From the plethora of maps and brochures tucked away under the seat, in the glove box, and in the little compartment in the door panel designed especially to hold used Kleenex tissues, chocolate bar wrappers, and little plastic bottles of body lotion pilfered from hotel bathrooms, I select a map at random and study it carefully.
“When you get to the Pacific Ocean,” I say, “turn left.”
MONTHS before the trip, I had a thought: Must get some brochures, check out the Internet, make a plan. I like to know what’s ahead, even if it morphs into something else. At home, I’m the one with the tidy desk, pens in a row, books squared, something I spend an inordinate amount of time justifying. Sometimes, I insist, a messy desk is not a sign of a creative mind; it’s just a disgusting, messy desk.
Wayne is always telling me to stop thinking about the papers that need filing and concentrate on my writing. I did that in Vancouver— there’s a manuscript in the back seat to prove it—and my plan to plan this trip got pushed aside until it was almost too late. At the last minute, I dashed off requests to the tourism offices of the states we’d hit first: Washington, Oregon, California. We were packing the car when the bulging envelopes arrived.
From the tub in the Cannery Pier Hotel, I’d read the brochures aloud to Wayne, who was sipping wine in the adjoining bedroom. Along the Oregon coast, apparently, it’s geology that dominates. “Listen to this,” I called: “‘Cannon Beach: nine miles of wide, walkable beach . . . scenic beauty of the sea stacks offshore and headlands onshore . . . sea creatures in tide pools.’ There’s something called Haystack Rock, the third-largest coastal monolith in the world, whatever that is.”
“Sounds like a garage band.”
I ignored him and went on to the fine print. “A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single massive stone. Says here the Haystack is a 235-foot-high chunk of basalt. More than two thousand seabirds nest on it.”
I had his attention now. “Tufted puffin. Pigeon guillemot. Have we seen those?”
I may be the organized one, but Wayne is better at keeping up his life list. If I had my way, I’d make a note every time I met a bird, not just the first sighting. I remember birding with Roger Tory Peterson one cold, November day near his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut. I drove us to the shore; he was over eighty and his wife wouldn’t let him take the wheel. “He’ll get distracted by a bird and end up in the Atlantic,” she said. The wind off the ocean was bone-sharp; the clouds, a weight overhead. I scanned the skies. Not much to see, I was thinking, when he raised his binoculars to focus on some ring-billed gulls fighting over what looked like a french fry on the wharf. “I love gulls,” he sighed.
But there aren’t even gulls flying when we get to Cannon Beach. The wind is blustery and the rain has started up again. I had visions of wandering among the tide pools at the base of the Haystack, through what the brochures call the Marine Garden, a 300-foot radius rich with sea stars, iridescent anemones, and idiosyncratic crabs, creatures so delicate that the whole assemblage could be obliterated in an hour by careless tourists. “Walk only on bare rock,” the brochure warns. “Barnacles are animals too!”
No need to worry about dealing a death blow to a barnacle today. I roll down the window to take a picture—the sun is shafting out from under the clouds, a deadly, sulphurous yellow that defines the word “inhospitable.”
Monoliths rise from mercury waves all down the coast. Goonies Rock. Arch Point. Otter Rock. Their slick shapes call out to be named. Not far from where we turn back onto the coastal highway from our Willamette detour is Proposal Rock, so named because some turn-of-the-last-century romantic went down on one knee to a fair maiden in the scrubby forest that sits like a bad toupée on top. To get up there, not only do you have to climb a steep cliff, you have to cross a wide, cold creek with your pant legs rolled and skirts hitched. How romantic is that?
After our detour to the Willamette, the weather does not improve. Wayne dozes while I squint through the windshield at the central part of Oregon’s coastal highway. The waves are gelid, whipped into grey foam against the monoliths. On a sunny day in mid-July, these beaches must be a lovers’ delight, but in December, in a storm, they fill me with despair, even though I’m warm and dry and safe in our little car. At Cape Foulweather, the breakers pound as though they mean to end the world. And maybe they will. More than once, the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, nicknamed Terrible Tilly, has had her light smashed by rocks flung 133 feet up from the sea floor by the waves. And then there’s the Devil’s Punch Bowl, an enormous basin formed when the roofs of two sea caves collapsed along this shore.
I keep my eyes on the road, on the endless slap-slap of the wipers. If we want to see the splendours of the Oregon Coastal Highway, we’ll have to come back. In July. In a heat wave. In a convertible. I’ll file the brochures. Planning will be a breeze.
WITH the tapioca sun a pale, lucid orb in the upper right quadrant of the windshield and the Pacific Ocean on our starboard side, Merilyn is assured that we are heading due south, and I can relax. The effects of the wine are wearing thin.
“You were snoring,” Merilyn says comfortably.
“I wasn’t asleep,” I protest. Navigator falling asleep is a grave offence for which we have yet to establish a suitable punishment. “Name the next five towns we’ll pass through” has been suggested. “Drink less wine” has also come up. We’ve sent it to arbitration. Driver falling asleep is a much graver lapse, and it is part of the passenger’s duties to prevent it, hence the stricture against a nodding navigator.
“Then you were awake and snoring,” she says, “which is worse.”
“Where are we?” Wrong question, coming from the navigator.
“Coming up to Florence,” Merilyn says.
I look at the map. This entire coastline seems made up of one protected area after another: Beachside State Recreation Site, Yachats State Recreation Area, Neptune State Scenic Viewpoint, Carl G. Washburne Memorial State Park. To our left is the Siuslaw National Forest, a vast green area on the map that connects a little farther south with Elliott State Forest. If it is true that only about 15 per cent of American wilderness is protected by legislated parkland, most of that must be concentrated here, along the Pacific coast.
We are, I note aloud, passing through some very tall trees. They soar above us like rockets, their noses vanishing out of sight, their tangled, exposed roots trailing on the ground like ribbons of exhausted fuel. They completely dwarf the notion of what we easterners think when we think tree. At home, a log cabin might be made from forty logs; here, it seems, one log would make forty cabins.
The forest is primarily Douglas-fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, western red cedar, and tanoak. Every now and then we pass a stump that seems broad enough to build a house on, and I am rather surprised no one has. In fact, the nascent hobbit in me wonders if a person could simply carve out a western red cedar to make a house. A tree needs only 10 per cent of its outer cambium layers, a few dozen rings, and its bark, and it will keep sending sap up to its branches. A fifty-seven-foot-diameter sugar pine would give about fifteen hundred square feet of floor space. In fact, carving a house into a tree would seem to make more sense than felling the tree, sawing the wood into boards, and then reassembling the boards to make a house.
William Least Heat-Moon looked down this highway and saw four hundred miles of “clapboard-by-the-sea motels, Jolly Whaler buffets and clear-cut mountain slopes