Words in the Woods

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts, Travels

Fern growing from a tree along the Pistol River on the Southern Coast of Oregon

It was raining as we fell into sleep, and by morning, it was still doing so. We had mixed feelings; a part of us wished for it to not relent while the other side that’s aware of our brief time along the coast desires to venture out and find those aesthetic moments that convey a perfection generally expected by those who have been witness to our travels. On the other hand, it was my intention to busy myself in writing of events unrelated specifically to this particular journey but instead to find the words that tell the story of the unknown I would like to explore.

Turning on words, though, is a fickle thing. The beginning of the thread can remain elusive until it’s not, and then the tapestry appears in my mind’s eye and wants to be captured all at once. I suppose that there are dozens of threads in my imagination, probably all I need to make the grandest of quilts, but the chaos of having so many of these random elements strewn chaotically throughout my brain without organization inhibits my ability to find order. Like creating a song, I should probably focus on uncovering a melody or a rhythm and then discover what compliments the emergent structure.

Mushrooms growing from a tree stump next to the Pistol River on the Southern Coast of Oregon

Instead, I feel drawn into this sabbatical from routine desert life during a pandemic and desire nothing more than sitting here in the forest enjoying the constant drizzle and our removal from the troubles of the zeitgeist. So, I write about whatever comes to mind and consider that I’m in the process of winding down to a point where I can fall into flow.

How does one find symbiosis with the mushroom? Not the apparent lack of thought but the patience and wisdom to know that one doesn’t rush off to change their station in life by desire alone. We must first accumulate a mass of presence, and for us humans, that is found in experience and the thoughts discovered in reading. Born with a blank slate, we know nothing about what we like, how we will ultimately communicate, or even how we’ll get from Point A to Point B once our leg muscles are able to propel us. Beyond that, we also know nothing about the structure of stories, the melodies of tunes, or the cascade of light we find patterns within. Our mental machine must be tuned and then constantly refined to operate more efficiently with increasing performance or should we accept that the one-horsepower stream engine sputtering inside our head since we were but children is sufficient?

Apple from The Fish Inn next to the Pistol River on the Southern Coast of Oregon

Should we allow the fruit of our efforts to languish in the tree, it will slowly shrivel, fall to the ground, and rot, becoming fodder for that which will come along and feast on the waste. In this sense, nature is merciless and is quick to recycle that which is not producing growth. Do we really believe we can escape this law of nature? The trick facing humanity is to know how to encourage that which is blossoming to come into their own and seize their moment to become whole. The current evidence suggests that we are failing, but I’m not out here in the woods to follow my own laments; on the contrary, I want to discover what I don’t yet know.

The rain comes down with renewed vigor while the gray clouds seem to close in on Earth. When the rain picks up, the birds that had been about when things were at but a drizzle return to quiet and remain out of view until one drops from a giant, perfectly still tree, bouncing from rock to ground before zipping back into the branches above. Meanwhile, we whittle away the time locked into the conveniences requiring electricity and communication. Caroline is talking with her mother in Germany via Skype while simultaneously knitting a pair of socks for me and occasionally referencing various stories on the internet as the two explore topics of interest. I sit in the kitchen at a small table by a window, writing this here that you are reading, and from time to time, I head outside to snap a photo of ferns, mushrooms, apples, and the house we are staying in.

The Fish Inn next to the Pistol River on the Southern Coast of Oregon

But the house we are staying in cannot be stayed in all day. Well, it could, but that would deny us the opportunity to get a modicum of exercise which is highly important on vacation as the inclination might be to nest. Nah, that’s not us, so with a heavy amount of ambivalence, one side of me saying stay and write, the other side reminds me that this isn’t just about me, and so it wins with the argument that we need to do things that involve us.

Natural Bridges north of Brookings, Oregon

Words at the Sea:

We’ve been here before, but that doesn’t matter. Maybe we’ll be back again, but that, too, doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are here now, seeing this under entirely new circumstances where we are different, the ocean is different, and the landscape below is different. It’s all very subtle, and no one could put their finger on precisely what’s different, but we should all understand that it’s impossible to be here from one day to the next and have the reasonable expectation that the universe of it all has not been altered in some nuanced little way. It is on us to tease those changes out of the fabric of what lies before us or from within. Is my mind different? Do I perceive colors differently? Have the trees changed height, or did some of the rocks fall into the sea? How does one measure the variation between memories separated by time?

Brookings Harbor, Oregon

On the way to Brookings Harbor, we stopped for a walk out to Cape Ferrelo, but the photos from up on the hillside were too meh to share. Sometimes, the overcast or rainy weather can work in our favor, and at other times, I don’t enjoy the results. Maybe six months or six years from now, I’ll be wondering why I didn’t include a couple should I then be convinced they were better than I remember, but that will be then, and this is now, so no photos of the place where I did take this amazing photo of Caroline back in 2006. By the way, we are traveling with that exact umbrella on this trip, too. If the weather is encouraging tomorrow, maybe we’ll reenact the image.

So what of the boats in the harbor, you ask? Really nothing other than there’s something about tall masts lined up that I find intriguing. I’ve never given it much thought though, why masts should hold this kind of appeal, but they do.

Caroline Wise at Lone Ranch Beach north of Brookings, Oregon

This is the “modified for old people” version of the wife standing in the water on vacation photos we often post. Normally Caroline would have doffed the shoes and socks, sucked up some gumption, and plodded into the bone-chilling water, but with her new rubber boots, which were just bought yesterday needing some testing out for micro-holes, she walked into a flooding stream and emerged with dry feet. Don’t worry, though, as I’m as certain as can be that no less than once, she’ll be barefoot in the water because that’s what she does.

Lone Ranch Beach north of Brookings, Oregon

This water and the water behind it, not the stuff in the ocean, is what Caroline was just standing in. We are at Lone Ranch Beach, which is the neighbor of Cape Ferrelo. The rain has stopped, which has encouraged us to take one more walk this afternoon before the sun sets. While down here we both question if we’d ever been here before as nothing looks familiar. It could be that it’s low tide, and with all the exposed rocks, things just appear different. Or maybe it really is our first visit.

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Lone Ranch Beach north of Brookings, Oregon

To mark the occasion, we pose for a selfie, and while we are properly lit, I cringe at how blown out the background is. Just look at the photo above this one to see how it’s supposed to look, and you, too, will have your skin crawl at how poorly the photographer of this selfie is at knowing how to operate his camera. I’d bet my smartphone would have done better than this archaic DSLR that only recently replaced the old guy’s Brownie Instamatic.

Lone Ranch Beach north of Brookings, Oregon

The sun has set, though we cannot see it, nor have we seen it all day. Fog has been pulsing back and forth off the ocean and rolling out over the surrounding hillsides as we spent a couple of hours out here on this short stretch of beach. We were mesmerized by the brutal crashing waves that appeared to tower well over our heads before breaking at a good distance and quickly being consumed by the water rushing back to the sea that had made it up the beach. The waves that did race up the sand felt sneaky, which had us on alert as we made our way to exposed rocks that obviously were part of a seafloor exposed by low tide. What makes this obvious to us are the mussels, chitons, barnacles, and sea stars. Oh, did I say sea stars when previously I kept calling them starfish? Today, we learned from a nearby display that they are now called sea stars because starfish don’t have gills, scales, or fins, though they do live underwater…where they kill urchins, mussels, and anemones.

On The Pistol River

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Dawn on the Pistol River in southern Oregon

The veranda is dripping while fog clings to a mountainside across the way. Between us and the mountain, the forest is showing some of the colors of fall. Somewhere unexplored just yet is the Pistol River that will have to wait for us as we are moving lazily after two solid days of scurrying over the desert, through farmlands, and into the coastal mountain ranges that have brought us to the edge of the Continental United States. We are on vacation and determined not to act urgently unless trying to capture peace and quiet in our remote self-isolation.

At the moment, there’s a reluctance to move at all as the quiet reassures me that it’s okay to sit here and listen to the birds chattering in their morning routines. The pink of the first sky has given way to clouds reminiscent of yesterday’s that we experienced just south of here. Steller’s jays and robins flutter about, telling my imagination in their tweets that they are our prison guards here to ensure that today we do not move from our encampment in the woods. At the moment, I’m good with their command, as parts of our human routine come with their own demands that are on hold while I follow this word trail in my head.

Alas, the breadcrumbs of thought bring me to ideas of food that won’t be had down the road in some toasty seaside cafe. No, we are eating right here as soon as I move my cold self into the kitchen. Cold because last night I turned off the heater in order to have a cozier quiet, as our luxurious feather comforter from home is along to make strange beds more familiar. How’d that work out for us? My poverty of language when it comes to explaining the warmth and happiness of sharing a bed with Caroline as we nuzzle in a chilly room will never convey how, from shoulders to toes, we bask in a sense of delight. The old cliched, “This ain’t our first rodeo” comes to mind as it was right here on this coast that it had first occurred to us to bring our blankets along after learning we didn’t enjoy our sleeping bags in a yurt that much and that with the little space heater that is available in every one of these little canvas dwellings by the sea that our own bedding would be better suited for our stay. So on subsequent visits, we brought our pillows, a sheet, a blanket for insulation between the sheet and a plastic-covered two-inch thick mattress, and our big fluffy comforter. Seeing we cannot stay in yurts this trip due to the pandemic, we are doing “modified yurt” while luxuriating in a house.

Road near Pistol River in Southern Oregon

The likely inaccurate weather report has us heading into town. Yeah, this is our road leading to and from our spot along the river called The Fish Inn. With high winds predicted, we don’t want to be traveling this tree-lined trail through the woods, as it could be a minute before a fallen tree gets cleared. Maybe we should consider acquiring an ax in town in case an emergency were to arise.

Caroline Wise at "By My Hand" yarn store in Brookings, Oregon

Speaking of “emergency,” you must have known that if a yarn store was open, we’d be stopping in. Caroline’s justification, which was almost but not really valid, was that I could get a photo of her wearing her Monterey Bay mask in Oregon. “Wow, wife, that’s such a novel idea,” said the reluctant eye-rolling husband. But of course, I fell for it as not only do I want to remain happy, I want Caroline to be happy too, and if supporting a local business so I might gain a new pair of socks is part of the equation, well, then I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about my side of the win. Do you see that yarn she’s fondling? My feet will be adorned with that after it’s automagically transformed into custom-fitted socks.

Old rusting U-Haul truck in Brookings, Oregon

The idea was to fetch a couple of things and get back up the road before the purported gale-force winds hit, but it looked so nice and tranquil that we decided some sightseeing was in order. Zoomed into the map, it looked like there was a trail we’d never been down, and so, being the intrepid adventure travelers we are, we moved down the road in that direction.

Face carved into sand near Chetco Point in Brookings, Oregon

Chetco Point is guarded over by this totemic figure that is likely some vandalism more than the ancient carving I’d like to tell you it is. This idea spurs another thought about the first humans who learned to draw as they trolled their fellow tribal members. Think about it: it’s about 35,000 years ago, and you leave a face like this in a known location; the next time your group is traveling through, they’re startled by the giant face looking at them through the rocks. You get to claim that aliens must have done it or that the gods left it as an inexplicable message to spur deeper thinking, but you don’t have the intellectual tools yet to examine the phenomenon, and so the tribal members remain perplexed for centuries, a big win for the prankster artist.

Chetco Point in Brookings, Oregon

Enough of the comedic shenanigans and back on to the path of beauty. You’d never believe what’s up this paved trail between the two giant rocks that make up this point jutting into the ocean; it’s a bridge. A beautiful heavy wood bridge connects the rock outcroppings so we can step out even further away from the habitable land onshore. This moment of human goodness has been brought to us by the commons. For those who need a refresher on exactly what the commons are, please take a gander here at the explanation from Wikipedia:

The commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit.

Chetco Point in Brookings, Oregon

Sure, we want to indulge our senses every minute of every day we’re out here on remote self-isolation, aka vacation, but due to the volatile pandemic situation and news flying in about shifting lockdowns and quarantines with rising infection numbers and death toll, we pay attention with an alert ear to what’s on the wind. We do not look at the clouds with the sun trying to poke through and wish for a moment of blue sky as the glistening water is already all that we could have hoped for. Just to hear the sea crashing into the land after a long journey from the other side of the planet is a gift of extraordinary value offered to so few. Should we have to cut short our plans, knocking on wood that we won’t have to, we are resigned to the notion that even this will have made for a perfect getaway.

Chetco Point in Brookings, Oregon

Maybe you thought I’d leave out the details of a pile of nothing? Not a chance because without the visual reminders of those things underfoot and overhead, we only have the myopic view of what was obvious and in front of our noses. What is under our nose and outside of our peripheral vision also holds attraction, should we take the time to recognize the picture is best experienced when taken in its totality. Trying to convey a composite image of our day requires that I find what might have been overlooked if I was only looking for the obviously spectacular. While some will object and say this accumulation of twigs and branches washed ashore by the tide is a pile of detritus, I’d counter and ask them to see the sunrise and sunset that once shown upon the remnants of these former plants and remember that one day their own bones will one day be bleached and discarded as the beauty and wit they once supported is long gone.

Caroline Wise at Myers Beach North on the South Oregon Coast

Just how amazing can this kite you bought ten years ago that fits in a box the size of your palm be? Well, to Caroline, it may as well have been the greatest kite ever made because even at 50-something years old, she giggles at her flying skills as the tiny kite goes aloft. The winds were so strong that, at times, she appeared to possess acrobatic skills for flying such things as it raced towards the ground and performed a dozen or so tight spins. In the end, the short 30-foot-long string was a tangle of knots that put a stop to her moment of entertainment. Time to go check out what’s exposed here at low tide.

Myers Beach North on the South Oregon Coast

While I’m redundant in stating that this is our 20th visit to Oregon over the previous 18 years, this is once again an encounter with a 1st. The shark tooth rock at Meyers Beach North, south of Gold Beach but north of Pistol River, has never been inspected by us from close up. Maybe the water was too high, or we missed the break in the guardrail that indicated where the trail was, but here we are down on the beach, getting a different view of things. The silver plants in between the ice cycle plants were what caught Caroline’s eye up on the sheer cliffside. I couldn’t answer her as to what they were as I have no idea, and while I’d love to ask someone who reads my blog what it is, the fact is that no one reads my blog, especially these particularly long-winded entries that are loaded with rich nuggets of wisdom.

Starfish at Myers Beach North on the South Oregon Coast

They don’t jump around, don’t have fangs, and can’t fly; as a matter of fact, we’ve rarely seen them move, but starfish hold particular interest for these two intrepid explorers of things already discovered. I’d guess it’s their terrific colors punctuated with the starfield-like dots on their backs that are at least part of the draw. Or maybe it’s the cold-blooded death squeeze they put on the mussels and anemones they hang out with, whose screams we might be able to decipher if we spoke their language. While the immobilized starfish cling to whatever they can hold onto while out of the water, maybe we’d do the Cnidaria and Mollusca families a favor if we kicked in the faces of these Echinodermata? Heck, I don’t even know where the face of a starfish is. If I had to guess, I’d venture to bet it’s in the center of the other side we cannot see, but that then begs the question, where’s the butthole? Nice, Caroline just informed me that they then must be Johnfish as I, too, put food into the hole that shit’s been known to fall from.

Barnacles at Myers Beach North on the South Oregon Coast

It was getting windy, so maybe the promised storm was finally coming in. No time to stick around like these barnacles, and we were short upon running out of daylight, too, so we headed for the exit.

Myers Beach North on the South Oregon Coast

Not that we were done with the day, far from it. You see, we had gone back to the house earlier for lunch, and we’ll be there again soon so Caroline can spin some cotton into yarn and continue following a weaving course she’s been taking. I’ll return to writing today’s blog entry before tending to dinner. Speaking of that, we’ll be having seared scallops with a tomato and avocado salad, but don’t think for one minute that there won’t be some kind of snacking indulgence; we are, after all, on vacation; I mean remote self-isolation.

Remote Self-Isolation

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Near False Klamath, California looking out at the Pacific Ocean

After spending nearly all day yesterday driving, we did more of the same today. With a destination 1,200 miles (1,930km) northwest of home, we broke up the segments into two nearly equal distances by driving from Phoenix, Arizona, to Fresno, California, yesterday, and then today, we finished the trek. It rained most of the day, at times coming down heavy, making for some white knuckle moments on the narrow Highway 101 through the Redwoods of Northern California. Normally, there’s nothing particularly troublesome about driving in a bit of rain but we’ve not seen the stuff since sometime earlier in the year, as in back in January or February. By the time late afternoon had rolled around, we were resigned to the imagined fact that it was going to rain all day, but then, just as we reached False Klamath on the ocean and our first opportunity to find ourselves oceanside, we were offered this view above.

Caroline Wise on the beach at Crescent City, California

But the sky wasn’t done with us yet as it cut itself in two with this bisection that seems to suggest, “Leave this gray from down south behind you as on your right and to the north, Oregon is about to smile upon you.” Had the heavens closed up after our first stop, we would have been content to have had a minute to admire the silver sea. Besides, who could have asked for a moment of molten gold ocean to pull us from the car just 20 minutes later? By the way, in an alternative universe, there is a similar picture of me in silhouette, as it was Caroline’s idea to snap a photo of me with her phone as I stood in the same place. Seeing her image, I told her to assume my position, and I took this one of her. On more occasions than I wish to publically admit, though that’s just what I’m doing right now, my wife has some really good ideas and is quite inspired. Just don’t tell her I said this, as it will all go to her head, while it’s her modesty that lends itself to her better qualities.

McVay Rock at sunset in Oregon

Our minds are blown as little could we have imagined that we’d make the southern Oregon coast by sunset and that we’d see it in all of its spectacular glory at an overlook we’d never visited. As I’ve shared before, this is our 20th visit to Oregon in the past 18 years, and while I might brag that we’ve seen every inch of this beautiful isolated stretch of the Pacific coast, on every visit, there seems to be just one more place that we’d somehow missed. Today, that stop was at the McVay Rock State Recreation Site, which is less than 3 miles from the Oregon and California state lines. How had we missed this?

Our final stop was a few miles up the Pistol River at the Fish Inn that we found on Airbnb. This place off the beaten path is more than a dozen miles away from the nearest town with Brookings to the south with its population of 6,465 and Gold Beach to the north and its population of 2,293. We’ll be spending the next few days on this 35-mile-long sparsely populated stretch of coast in a kind of remote self-isolation as we try to have as few encounters with other people as possible, minus the requisite stops at Dutch Bros. for coffee.

Vacation Must Be Had

JWise Travels

Gold Beech

Travel planning in a time of pandemic feels simultaneously foolish and necessary for mental health reasons and because vacation time doesn’t roll over into the new year. “Why not stay home?” is the chorus I can hear rising, but that is not a vacation when every day for half a year has been spent at home. “But you are going to Oregon, which by now is your second home?” True, this will be our 20th trip to Oregon in 18 years, but we are doing it differently this time.

We are driving not because we are horrified by flying, though we are reluctant; the main reason we are passing up the incredibly cheap airline tickets is the obscene price of rental cars for our 18-day stay at the coast. Sure, we’d like to save the four days of driving to Oregon from Phoenix and back, but at $1,200 for the flights and rental car, we’ll take the slog up through the middle of California.

Shags Nest

Nervousness is the first thing that strikes me about this new adventure. At the moment, California and Oregon are ablaze with forest fires. The pandemic is still ravaging society, and the presidential election is looming. We also don’t know how people along the way are dealing with seeing cars with out-of-state license plates and if there’s still hostility towards those traveling through their small towns.

To mitigate some of this anxiety, we are approaching things the best we can. We have a solid 14 days directly on the coast, so we won’t feel cheated by all the driving. I spent an entire day plotting our way up and down the coast with where we’d be staying. Our old favorites, the yurts, are closed for the rest of the year due to COVID-19, and staying in motels wasn’t really an option. Due to the pandemic, I am reluctant to count on three meals a day at local restaurants, and so my plan was to find lodging with kitchens.

HuntingLodge

Airbnb came to the rescue, though of the four properties it pointed me to that I booked, only two of them went through their service. Charging me $100 for having found a place on their site felt like robbery, and so where I could find a way around them, I did. Mind you that part of my pain threshold here was evinced by the fact that in the last couple of years, we were paying between $40 and $70 for entire apartments from Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, and Austria where food and cultural options were extraordinary while in rural Oregon it’s not uncommon to see people asking $170 a night for places with wood paneling, pastel quilts, and decor straight out of the 1970s. Other than the location in nature, the local food is often mediocre, and there are really no cultural amenities unless you consider a bowling alley or the rare movie theater as the height of those services.

Our destinations are well off the beaten path. Typically, there are not more than a couple of hundred people max who live within a couple of miles of where we’ll be staying, mostly, it will be a lot less than that. All of them have kitchens with a stove being essential as opposed to kitchenettes that often only feature a microwave oven for warming food. This arrangement meets a couple of criteria for pandemic travel: first, we are not in population centers, and second, we do not have to visit restaurants.

Airstream

This brings me to working on a meal plan that minimizes our need to encounter other people. While we’d love to visit some old favorites, part of the allure of vacation regarding meals is sitting down in the location to absorb the ambiance and not worry about cleaning away our mess. Taking things to go still offers the same food, but we’ll be in Oregon in late fall. It could be raining (or even snowing), and even if it’s not, not many restaurants and cafes have outdoor seating. Who’d want to sit outside for breakfast anyway when it’s barely 40 degrees? We’ve eaten in the car, which is okay on occasion but not every day. The tragic side of doing things this way is not being able to tip wait staff, who are likely counting on generous people coming through to make up for locals who might be financially pinched at this time.

Back to the meal plan. I do not trust myself when it comes to giving in to whims, especially when it involves food. How many times visiting a grocery store, do I leave with many things I don’t need or really want when my rational mind is operating? So, before we leave, I’ll fill in as much as I can regarding how breakfast, lunch, and dinner will look like. Regardless of this intention, we are flexible enough to know that visits to places like Luna Sea Fish House in Yachats and the Schooner in Netarts for Oysters Rockoyaki are de rigueur. Funny, but both of these places have great outdoor seating, so nothing to worry about there.

CozyCottage

I’m now faced with only 49 individual meals I have to take into consideration, and instead of working on that, I turned to this blog entry as looking out so far into the future regarding my culinary experiences while traveling felt tedious, daunting even. Then, as I look at the photos of our lodging choices that are featured here, I can’t help but think I need to bring our Korean Ddukbaegi bowls to make sundubu jjigae, which translates to clay pot and soft tofu stew. That would be the perfect dish while looking out over the ocean on a cold rainy day. Then what about that old Indian recipe Kadai paneer we’ve been making for years? Sounds like a good start.

Along the way, we’ll stop at Dutch Bros. countless times for coffee, and of course, we’ll likely stroll along many a beach we’ve walked numerous times before as it’s possible we’ve visited the majority of easily accessible places along this stretch of ocean. We’ll be staying in each location longer than has been typical on previous visits as part of the exercise of embracing how things are different now, so vacations should also change a bit. The idea of taking a little more time to linger, to simply stop and gaze upon the sea for entire days, has a certain appeal. I’ll report back after our return.

The Fruits of Coastal Labor

JWise Photo of the Day

John Wise wearing handmade socks in Phoenix, Arizona

While up in Oregon last month Caroline toiled away in the minutes found here and there while out and about, but especially in the evenings when I would sit down to write of the day. Her task was the turning of yarn we’d picked up at Knitted Wit in Portland during a previous visit into custom-fitted socks tailored specifically to my feet; these are those socks. For about a dozen years now Caroline has been making my socks, although they started out with the most conservative of colors as I have to admit that at the time I was reluctant to give in to wearing such things. You see, I’m a product of the 60s and 70s when handknitted clothes demonstrated your commitment to the hippy ethos. The idea of returning to the days of those stereotypes was anathema to my sense of the modern (read: bias). Reluctantly I accepted a gift from my mother-in-law Jutta who made my very first pair, though she needed extensive help from Caroline (and her sister Stephanie, since they were not finished by the time Jutta returned home).

Through the intervening years, Caroline has knitted me 19 pairs of socks with just two pairs needing to be retired due to me wearing them out. How appropriate that in 2020 I will receive my 20th pair of socks made by her labor of love for me. This next pair is already underway being knitted with yarn I picked up at Die WollLust while in Berlin earlier this year. They are difficult and have proven time-consuming as while I was in the shop picking up yarns that she wanted I spotted some patterns I found intriguing and so I purchased the yarn and had it sent to the States. Sitting in our cabinets and shelves where our hoard of yarns gathers dust are at least another dozen skeins of fingering weight in vibrant colorways waiting their turn to be knitted and purled into sexy foot gloves that have proven to be so attractive to the fans I gather once they witness such handsomely dressed feet.

P.S. This is about the closest we’ll ever get to having a Christmas tree, so Ho-Ho-Ho and all that stuff.

Oregon Coast 2019 – Day 9

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Seaside Beach in Oregon

Cannon Beach (not pictured as we were already in Seaside before I took a photo) is where we spent the better part of a few of our previous trips to Oregon and was the starting location for this last day of our visit. With the rain coming down, we skipped the usual beach walk that would take us past Haystack Rock and instead left immediately for Seaside just north of us. This brings up one of the considerations of pre-booking a room, which, unfortunately, is often required on holiday weekends.

Had we woken to nice weather, we wouldn’t have cared about breakfast (and remaining dry) quite so much; we would have started on the beach first thing, and our day would have likely included a walk at Ecola State Park. The premium we paid to be in Cannon Beach would have been justified for our convenience of doing more with the short day under sunny skies. Instead, we incurred an extra $70-$90 for our room but have nothing else of value for putting our heads down here. So it goes, and like all things on vacation, we have to negotiate the variables.

Seaside Beach in Oregon

While it may well be a gray day for the remainder of our time out here, we must consider what we’ve heard about the freeze the rest of the country is experiencing and even take note of the snow blanket on the mountains just east of us. Being lucky enough that we can take this short walk between rain showers makes things quite okay. Three tornadoes touched down in Phoenix a couple of days ago, one of them only about 5 miles away from where we live. The Grand Canyon had blizzard-like conditions, losing electricity and heat, all of this while we walked the seashore with nary a care.

Seaside Beach in Oregon

The photos so far are of the beach in Seaside and were taken after our interesting breakfast at the Osprey Cafe. The wait for a table was well worth it as I can say I’ve never had Nasi Goreng for breakfast; it was even topped with an egg, making it especially breakfasty. While I’m at it, Caroline opted for Huevos Rancheros with a kind of corn cake called arepas. We’ll be back.

Dough Dough Bakery in Seaside, Oregon

It was starting to rain again as we finished our walk for the short drive to the intersection of Broadway and Holladay Drive and a return to the Beach Books store. Last year, we met Alexa, who we learned yesterday is working today. The Seaside Yarn and Fiber store is two doors down, and in between is the Dough Dough Bakery with hot coffee, free WiFi, and some excellent baked goods. After talking books for a time with Alexa, I headed into the bakery to catch up on some very neglected blogging chores.

Armed with more coffee and willing to suffer greater indulgence for the sake of allowing me to extol the virtues of being fully on vacation where the senses should always be operating at full capacity, I had a cinnamon roll. What’s the big deal? It’s just a pastry, right? Not to a person with diabetes; it’s evil incarnate and promises to spit on my cells that cannot absorb any more glucose. More insulin is the solution, you say? Not in my world where exercise, diet control, and Metformin have been able to keep things in check. This form of hedonistic debauchery in the realm of culinary sweets is tightly controlled, but not on vacation, as that would be torture.

Seaside Yarn and Fiber in Seaside, Oregon

Let’s pretend this is just a normal day and that we live here in retirement. This raises my ire as it brings up what is broken with Oregon beyond the clearcutting of forests and overfishing: the cost of real estate. Wealth from outside the area has moved in on the coast, buying up property for vacation homes and investments, thus driving up the cost of real estate for everyone else. You need not point out that this is the norm in cities across America, allowing the wealthy to earn more from their already concentrated wealth. Combine the rising cost of a dwelling, be it a rental or purchase of a home in places with relatively depressed economies where most people make something under $15 an hour, and you have a recipe for pain.

The idea that we could rent a place in northern Italy cheaper than we can two miles inland in Florence, Oregon, strikes me as a horrible deal that doesn’t bode well for the local economies up and down the coast here. Instead of Caroline and I leaving our savings here in Oregon, we’ll likely be spending them across the Atlantic, where our cost of living will be more manageable. What justifies these extraordinary inequalities where a small cadre of wealthy people are able to bring financial ruin to so many? These actions drive the people of lesser means out of the region into bigger cities, but their lack of formal education relegates these transplants to menial jobs. I guess this is one way to curtail Hispanic immigration.

This is not a win-win situation for anyone unless the wealthy, who are displacing the residents of this coastal region, believe their working-class minions will commute 20 to 70 miles from points inland to take the jobs of serving them lattes and walking their dogs. As I write this, I want to blurt out that I think this is just plain old fucked. Maybe you are suggesting I do something about it? Well, what does one do in a country where mediocrity and acceptance of a distorted and broken status quo rule the day? Ayn Rand, with her idiotic Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, was wildly successful in bringing us to a pure version of survival of the fittest, which has translated into everyone out for themselves and be damned those of you who can’t keep up. To this end, I don’t feel we are any longer Americans except when someone asks us for our hopes and prayers, to stand for the national anthem, or somebody brings up soldiers and their sacrifices.

Beach Books in Seaside, Oregon

Out of the bakery and back to the bookshop. This being Sunday, the bakery closes early at 1:00 p.m. due to business fading after the rush of people leaving church services. At the last minute, Caroline decided she really liked the Dough Dough Bird t-shirt too much to let it go, so we have one more item to pack tonight.

It looks like we might have another book or so coming home with us, including The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History by Thor Hanson that Alexa inadvertently brought our attention to. She also let us leave with Me and Mr. Cigar by Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers and The Adventurer’s Son: A Memoir by Roman Dial. These two last titles are not due out until next year; lucky us. These would join yesterday’s findings with 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard, and Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey.

The Ken Kesey book was recommended to us down south while at the Siuslaw Pioneer Museum in Florence due to our interest in the historic industrial side of Oregon and how its past is crashing into the reality of the present. While I thought there was a small chance we’d find this title up here in Seaside, I was surprised that they’d have a title that is 42 years old, even if it is about Oregon.

This makes me wonder about resource depletion going on 100 years ago and how the wealthy are depleting the working class today by harvesting every penny they can from them through owning their homes and apartments and wrecking their participation in acquiring a quality life for themselves. But who cares about the unwashed masses who made their bed and are now being forced to sleep in it, right? I care because Caroline and I could easily be priced out of our vacations. Right now, we are privileged to have the means to bring ourselves into these kinds of experiences and are well aware of the fact that the majority of people along this coast do not have the ability to take themselves even down to Arizona, forget about the expense of heading to Europe for a few weeks.

Moss is allowed to live a better, more symbiotic life here on the coast, where, from its vantage point near the ocean, it lives free. Its descendants inherit its place tax-free and do not require an expensive university education to make a living. The birds take a place on the beach or on a tree branch when not darting about the sky without a license or rules they have to follow as they travel freely on their quest to find food along the way. Only when humans come along to displace their habitats do these creatures and plants find their existence threatened.

I’ve probably made this exact lament at least one other time here on my blog, but I feel it bears repeating. I’m supposed to feel free. To the extent that Caroline and I have the education and economic ability to bring ourselves into these adventures, I certainly feel lucky, but I also appreciate that so many more people in Europe have the same opportunities and means to share in the extraordinary. I attribute this perceived disparity to giant differences in health, education, and business practices in Europe that have at least some bias favoring the common individual. Europe’s population is twice that of America’s, and yet they can afford free university, great public transportation, and a humane amount of paid vacation for the individual to find a quality of life that better justifies the sacrifices made for the state and for big business.

Astoria–Megler Bridge between Oregon and Washington over the Columbia River

Bridges are interesting in regard not only to transportation but to human endeavors, too. In practice, they make moving between two geographical points easier, saving us time and allowing us better access to things and people that might otherwise be out of reach. In society, we use bridges as part of our social networking, which is supposed to offer us access to opportunity, but as we become electronic shadows of our former selves, we are increasingly irrelevant as part of the intellectual highway system. In that sense, it’s as though this bridge over the Columbia had been built for birds that would just fly from shore to shore. So why is this human-to-human bridge failing?

Is it because of our dismal view of one another? Is it because we no longer feel like an integral part of a larger thing and instead are isolated electrons in orbital positions around a nucleus of the ego existing in a void? Are we nothing more than a transaction with an IP number moving about like some anonymous packet of data? While hydrogen and oxygen are almost inextricably entangled in a water configuration, it is as though we humans are on a path towards oblivion, believing we can be on our own alone in a universe where the execution of financial transactions is the apex of being. Community and belonging to a larger something is going extinct.

Dismal Nitch in Washington

Our act of becoming nothing was being recognized by the early 1980s as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were writing about our deterritorialization in the book A Thousand Plateaus. In the ensuing years, we’ve accelerated the process and broken free of all territories on our way to full dematerialization. While those authors were seeing the hints of losing cultural meaning they could never have predicted that the personal electronic economy would not only remove any vestige of personal territory but that it would reject the physical existence of the individual.

As we become electronic puppets on the stage of parody where consumerism has replaced survival, we no longer have a need to be human in the sense that we are an evolutionary species seeking meaning. In another age, we learned to brave the elements, were taught about our environment, we sought symbiosis with a hostile world. Becoming nothing more than information, are we casting the die that suggests that without meaning, the course of evolution may have little need of us?

In an otherwise symbiotic system where death and growth found balance, maintaining relative harmony, we humans discovered ways of subverting nature while destroying our life support system. Simultaneously, we have been dispatching culture and turning ourselves into binary anonymity. Where we used to be a family, community, town, village, state, or country, we are quickly approaching that of being nothing.

Not that any of that really has relevance here, as the larger issue is why we ever believed that the proliferation of information was going to act as a great equalizer by making the wider distribution of knowledge something empowering. Greater access has had the contrary effect in exposing the depth of the individual’s proclivities towards debased idiocy. Collectively, we pander to the lowest common denominator in the name of individual choice under the guise of freedom. We are bullshitting ourselves at the expense of our continued existence but are rendered too narrow-minded to understand our predicament. A dismal situation indeed.

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Dismal Nitch in Washington

Caroline’s and my situation, on the other hand, is anything but dismal when I consider that we have options, can travel, read, write, explore our minds, develop skills, and contemplate the deeper corners of the ocean, the cosmos, and our emotions I realize our inventory of wealth is overflowing. We continuously try to build bridges with everyone and everything we encounter. While I have embraced our deterritorialization on a path to better knowing our world without any personal allegiance to any particular state, we are at the same time cultivating a global reterritorialization where we work to develop a kindred spirit with everyone. Our path doesn’t see us fading into dematerialization and nothingness as we do not lead a passive life of observation but are out here trying to find the things we do not know, understand, or fully comprehend. On occasion, we stumble into the profound and magical, dressed in moments of love that bring sunshine to the most dismal of days.