Oregon Coast 2019 – Day 1

Glass ornament at Sassy Onion Cafe in Salem, Oregon

Up earlyish and gone soon afterward. Frozen and mostly dark as we pulled away, the horizon was just showing the first signs of the approaching dawn. Without a window scraper, we waited for the car to warm so the windshield wipers could do the work of clearing the view. While we sat there we realized how luxurious those seat warmers in our own car can be; this is part of the price we pay for renting the cheapest car on the lot.

With no interest in Portland today, though I’d swear Voodoo was telepathically signaling me to stop in for a breakfast of maple bacon donuts, we got onto Interstate 5 for the trek south. It’s 34 degrees of cold, with fog filling the space between. Our need for coffee is demanding a stop in Salem to re-caffeinate our nervous systems.

Our stop in the state capital is at the Sassy Onion; our server is Michelle. We learn that she’s been here for nine years and is the mom of a 1-year-old baby. The handmade glass ornaments that went up overnight are made by the owners over the course of the year just for the approaching holiday season. Breakfast was great without a single negative, such as the abundance of hipsters we’d have had to compete with for a table had we eaten in Portland. If you want to blurt out loud that this writer sounds like a grumpy old man with a chip on his shoulder, go ahead, as I am likely quite a bit of that by now.

Driving south on Interstate 5 in central Oregon

Nearly the entirety of our drive down Interstate 5 was under a blanket of heavy fog which was of no matter to us as our goal was getting to the coast with as little distraction as possible. Not far from our turnoff on Highway 38, the weather started to clear, likely because the universe wanted us to have a great welcome when we finally reached the coast.

Umpqua River along Highway 38 in Oregon

This being our 18th visit to Oregon, we finally learned how to pronounce Umpqua, which is the name of the river seen here in front of my lens. It’s pronounced with an emphasis on the “U” with a sound like “umpire” instead of the are pronouncing it like the “U” sound in “soup.” At this point, you should take note of our weather conditions as we have. One never knows what will be just around the corner.

Wetland next to Umpqua River in Oregon

And it was surprising that the sign that suggested we were in an elk crossing area meant that we’d really see elk, but that’s just what happened. I wasn’t armed with the right lens for capturing them in the distance, but the meadow they live in was so beautiful that it required a stop for entering another image into our long-term memories of just what we’ve witnessed out here in America.

Antique Loom at Timber Faller's Daughter in Reedsport, Oregon

In Reedsport and looking forward to encountering the ocean in a few minutes Caroline spotted a yarn store. It may as well have been a lightbulb in the middle of the night and her a moth. We made a U-turn because there was no other choice, but luck would have it that the shop was closed with no explanation why it was so on a day it was supposed to be open. Next door was an open shop with this old loom in the window, so Caroline dipped in to find out if the yarn shop might open later.

This hoped-for shopping moment was more utility than just desire as Caroline needed some reinforcing thread for a pair of socks she was knitting for me while on our coastal visit. While inside the neighbor’s place called Timber Faller’s Daughter, the owner of this shop tried texting the other lady, but there was no answer. Well, luck was still with us as she told us that she was down in Coos Bay visiting the First Annual Chowder Festival, so while we might not get the thread, we are hoping to find the Chowder Fest.

Caroline Wise on the Oregon Coast

At the coast in the sun, who could ask for more? It’s nice to be out here on the Pacific Ocean in Oregon and not to feel any sense of urgency that we have somewhere we need to be. With nine days to enjoy ourselves while covering 230 miles between Bandon and Cannon Beach, we only need to cover about 25 miles on average, though with trips up and down the coast at various times of the day depending on what we want and where it’s at it we’ll likely drive a considerable amount more. The point is we have reservations for every night we’re out here, but nothing else is pressing, and if plans had to change, we’d simply adjust the schedule. For now, we’ll take our time as we meander slowly down the coast for the 50ish miles we have left today.

North Bend, Oregon

Coos Bay, with the McCollough Memorial Bridge in the distance on the left, is one of our favorite views. Okay, so that’s just a little disingenuous as we’d be hard-pressed not to admit that everywhere we look on this coast are views that are our favorites.

Veterans Memorial Wayside in North Bend, Oregon

Our stop at Coos Bay is at the David Dewitt Veterans Memorial. Today, there are stones with messages on them laying atop some of the bricks, noting people from the area who’ve died in various wars. Not only does this display grab our attention, but so does one of the larger markers with the following engraving:

“There shall not be Peace until the Power of Love overcomes the Love of Power.” – From a latrine wall at Pleiku, Vietnam in 1968

North Bend, Oregon

Since we entered Reedsport, we’ve been in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area that stretches over 40 miles south. ATVs and OHVs are the primary means of transport on the dunes, and for those who may not know, ATV stands for an all-terrain vehicle, while OHV is an off-highway vehicle. Even in fall and winter, the dunes are a popular place for people to race around along the ocean as they careen about the sand at all times, day and night. If you don’t own one of these vehicles and you are on a visit to Oregon from another country or you are coming from somewhere that makes it difficult to drag it with you, there are plenty of places to rent these things along the coast.

Blue Heron Bistro in Coos Bay, Oregon

In the city of Coos Bay, we found the difficult-to-find location of the First Annual Chowder Competition. The event was running from 10:00 to 4:00 p.m. with chowder tasting from 11:00 to 3:00 p.m. For $10, visitors were able to taste nine different preparations of clam chowder. There were supposed to be 11 participating vendors, but two bailed out at the last minute, we heard. The nine we tried were not simple iterations of a theme; there were some significant differences between everyone’s play on this old coastal favorite. Our favorite, though, goes to the gentleman above, who is the owner of the Blue Heron Bistro right here in Coos Bay. Turns out that he’s the new owner of the restaurant that specializes in German food.

Driftwood Farms Yarn from Reedsport, Oregon

We met Jessica Shrag, one of the owners of Driftwood Farms up in Reedsport, who also happened to have set up a small booth at the chowder competition, which I should have pointed out is also a Craft Bazaar. The colorway of yarn in the center of the photo will be a new pair of socks for me someday. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t happen until a return to Oregon in 2020 or while on a trip to Europe.

Charleston, Oregon

Opting for the scenic route via Charleston and not Highway 101, we are able to make the obligatory first visit to the water’s edge.

Crab Pot in Bar View, Oregon

While Caroline combed the beach searching for treasure, I headed down a pier where a father and son were walking to haul up some crab pots. The little four or five-year-old kid was fearless as he grabbed small crabs from their back legs and tossed them off the pier back into the water as they were too young for harvest.

Bandon Marsh in Bandon, Oregon

We are visiting the Bandon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge and the Ni-les’tun Unit specifically. I decided to bring along my macro lens so I could capture some different views of things here on the coast. Mostly, I seem to focus on landscapes, and I’m sure they’ll make up the bulk of what I’ll be sharing over these nine days, but at least I might have some variety of details. We stopped at the refuge because, with all the time we’ve spent in this area we’ve never paid a visit here.

Bandon Marsh in Bandon, Oregon

The colors of fall are here at the refuge, though they are mostly tans, with a lot of green still dotting the open land. We are here by ourselves, though a gunshot in the distance lets us know that someone is likely hunting birds on the refuge. The sound was far enough away and was from a shotgun, so we were not too worried about some high-powered rifle shot zinging past our heads.

Bandon Marsh in Bandon, Oregon

There are not a lot of birds out here; maybe they’re all dead. There’s not a lot of water either, so as far as this being a wildlife refuge is concerned, we may not be as impressed as we would be if we were visiting at the right time of year, whenever that might be.

Shore grass at sunset in Bandon, Oregon

Checked into Windermere Hotel in Bandon and learned that our room has been upgraded to a fireplace room with a king bed and patio from the no-frills cheapo room we’d booked as it wasn’t finished being renovated. Lucky us. Before fetching some dinner down in Port Orford, we had to go for a walk to take advantage of the early sunset.

Caroline Wise at Sunset in Bandon, Oregon

Caroline’s happy place. Nothing likely beats the sounds, smells, and feelings to all the senses as we walk on wet sand towards the crashing ocean as sunlight glistens on the surface of the water and reflects off the wet sand. Shorebirds come and go with about the same frequency as a couple of other people out here with us. We find it peculiar that in such a spectacular place, we can ever be nearly alone for as far as the eye can see on pristine beaches such as these.

Bandon, Oregon

As for where exactly we are, this is in south Bandon and south of the famous Face Rock that sits just offshore. This small town on the southern coast is the first popular landing place for visitors coming up from California. So why am I posting a photo of a small blob of seafoam? Well, because it was moving around like it had a mind of its own and kind of looked like an amoeba. Now, it’s available for our memories for the rest of our lives.

Sunset in Bandon, Oregon

Shortly before 5:00 p.m., the sun closes up shop and goes home for the night. As for us, we’ll get into the car for the 30-minute drive south to Port Orford for our 6:30 p.m. reservation at Red Fish Restaurant. The food was pretty good, on the verge of excellent, and definitely one of the best, if not the best, food on the south coast.

Our first day here on the coast feels complete with a sense we used every available minute for things that gave us value for each penny of investment it takes to put ourselves out here. There was nothing to change, no lament, no surly staff or angry people in our encounters. Tomorrow will surely be just as amazing.

Oregon Coast 2019 – Day 0

Caroline Wise at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Arizona

We are flying from Phoenix, Arizona, to Portland, Oregon, tonight. We are on today’s last non-stop flight that will have us arriving at midnight. After we fetch our rental car our hotel is just a couple of minutes from there. The plan is for an early wake-up so we can get moving south on Interstate 5 to hopefully reach the coast by noon. If weather from the interior to the coast looks like we could hit icy roads, we’ll instead head out the Columbia River towards Astoria and then south, which will require at least 8 hours of driving.

As I said in a previous blog recently, this is our 18th trip to Oregon over the past 17 years. We are surprised that after this many times and our ability to venture nearly anywhere we’d like to, we are still as excited as ever to be encountering this beautiful corner of America yet again.

At the airport, I start to become overwhelmed with my social anxiety, seeing that the masses are a corruption of sniffling convulsions who have no idea they are in public. Their tics are on the verge of Tourettes, while their vulgar displays of what is measured in their minds as fashionable drive me to the edge of losing my composure and returning to the car so we can have a pleasant drive north. This temporary clan of people only has one thing in common with me: we are at the same airport; beyond that, they are barely human. I make this assessment from the pedestal of advantage as I’m able to see through their insipid artifacts of fake personas that attempt to show aspects of a thing they find relevant, but this act is transparent. This facade is an illusion, allowing their shallow meaninglessness to scream at me, “Look, look here! I have these things that give me the appearance of relevance!”

I can’t shrink at these antics and allow their greasy lather to simply flow off my back. I become entangled by their creepy web of superficiality that can be read as a plea to become meaningful if only they could cast off their hostility toward knowledge and ditch the banality. Their consumption of media defines their shape, and their future is a custom-made straight jacket subliminally created by their lack of personal intellectual responsibility. This nothingness they embody oozes out of them, dripping like hot wax into my sense of well-being. This is how I fly.

Neo-Nondeterminism

Neo-nondeterminism

The brevity of awareness, fear of enlightenment, and certainty that a kind of contagion will result from knowledge are all maladies plaguing modernity. We drag fear of the unknown from out of our distant past where the dark forest-harbored monsters bent on devouring our souls. Those things unseen and unexperienced would offend our sensibilities and bring disappointment, should we waste our time and money on that which we are certain we wouldn’t enjoy anyway. This is what living in history burdens us with – combined with a short lifespan that may not wake us to the lies.

A generation born of living in the moment and experiencing immediacy has been sheltered from the outside world by parents who wanted to shield them from that which they themselves feared more than living. Then, when their offspring, unaccustomed to face-to-face interactions, adapted to their sequestered existence, parents complained that their children didn’t have the social skills they deemed appropriate. In isolating their children, they cast the mold while the negative patterns were being reinforced by their own preoccupation and titillation delivered by the anxiety engine of television and the numbing of intimacy due to online porn.

Parents gleefully supplied the multitude of screens and connectivity to their children who assimilated the worse qualities of a society enchanted by the narrowing of their focus. Then, these very same parents dared have the audacity to question what happened to a generation as though they were fully unaware of their own selfish actions having an influence on their children. We look to tradition and nostalgia with the warmth that is now unjustified in light of the circumstances of being forced into an evolutionary catapult called technology.

With this type of conditioning, we should expect a deterministic behavior where the comfort of routine is returned again and again. To expect someone to wake from this state is magic thinking at best, but this is what the Boomers and Generation X expect of the Millennials, and Gen Z. We have created computer programs based on old paradigms that require the exact same results of the software to function like clockwork.

Nondeterminism is defined as a program that can exhibit different behaviors on different runs. I’m hijacking the term here and defining Neo-nondeterminism as an idea that people need to explore the intentionality of not doing things the same way over and over. They must get off their self-reinforcing hamster wheel of routine and change the pattern. From home to work, back home, cook, clean, sleep, back to work, and back home should not be fully normalized. Throw a monkey wrench into that routine.

Start some tutorials about a subject you would like to know more about or that you never considered learning. Pick a country on the globe, find a recipe from that country, and make a new dish for dinner. You might want to search YouTube for a list of songs from the same place to listen to while you cook and try these new flavors. Go bowling in drag just because, or start a band even if you don’t play an instrument. You have but this one life to try those things that are not reinforcing the boring potential we all call routine. Stop being so rigid in the outcomes you are accepting as what’s comfortable to you. You learned to poop outside the diaper into a toilet; you can learn to stop pooping on your opportunity for new experiences.

Modified Fasting

Avocados and Green Superfood

Here I am again trying near starvation. This week’s regimen is a modified Fasting Modified Diet (FMD). Instead of the Prolon version, I’m saving the $250 and trying to substitute with avocado and Green Superfood. What is all this you ask? A month ago I spent a week on a heavily restricted diet that kept my caloric intake under 850 calories per day. It’s designed by Dr. Valter Longo to mimic a water-only fast and includes the aforementioned $250 box of foodstuffs.

Back when I was first considering FMD I was still quite skeptical about the whole thing so I was thinking of trying the avocado variant when a friend I’d told about the program asked me about going in on a fast using a box of food items, specially designed by Prolon, that very precisely supply the balance of nutrients as recommended by Dr. Longo’s exhaustive research. She was taking advantage of a buy-2-get-1-free promo which allowed me to pay just $165 to test the efficacy for myself. It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve tried but I liked the results.

As my friend wanted to use her second box she asked if I was up for round two. I said sure but I wanted to explore the avocado suggestion. So, starting yesterday morning I began this modified fast.

My diet for all five days of this week will be as follows: I do my best to not eat my first “meal” of the day until noon. That meal is one avocado with a bit of olive oil and lemon and an 8-ounce glass of water with Green Superfood powder. I do this twice a day for lunch and dinner. These 400 calorie meals are supposed to make fasting easier and while it’s not strictly a fast the nutritional makeup of this diet is intended to “trick” the body into acting as though it is a real fast.

Glocalization

Glocalization

After spending the majority of my life being deterritorialized, I’m now “cursed,” living a glocalized existence. Little could I have understood that leaving New York state as a 5-year-old, being moved around between relatives, moving to California and taking up residence in Long Beach, Monterey Park, and then West Covina prior to moving to Arizona and within a few years of that heading off to Germany, where I’d be at home for ten years, I was being primed to have a nomadic sense of place.

It seems apparent to me now that this type of nomadism works to deterritorialize people. I had no connectivity to traditional social, cultural, or political identities but instead grew adept at normalizing diverse tastes for the various regional attitudes, flavors, and sounds that were integrating me. As I grew older, I desired to bring the hodgepodge of influences from my various stages in life to new modalities where novelty ruled, and traditions were never able to take hold.

Without American football, beer, god, television, Christmas, or guns as foundational cornerstones of who I see myself, I have been able to instead find refuge in the music of our vast world, pleasure in sampling the taste of water, the thrill of exploration, and the celebration of every day as my version of an experiential life. I’m in a state of near-constant curiosity about those things I’m yet to experience. I’m actively localizing my encounter with the globe and growing impatient with the market’s failure to bring me life as I want it to be: convenient and within reach.

For me, the palette of reality I’m able to paint from far exceeds the immediacy it affords me. The desert I live in is not only a physical realm but a metaphor for how I’m trapped in a kind of monotheistic capitalism, meaning there’s a tendency to be forced to pray before the American God of Consumerism. In my perfect world, the taste of Burma, China, and Italy, the live sounds of Indonesian gamelan, German minimalist techno, and the heavenly emanations of a choir singing in Latin, along with the clothes of rural Croatia, the fabric dying of Kumo shibori, or even a dhoti would be easily found and used, though I feel uncomfortable using these things here in conformist America.

As such, I no longer feel like an American in the classical sense of that identity but subjugated by a cultural orthodoxy verging on militantism. From my perspective outside this dominant purview, I feel it’s apparent that fear of losing the traditions and dominance of a ruling class has society scrambling to contain the evolutionary processes that are underway. It’s as though after 70 years of propagating a globalist agenda that was intended to strengthen American allies and contain leftist/communist anti-capitalism, the fruits of this global collaboration are having undesired follow-on effects.

The idea that putting the internet and humanity under tighter control could somehow quiet dissent and stymie attempts at rebellion seems to be futile. Our world shares music, film, food, art, electronics, communication, transportation, resources, and the environment, even when we are flawed in just how we do those things. Many people are well aware of the interdependence on one another, and it seems obvious that this will likely continue to shape our futures. The notion that this cat can be shoved into a box it left long ago is foolhardy at best.

Number 9 of 20

Trip 9: We are now booked for a rather short 5-day visit at Yellowstone National Park with reservations in hand for Old Faithful Inn during May 2020.  I even called ahead to have a note put on our reservation asking for room #225 we’ve stayed in on nearly half a dozen of our visits. To date, we have spent 36 days spread between 8 trips here at Yellowstone; this visit will push us to 41 total days. You can bet I’m already thinking about a winter return, possibly as early as Christmas 2020.

Update: This trip was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Caroline Wise and John Wise in Yellowstone Jan 2010

Trip 8: The next time these two faces are seen in Yellowstone National Park, it will have been ten years since we were last in the park and 20 years since we made our first visit back in May 2000. This photo was taken on January 22, 2010, during our second winter visit to the first national park on Earth. This indulgence of being able to visit two winters in a row afforded us another eight days here. That ice-cream-colored beanie was hand-spun and knitted by the woman on my right, and I chose the colorway. I felt it made a bold statement.

Yellowstone Jan 2009

Trip 7: Our first winter visit to Yellowstone was for nine days, split between Mammoth Hot Springs and Old Faithful Snow Lodge. We thought the park was going to be enchanting, but we never could have anticipated just how astonishing the place is during winter. There’s a fraction of the number of people who visit during the summer, and the quiet and serenity that accompanies this time of year cannot be understated. We arrived on January 10th, 2009, in time to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary here in Yellowstone.

Canary Spring in Yellowstone July 2007

Trip 6: Four days over the long 4th of July weekend back in 2007 was enough to refresh our memories of how beautiful Yellowstone Park is.

Yellowstone Hot Spring May 2005

Trip 5: Only two days were spent in Yellowstone back in May 2005. My mother-in-law, Jutta Engelhardt, is with us again five years after her first visit to Yellowstone, this time in the spring instead of late fall.

Bison in Yellowstone May 2004

Trip 4: It’s May 2004, and we are with our friend Jay Patel on a cross-country road trip that wouldn’t have been complete without a stop in Yellowstone. Over the course of three days in the area, we spent a great deal of time exploring the geysers, mud pots, and wildlife. While you can’t tell from this photo, we also had plenty of snow to make snowmen and snow angels in.

Old Faithful Inn Yellowstone July 2003

Trip 3: Our only 1-day visit to Yellowstone occurred on July 6, 2003, after being away from the park for three years. We were on our way south after visiting Glacier National Park on the long 4th of July weekend.

Jutta Engelhardt and Caroline Wise in Yellowstone 2000

Trip 2: Under the guise of bringing Caroline’s mother, Jutta Engelhardt, over to see Yellowstone (because I’m that kind of selfless husband and son-in-law), I was able to convince my beautiful wife of the importance of making a second visit to this corner of Wyoming in the same year. Truth is, I would have sold Jutta to any bidder for the opportunity to visit again, as I couldn’t get our first visit out of my head. This is during October 2000, the closing days of the park. We spent five days on this visit.

Caroline Wise and John Wise in Yellowstone 2000

Trip 1: Our very first visit to Yellowstone National Park with our friends Ruby and Axel Rieke started on May 14th, 2000. While we had reserved a room for four days, I could have stayed for months. I was smitten with Yellowstone all summer long and schemed to figure out how to justify coming back sooner rather than later. Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagined that within 20 years, we’d be making our 9th visit and that we would be able to visit the park during all seasons.