let go sometimes and let nature run the show, as it always has in the past, and always will until the end.
A few minutes later, I said goodbye to the woman and went home. I decided to drive to a café in Newport a couple of miles away and wait with coffee and distractions. The plan was to return to the beach at 11:30 and see if the pup was still there. If it was, the mother probably wasn’t coming back and the pup would die. And it would suffer too, and I felt sure I would be compelled to alleviate the suffering, although I had no idea what that might entail.
In the café, I read the Oregonian and New York Times, wrote in my journal, and read an old copy of a Paris Review collection of interviews with writers. In the book, I came across a line by William Faulkner: “A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination.”
I underlined the sentence and thought I might later quote it to my creative writing students.
Time passed and the three-hour wait plunged me into the second most intense sense of dread I have ever felt in my life. Number one was walking into the Tillamook County Courthouse seven years ago to file for divorce.
The vigil concluded, I drove slowly home to learn the pup’s fate. As I waited at an intersection for the light to change, it suddenly occurred to me: “What a fool! I could have sat on the cliff above the beach, watched in real time how this story ended, and documented the drama with photographs!”
But I let my sense of dread defeat my curiosity about the world, which amounts to nothing less than literary suicide for any writer. Or a kind of suicide for all people too, I think.
The dogs were leashed as we took the trail to the beach. I noticed the wet sand, freshly swept by the recent tide. Had it been high enough? I looked north at the rack line where I last saw the pup.
Gone. And I missed it all.
Matt Love lives in South Beach, and is the author/editor of The Beaver State Trilogy. He can be reached at lovematt100@yahoo.com.
Learn more about seal pups on the beach
Thanking Rachel for a noisy spring
[Posted June 25, 2008]
Six thirty. The mist falls on one of the last spring mornings before summer begins. I hit the beach with the dogs needing the shot of salvation the beach routinely injects whenever the disease of depression infects me.
We cruise north to the south jetty. In the distance, a ship waits for calm seas before making the narrow run between the rocks toward the safety of Yaquina Bay. The dogs break off east to sniff at the wrack line and I turn my head and look the other way, to the water, where all life began.
Ahead, less than a football field away, I see two large raptor-like birds standing on the sand, unmoving, staring straight west, as the last inch of a wave trickles over their talons. What the hell? Hawks don’t surf.
Tacking at northwest angles, I move closer to investigate, employing all my senses as Henry David Thoreau once commanded me — all of us — to do.
Suddenly, it dawns on me: for the first time, I am watching bald eagles in Oregon not in flight. They now exist less than 50 yards away, on my beach, and not another human is around to pollute the moment.
Immediately, I don’t feel the disease of depression anymore because I know that without one woman, a scientist, a writer, a warrior in defense of nature, a hero, a goddess who should adorn our currency, I know that without her monumental effort, bald eagles would not exist in South Beach or anywhere else in America.
Her name is Rachel Carson, and in 1962 her landmark book “Silent Spring” launched the modern environmental movement by exposing the ecological disaster wrought by the indiscriminate aerial application of poisonous chemicals, namely DDT. It was an overnight bestseller around the world and attracted an astonishing variety of readers, including a President of the United States, John Kennedy, who convened a special panel to investigate the disastrous effects of pesticides on the natural world. Later, DDT was banned, and with the help of the Endangered Species Act and Richard Nixon, who signed it into law, the birds came back. The spring wasn’t so silent anymore.
Without Rachel Carson and “Silent Spring,” there wouldn’t be a pelican, peregrine falcon or bald eagle left in this county, even Alaska. DDT was wiping them out as the government and farmers sprayed oceans of this poison across the land and water. It was a modern-day industrial plague encouraged by chemical corporations and their hired men in white coats who apparently never listened to birds.
I feel better after seeing the eagles, but I want more. I want to see the eagles launch from Earth. I want to see something I’ve never seen before. Yes, it amounts to a rude hominid interruption but I’ll beg forgiveness later.
I sprint toward the eagles and they lift off the sand on course for Asia. They quickly bank east and fly toward the cliffs. From nowhere, a third eagle joins the formation and I watch all of this, annihilated yet saved, restored, ready to keep at it and get good work done, part of which is pulling all the weeds from my lawn by hand and not spraying herbicide.
Matt Love is the author of the Beaver State Trilogy and publisher of Nestucca Spit Press (www.nestuccaspitpress.com). He lives in South Beach and his books are available at bookstores along the coast.
He can be reached at lovematt100@yahoo.com
Haystack Rock and roll will never die
(posted June 11, 2008)
Is there anything more sacred in nature to Oregonians than recreating on our publicly-owned beaches? No, nothing even remotely comes close. A few confused people might say skiing on Mt. Hood tops the list. To that I say: every Oregonian has a beach story. Not every Oregonian has a Mt. Hood story. I don’t.
If anyone further doubts my claim, they would have been instantly convinced last year had they attended the first annual Cape Kiwanda Music Festival in Pacific City. There, local bands such as Lunker and the Retroactive Gamma Rays ripped through savage sets in front of a laid back audience of all ages, races and sexual orientations, drinking pop, beer or milk. In the background, surfers, dory boats, dogs, a wedding party, flying kites and small camp fires filled out one of the most quintessential Oregon scenes I have ever witnessed. It was sheer Beaver State beauty.
And don’t ever tell me Oregon rawk is dead! Not after you’ve seen Lunker tear it up with a groove so poundingly awesome that even the dwindling numbers of rockfish offshore and the spirit of Oswald West came out to boogie. Or heard the Retroactive Gamma Rays’ spine tingling surf instrumentals that make you want to dance with a total stranger.
Cost of admission? Totally free! Unlike skiing.
You still don’t believe my claim about the primacy of the Oregon beach experience? Well, it’s time once again for the free Kiwanda Music Festival, so on Saturday, July 5, make the drive to Pacific City and judge for yourself. I might also add that this year’s eclectic lineup blows away last year’s stellar one. The music starts at 2 p.m. and runs until dusk. Fireworks to follow.
Just head to Pacific City and follow the signs to Cape Kiwanda. The schedule is listed below.
Cape Kiwanda Music Festival
Saturday, July 5
2 p.m. David Twigg (solo acoustic from L.C.)
2:45 p.m. The Broke String Band (bluegrass from Portland)
4 p.m. Retroactive Gamma Rays (surf rock from L.C.)
5 p.m. The Dead Trees (indie rock from Portland)
6 p.m. The Juke Joint Gamblers (rockabilly from Portland)
7 p.m. The Whiskey Robbers (rock n’ roll from Newport)
8 p.m. Lunker (heavy funk rock from Pacific City)
9 p.m. Ninth Moon Black (ambient metal from Eugene)
The Great Birthright
(posted May 30, 2008)
“In the administration of this God-given trust, a broad protective policy should be declared and maintained. No local selfish interest should be permitted, through politics or otherwise, to destroy or even impair this great birthright of our people.”
This great Oregon birthright is our ocean beaches. Oregon Governor Oswald West wrote these words in 1949, 36 years after signing into law a bill he drafted that declared the wet sand areas of Oregon’s ocean beaches a public highway. He claimed a solo horseback ride in 1912 from Cannon Beach over Arch Cape and Neahkahnie Mountain, and into Nehalem, inspired him.
West also wrote: “So I came up with a bright idea. And this was very much of a surprise for I have enjoyed but few such in a lifetime.
“I drafted a simple short bill declaring the seashore from the Washington line to the California line a public highway. I pointed out that thus we would come into miles and miles of highway ‘without cost to the taxpayer.’ The Legislature took the bait — hook, line and sinker. Thus came public ownership of our beaches.”
West’s masterfully brief law reads: “The shore of the Pacific Ocean, between ordinary high tide and extreme low tide, and from the Columbia River on the north to the Oregon and California State line on the south, expecting such portion or portions of such shore as may have heretofore been disposed of by the State, is hereby declared a public highway and shall forever remain open as such to the public.”
Sixty-six words. With his law, Oswald West changed Oregon forever. He helped establish and enshrine in law a unique cultural relationship between a state’s citizenry and a natural recreational resource. Unique? It was and still is pretty much unprecedented in the world.
And to think that the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department doesn’t have one sign at any of its coastal parks honoring West, including, incredibly, Oswald West State Park! That amounts to a crime against Oregon history.
He was hardcore Oregon
[Posted May 14, 2008]
On Feb. 14, 2009, Oregon celebrates its sesquicentennial. You can expect significant media fanfare when the big birthday rolls around and all sorts of commemorative events. As Oregon approaches 150 years old, one question all of us living here might want to consider is: what qualifies as something authentic hard core Oregon? Something that can’t be found anywhere else in the country and is worth celebrating because of its utterly unique Beaver State quality. Something worth extolling, too.
May I offer a candidate for consideration? I met him a few weeks ago.
And thought I was a hard core Oregonian who dug Oregon’s ocean beaches!
Six thirty in the Wednesday morning. Rain smashes down on the skylights like a Keith Moon frenzy on the drums. Time to walk the dogs on the beach. If I don’t, a possible canine mutiny.
I don the pea coat and put on the stocking cap. We walk outside and greet slanting walls of rain. An umbrella? Are you kidding me? This is the Oregon coast. I once broke up with a woman who used an umbrella. I couldn’t be seen with her. Who doesn’t want to see rain fall on their partner’s face?
Seven minutes later we hit the beach. The pea coat has lost the battle with the rain. I can’t see beyond a quarter mile.
I let the dogs off leash and they bolt to the ocean. Suddenly, in unison, we see a man walking toward us, emerging from the clouds. It is a man? Or an apparition? The grim reaper? I’ve hit this beach with the dogs exactly 48 mornings in a row and this marks the first time I’ve seen another human being.
Interloper! Trespasser! This is my private church service. I feel violated.
The dogs trot over to the man. He pets them. I change course to meet him. There has to be a story here. Stories are worth interrupting church.
He wears a hooded sweatshirt without wearing the hood. His Levis are soaked through and he wears tennis shoes without socks. No expensive hiking accoutrements whatsoever.
He tells me he’s walking from the south jetty in Newport to Lost Creek—and back. I add up the miles. Close to 12. He must have started two hours ago.
I wish him good luck. He heads north and I head south. I never got his name.
As November nears, the writing is on the wall
[Posted April 30, 2008]
A drizzle falls as the dogs and I ramble south down Driftwood Beach, a few miles north of Waldport. I see no other vehicle in the parking lot, always the best sight at a state park beach wayside.
I am here to read the writing on the wall, or more precisely a sandy cliff, where on a previous visit to the beach, I’d noticed from a distance some letters and symbols carved into its face. At that time, I was eager to investigate, but an unrelenting downpour had swelled a creek and dissuaded my attempt at a long jump.
No downpour today. We approach the creek and I take a running jump and cross the channel by a millimeter.
Safely landed, I move toward the cliff. At the very moment I begin to read some of the words, a hummingbird bursts from a nearby willow thicket and flies inches past my face. It jolts me. I see the whites of its eyes. I’ve never seen a hummingbird at the beach and the juxtaposition of this beautifully tiny creature and the roaring vastness of the ocean presents an electric contrast.
I regain my composure and turn to the cliff. Initials, initials everywhere and not a sentence to drink: M + C = ; JR + S = forever. Sweet teenage math.
Outside of a smiley face and a nicely rendered drawing of a large smiling rodent, initials and names dominate the literature of the cliff. As I read, it suddenly occurs to me that there isn’t a single expression of a political nature. Not even one crude statement in a heated time of contested presidential election and protracted controversial war. What is one to make of that?
I don’t know. I have a theory but will refrain advancing it here and let the reader answer the question for herself. We should all answer it. And free walks on an Oregon ocean beach always makes for an opportune time to answer tough questions of love and war. Did I tell you I figured out the meaning of life there?
What do I really know about the absence of political statements on Driftwood Beach’s cliff, where, 40 years ago, I am sure they would have dominated the literature? I just found this wall and was surprised not to find a single expression of political belief. There is one now. In fact, there are two.
One night a storm will arise and hurl waves into the cliff and erode the carvings. But that might not be until after the first Tuesday in November, when things will surely change. Or remain the same.
Singing the praises of Sidney Bazett
[Published April 18, 2008]
Often when I ramble the beaches with the dogs, I often think about the people who created and protected this inalienable Oregon right that I freely exercise like a religion two to three times a day. These people deserve recognition and honor and that’s one of the reasons I started this column. In the coming months I’ll be profiling some of these people, the kind who never make it into the history books, unlike, say, generals and governors.
In the late 1960s, a Republican representative from Grants Pass offered the following explanation as to why he effectively sacrificed his political career to protect Oregon’s publicly-owned beaches: “The people of this state who can only afford a tank of gas and a picnic basket have the right to spend a day with their children on the beach without having to rent a motel room or pay a toll.”
His name was Sidney Bazett. He is one of the many unsung heroes in the successful fight to pass Oregon’s famous Beach Bill back in 1967. He died decades ago, but left behind a legacy benefitting every living person who has ever enjoyed a moment on an Oregon ocean beach. For free.
Isn’t that about everyone in the state? And everyone visiting the Oregon coast?
In the spring of 1967, HB 1601, which later became known as the Beach Bill, landed in a subcommittee of the House chaired by Bazett that oversaw beach issues. At the time, several motel owners were making unprecedented ownership claims to the dry sand areas of Oregon’s ocean beaches. The bill sought to protect the public’s long-standing use of these areas by declaring state control from the median high tide to native vegetation line, roughly to 16 feet in elevation.
A majority of Republicans dominated the subcommittee and they quickly moved to table the bill. Bazett was not among them. Even though he ran the subcommittee, he didn’t have the votes to push the bill forward and it appeared dead.
Had that been the end of the story, Oregon’s ocean beaches today would be desecrated with fences, boardwalks, ‘no trespassing’ signs, security guards, hot dog stands and espresso carts. In other words, it wouldn’t be Oregon. It would look like everywhere else.
But it wasn’t the end of the story.
Bucking his fellow subcommittee members and the leadership in the House, Bazett employed a series of clever stalling tactics until the public learned what was at stake if the Beach Bill went down. He leaked to the press. He met with members of the public and implored them to come testify on behalf of the bill. He postponed hearings. He bought time anyway he could.
The tactics worked and, later, the Oregon public rose up and demanded their beaches be held in public trust forever. The legislators listened and the Beach Bill has since become holy Oregon law.
For his efforts, for putting Oregon above party, Bazett was, as he later wrote a friend, “shunned,” literally, in the halls of the capitol.
Did I mention that Sidney Bazett hailed from Southern California and was a comptroller in the movie industry before migrating to Southern Oregon? When I learned this, I had to take back all those nasty things I’ve said and written about Southern Californian transplants over they years.
One of them helped save Oregon’s beaches for everyone, including those, “who can only afford a tank of gas and a picnic basket,” to enjoy.
A coast Classic
[Published April 4, 2008]
In serious training for the upcoming third annual Oregon Coast Instant Haiku Classic, I have taken to composing a haiku every morning during my walk down the beach with the dogs.
Let me tell you: composing a haiku in 35-mile per hour winds and sheets of rain is quite the hearty literary exercise.
Fortunately, this morning’s weather proved more amenable to composition. My effort:
Dogs bolt to the waves
One gull probes at the wrack line
West, a crabber floats
The haiku. The ancient, Japanese-in-origin, three-line, seventeen-syllable, five-seven-five structure form of poetry that distills the essence of a moment in nature. In a country where everyone probably talks too much and too loud and takes forever, if at all, to get to the truth, haikus offer a compact and quiet alternative. They never confuse. They always clarify.
The Classic, set for Saturday, April 12, at Café Mundo in Newport in the Nye Beach area, upholds and updates the venerable haiku tradition.
The Classic is a four-team poetry competition, scored by the audience in a format similar to a diving event where judges hold up numerical scores. All poets are randomly grouped into four-person teams. The host throws out a prompt, say “bonfires,” and then poets have 90 seconds to compose a haiku.
That’s right. On the spot, with a full house watching. Then the poet performs the haiku to the full house and judges score the effort. Winning teams advance for the right to take home the coveted Whitman Cup and special prizes.
There’s nothing like it on the Oregon coast, or for that matter, the entire state.
The competition begins at 7 p.m. Anyone interested in participating as a poet should show up at 6:45 (or earlier) to register. The event has been packed the last two years, so spectators should arrive early if you want to get choice seats.
Admission to the Classic? Free… which coincidentally and not by historical accident, is the cost required to ramble Oregon’s ocean beaches. More on that later.
A final word of advice for poets: Get to the beach and start practicing. Others are.
To muse and scavenge
Gulls and poets: much alike
Are you Newport bound?
Off and Running
[Published March 21, 2008]
Welcome to the first installment of One Man’s Beach, my new column for Oregon Coast Today. I have two modest goals for the column: 1) visit beaches from Manzanita to Yachats and share my observations, intuitions and meditations; 2) report on those matters that created and strengthened Oregon’s special relationship to its ocean beaches – a relationship utterly unique in the country, if not the world.
So what’s with the name, One Man’s Beach?
In 1938, a writer named E.B. White moved from New York City to a small farm on the Maine coast. Over the next several years, he contributed a series of essays on his new country life to the New Yorker and Harper’s that culminated in the 1943 publication of “One Man’s Meat.”
Sixty-five years later, the book is still in print and considered a classic of memoir, reportage, observation and the definitive look at the rural American home front during World War II. After the publication of “One Man’s Meat,” White went on to write, among other books, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.”
Eleven years ago I escaped the Pearl District in Portland to South Tillamook County on the Oregon Coast as a one-year cultural experiment to improve my mental health and try to establish myself as a writer. I succeeded on both counts and I’m still here, now recently relocated to South Beach. I’ll never leave the Oregon coast and have made its people and places one of my main literary passions.
Not long after moving to the sea, I picked up a copy of “One Man’s Meat” at a used bookstore in Lincoln City, read it that night, and was immediately struck by its compact prose style and participatory, yet restrained narrative voice.
“One Man’s Meat” exerted a tremendous literary effect on me when I first read it and the feeling has remained. The genesis for this column is a direct result of this feeling.
We are off and running, literally, since the last five mornings, in the overdue fulfillment of a New Year’s resolution, I hit my local beach at 6:15 a.m. for a reckless run down the sand. It was either raining or foggy or both. No other human was around. I saw the same western gull every morning in almost the exact same spot. Every morning I saw the dawn descend over the south jetty of Yaquina Bay. I didn’t have to pay a cent for this privilege. Perfect. Quintessentially Oregon. I ate it up…like a big piece of meat.
Matt Love is the author of the Beaver State Trilogy and publisher of Nestucca Spit Press. His books are available at coastal bookstores or through www.nestuccaspitpress.com. He can be reached at lovematt100@yahoo.com.
|
