September has always been the sweetest month, a time when summer lingers before its slide into fall, the days bright-blue and shadows changing as the sun edges farther south and there is dew in the mornings; leaves beginning to color, school about to begin. 

In September of this year there is no reason to mourn what occurred a year ago. We suffered and survived, and now, aware of our toughness and vulnerability, it’s time to get on with it. There will be other challenges, other disasters as the world becomes more crowded and increasingly unfair, but such is life.  September is my birthday month, for me a time of nostalgia, especially as I grow older, and this year to celebrate I drove south to the California border and returned on Highway 101--all the way up to Astoria, to see what remains of an Oregon Coast that still seems everywhere for sale.

I have made this journey several times. Once, some years ago, as a young reporter and concerned native Oregonian, and with the blessings of our late and legendary Gov. Tom McCall, to see what depredations time and “progress” had wrought.

This time I moved south inland, down the I-5 corridor to Grants Pass and, inevitably, beneath a pall of smoke through the great scorching “Biscuit Fire” eating its way through Southwestern Oregon. Traveling adjacent to the fire I was reminded of my mother’s account of driving through the “Tillamook
Burn,” a series of disastrous holocausts that devoured virgin forests in the northern Coast Range during the 1930s. Skies were dark and ashes fell on the streets of Portland from that one, started by an errant spark at a logging show near Gales Creek. Driving past fire-frightened deer, the air roily with smoke, trees scorched and the ground bare, I recalled accounts of forest fires burning uncontrolled throughout Oregon’s early history and certainly before. 

The Native Americans started them for purposes of good hunting and let them burn--for who was there to fight them--and early settlers recalled summer skies perpetually redolent of smoke throughout the Northwest.  Having covered forest fires in my past as a reporter, I recall there’s not a lot to say. Mainly it’s logistical:  So many acres, so many men on the fire line, weather conditions, water supplies, air drops and whether someone has been killed or injured, which was rarely in the past. Then, there were fewer homes in harm’s way, and that has made a considerable difference. We tend to describe forest fires and other natural disasters in anthropomorphic terms: “rapacious,” “angry,” “threatening”-- and all of the above, when nature is simply throwing down thunderbolts and reminding us of how insignificant we are. 

Gray and overcast in Crescent City, a flat place without any “there” there, I turn north toward Brookings and begin the long ascent of 101, eventually escaping the pall of smoke and finding the cool relief of sea fog instead.  Being from Portland, this is a seldom-visited section of the coast for me, a place of new and unfamiliar beauty. Here is a warmer, less-crowded place I’d like to know more of, a place to visit more often and stay longer, just looking out to sea from a landscape that holds few memories for me.  I can only recall that my father, an archer, made his arrows from Port Orford cedar, and I see signs advertising things made from “myrtlewood” (most often salad bowls)--which, as any Oregonian knows, grows only here and in the Holy Land--and I’m relieved to see the life-sized concrete dinosaur, green and yellow, still lurking the roadway as it did when I was a boy.

North to Coos Bay and Florence, memories begin to crowd in. I like the feel of these hardworking places which are still relatively isolated. I recall H.L. Davis’ novel, “Honey in the Horn,” with its descriptions of the Oregon Coast along here; how there were scavengers living on the flotsam of wrecked ships, eking out survival on the largess of the bays, rivers and the sea.  (Davis’ characters, at one point, encounter an early settler, an old man who for decades has operated a store within earshot of the sea but has never seen the ocean whose roar lulls him to sleep at night. Asked if he isn’t curious, the old man replies, “I know it’s there.”)

Lumber and dairy farms along here, then tourists--now tourists, with their lumbering, highway choking R.V.s, the roadsides chained with a repetition of  fast-food places, motels and condominiums. No sweat for anyone with money and credit cards, membership in AAA. “Going to the beach” was a true adventure in the late 1940s. As a boy, I traveled to the coast in my Aunt Metza’s pristine 1937 Chevy. In that black sedan shiny with my aunt’s fussiness (my Uncle Marko, from the Old Country, wasn’t allowed to drive), there were my grandparents, my cousin Madelyn and “Tippi,” the fuzzy muzzled family dog that my aunt kept on a short leash-- “Don‘t snuffle the windows, Tippi!” she would shout--all of us crammed into that great old car that, when she sold it years later, was in as good condition as the day it left the showroom.

Since my grandfather was a tailor, my grandparents, immigrants from Croatia, always dressed to the nines, and frequently the conversations were in Serbo-Croatian, grandpa’s English being what it was. “I speak three languages (Serbo-Croatian, German and Hungarian),” he once told me. “That’s enough.”  

Back before highways cut through the Coast Range, families traveled to the Coast by train, bringing all their supplies and spending the summer season in tents or, if they could afford it, large old hotels.  We usually stayed in small cabins that were wood-stoved, linoleum-floored, and furnishings were dank
and smelled of the sea. People got sunburned in those days, swam in the icy ocean until they turned blue, and sand was into everything. 

North of Florence, past some spectacular scenery, Sea Lion Caves and Heceta Head Lighthouse; small beaches, capes, cliffs and forests; creeks and rivers sneaking down, is Yachats, where I spent some good times of my life.

I find there is still the attractive isolation that drew me here the first time. Almost half a century ago, fishing off the rocks, fishing for fall sea-run cutthroat trout in the Yachats river; bending for agates or just looking out at the sea.  Here at Yachats (Ya-hots), with my first wife and several friends, we experienced the tidal wave from the Alaskan Earthquake, toasting the weirdness of off-schedule tides with good humor and a lot of booze.

Here, too, was where the late, great Oregon author Ken Kesey holed up to write and to finish his novel,  “Sailor’s Song. Here also something mysterious once apparently happened, causing my father to always refer to the place as “Not so Yachats.”  

Driving north through Waldport and on to Newport, memories crowd into the car: Fishing off the jetty, chowder at “Mo’s,” once a treat, now a tourist trap; some nights at Goodie Cable’s “Sylvia Beach Hotel,” angst and fantasy at Moolach shores; up past Otter Crest, Boiler Bay; Depoe Bay (which cub reporters always spelled “Depot” the first few times); then Lincoln City.
I remember as a young lad being taken to sea for the first time aboard a fishing boat, a “Tradewinds Trawler” (aka “puker”) from Depoe Bay. It was bright and sunny, the sea blue and festooned with white caps, and I heaved my guts out. Even today, just driving by the place, my stomach churns a bit.

Lincoln City, once a linking of small villages, has now become a state of mind; a gridlock of tourist congestion that an architect friend of mine, John Storrs, who designed the resort at “Salishan,” once described as a “gastronomical dustbowl.”  (Photo: Salishan golf course.)

Once upon a time there was the legendary “Pixie Kitchen,” “Lil’ Black Sambo’s” (the “Black”subsequently removed--as is the restaurant, currently burned but under reconstruction), the Dorchester House and Surftides Resort, where I spent my first honeymoon. .And some other places. But now there are many more, including “Chinook Winds Casino,” where myself and many others have contributed often to the fortunes of that venerable tribe before eating in the dining room.

However, on closer examination, the glut of over development that typifies Lincoln City has its attractive places if you seek them out; if you avoid the discount shops, for example, and seek out little back roads where small, unobtrusive hostels overlook fine white beaches and spectacular seascapes.

North again, I climb the hills below Cloverdale and Pacific City where dories put to sea. There are small farms tucked into the bends of the Nestucca River, pasture land beneath forest, and I recall better days of less people and better fishing for spring and fall running salmon, but I was young then, fishing more often and with more zeal.

Nearing Tillamook over its broad plain populated mainly by dairy cows-- “The land of trees, cheese and ocean breeze”-- I cross a small River named after the pioneer Trask, and recall the late Oregon author Don Berry, whose novel of the same name was, like Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion,” a
masterpiece of depicting Oregon coastal life, early and beyond. Tillamook is passed through, unchanged as it has been for much of my life. I see the high school football field with its sign, “Home of the Cheesemakers,” a weird name, I often thought, for a football team-- “Go Cheese!” perhaps, but the famous cheese factory is just down the road. In these parts you do what you can for glory. Beyond the cheese I cross the Wilson where I have spent days past freezing my ass off in pursuit of the wily winter steelhead. Then across the Kilchis, which heads, like all these streams, in the tangled Coast Range, burned and then grown over.  (Photo: Garibaldi on Tillamook Bay)

I remember that “Kilchis” was chief of the fierce tribe that hunkered by the shores of Nehalem Bay, a bit north, and legend says he was a huge dark man sprung from the loins of a black sailor wrecked on Peacock Spit, at the mouth of the Columbia River, early in the 19th century. Up again past Bay City, on Tillamook Bay, oysters here and the start of good salmon fishing at times.  Into Garibaldi, a mill town whose mill employed some of my uncles and cousins, but now only a huge skyward smokestack remains. The place has been transformed into a boutique-driven fishing mecca, and somewhat cheerier than in the past, until you’ve wintered here.

Up the road past the pristine Coast Guard station, we arrive at Bar View which anchors the huge rock jetty at the mouth of Tillamook Bay. Fished here as a boy, renting cane poles and clam necks from “Sig,” and old Norwegian who once ran a bait shop of the same name, catching rock fish of varying ilk and colors when the tide was right.  Now, finally, Rockaway Beach, which has a large chunk of family history. My uncle and aunt had a store here and my uncle was mayor for 20 years; my other uncle was on the city council. Another uncle still owns a commercial block in what passes for the “urban core,” and I love Rockaway’s undevelopment, a town remain sleepy despite efforts otherwise, thank God.

Twin Rocks dominant in the sea to the south, a lovely expansive beach northwards to Nehalem Bay, Lake Lytle a bit north out of town. I recall staying here during World War II. Blimps from the huge hangers at Tillamook passed overhead during the day seeking submarines, at night a siren screamed for lights out and people to be off the beach. I learned to swim here, in the saltwater Natatorium, built fires on the beach; drank beer in the now defunct “Harold’s Club” (the other one), and introduced my kids to summer days like I once knew--and now so many of the family are gone. So quickly it all passes, but there is a store of memories. I remember my aunt in her last days, lying in bed still tough and beautiful, saying quite pragmatically, “I can’t die, I have too much to do.”

Too many other things begin to flood in, times and people gone, so I have to be off and out of there.  Snaking up the flank of Neahkanie Mountain I revisit the most spectacular view on all of the Oregon Coast, smiling as I remember legends of Spanish treasure buried somewhere on its sides, the legions of
treasure hunters who have found nothing but beeswax.   Winding down, I pass Arch Cape where author Jean “Clan of the Cave Bear”Auel has her lair; a gracious and most generous woman trapped by a series of unfortunate prehistoric novels that will most likely conclude when her protagonist, Ayla, invents the outboard motor. (Photo: hiker link to this area)

Thinking of Jean, I recall what James Michener wrote in an introduction to a biography of Truman Capotes; that he himself was not a good writer but was pleased that his earnings and popularity allowed his publisher to print Capote and others of higher quality. 

Cannon Beach, just north, I pass by quickly fearing entanglement in its Mother Goosey ambiance. Like many places overwhelmed by the B&B set, “Cannon,” as they refer to it, is a place to go if you want to be seen by someone who will tell you later, “I saw you at Cannon”-- as in “I saw you at: Black Butte, Sun River,  Salishan. . .”  Trendy, not like the venerable beachside destinations of Seaside and Gearhart anymore. Seaside, where Lewis & Clark made salt from the sea, a carnival place of Skee-Ball and saltwater taffy, and where therewere violent Labor Day riots in the 1960s; Gearhart hanging in there staid and respectable, its old hotel gone and now condominiumized; the beach doesn’t change much. September light, the sun dropping farther south as I travel north to Astoria, passing Fort Clatsop where Lewis & Clark hunkered for a winter of damp and sloppy storms.

I see the Astor Column atop its hill, and recall that the city began as a fur trading outpost established by John Jacob Astor, whose name is on the town’s tall and once spiffy hotel.  I spent a winter here myself, when the Navy had a mothball fleet based at Tongue Point in the 1950s, and before the four-mile bridge was built to Washington, rode the ferries on gray gloomy days, crossing by Desdemona Sands where men once fished for salmon with teams of horses.  Seagulls hang in the ever-present sea breeze and there is almost too much history here: Chinook Indians, fur traders, British and American seaman entering the great Columbia River, passing over the Columbia Bar, which some say is the most treacherous in the world.

Too many people come here to fish now, the salmon dwindling, but from the river the view once must have been more promising. Finns and Slavs and Swedes and Norsemen, immigrants of all ilks came for the fish and to cut the trees, there was a street- car line in the old days, and you’d think Astoria, located where it is on its beautiful hills, would be as big as San Francisco.
But not so without a railroad moving east, up the river to Portland, which ships can reach quite easily over 100 miles. 

I travel east myself, leaving the coast and following the river back to my home town. Some leaves are just beginning to turn as the days begin dwindling to a “precious few,” and I think upon my own years, this September of my life, and wonder if it can be the best of all seasons.

© 2002 Paul Pintarich   Graphics link to their source, where known.