Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

On our last full day here,  it finally dawned clear and stayed sunny, if a bit chilly, all day.  We decided to return to Cape Perpetua and take one of the 3 or 4 hikes that originate there, opting for the Gwynne Creek trail and its 8-mile round trip.  This trail climbs steadily upward through a forest of magnificent old-growth Sitka spruce and Douglas fir to the halfway point, then returns in a winding, gentle descent through a creek canyon.  Although you go several miles inland, you’re never out of earshot of the surf’s roar.

No hike in the northwest is complete without at least one slug encounter.

Well, we hauled the dang kayaks all the way down here, and daggumit we’re gonna use ‘em.  We discovered this little trip a couple years ago, called the Siltcoos River Canoe Trail, just south of Florence.  It starts in a freshwater lake (Siltcoos Lake - who’da thunk?), enters a river leading westward through forest and sand dunes, widens out into an tidal estuary and, finally, empties into the Pacific.  Distance one way: 3 miles.  We see a wide variety of wildlife on this paddle: kingfishers, deer, otters, ducks, eagles, ospreys.  This year, we got an extra thrill.  As we were paddling around a bend, I heard a crashing in the brush up on a dune, and thought it must be someone’s dog loose and out chasing something.  Then I heard a strange “gunk-gunk” sound, and then a mama black bear and two babies tore ass across an open stretch of sand and dove into the brush.

I immediately raised my camera to my face to try to catch a shot, and missed what my wife saw, the mama turn and stare pugnaciously back at us before disappearing into the brush.  I snapped blindly, not really able to see much through my viewfinder.  I may have caught her - see the cameo below and tell me what you think.  It was an odd place for a bear encounter.  We’d just crossed under the Highway 101 bridge, and into the Honeyman State Park.  All around are cottages and car-camping areas, not much bear habitat, to our thinking.

From there on down to the ocean, my wife’s serene little drift became a little tense, as she speculated about how well bears can swim (real well, as it turns out).  I told her I’d heard of damn few kayak-bear fatalities, but she remained vigilant.  Later, one of our friends speculated that, to the bear, a kayaker was probably like some exotic shellfish that was a pain in the ass to get out of the shell, but worth the effort for the soft little meats inside.

Returning to the boat launch, we saw several bass boats zipping around the lake.  One of the fishermen told us there was a bass tournament on Saturday, and they were out scoping out spots.  Don’t know why I kept thinking of Hiassen’s Double Whammy after that.

So, is there a bear in the shadows there? Tomorrow: UFOs of the Oregon Dunes!

I promised Keiko of Saunter and Repose I’d post a picture of a skunk cabbage, and here it is.  In certain moist hollows on the coast, they grow with abandon.  The pistil, or stamen, or whatever that penile thang is emerging from that prepuce thang has intricate rows of coiled polleniferous structures wound around it.  Hey, is it hot in here, or is it just me?  The plants have a slightly sulfurous odor, but it takes imagination and previous experience to evoke “skunk” from it.  The honkin’ shamrocks growing around it are equally amazing.

On Thursday, the clouds seemed to lift palpably, and every now and then a blue patch (we’re calling them “sucker holes”) appeared in the gray ceiling.

One of our favorite hikes here is in the Oregon Dunes Recreation area south of Florence. There’s a long strip of the coast from Florence south to Coos Bay that is comprised of sand dunes. The dunes start at the water’s edge and go inland for 1 to 2 miles before gradually becoming forested. Our hike is a 7 or 8 mile loop that begins in dense forest, emerges onto the dunes, crosses the dunes to the ocean. From there you hike a mile or so along a wide, hard-packed sand beach, then turn inland back across the dunes, and end up with a 3-mile walk through dense forest again. We love the variety of terrain, and the otherworldliness of the dunes.

It was still awfully rainy on Wednesday, but we decided we wanted to get out and hike anyway. There’s a short (3 miles roundtrip, but with 800 feet of elevation gain ) hike at the Cape Perpetua area from the Forest Service visitor’s center up to a whale-watching parapet. We felt this hike would be strenuous enough for a good workout, yet short enough that we wouldn’t die if we got rained on. Also, we hadn’t seen any of the grey whales that are migrating north this time of year, and this viewpoint gives a great panorama of a wide stretch of ocean.

As it happened, we got almost no rain on the hike, although you can see from the picture that it was never very far away. That virtual wall of water moved sedately from south to north, adroitly avoiding our little outing. We added on a two-mile jaunt back into the forest to visit a giant Sitka spruce that my wife loves to see. That’s where the picture of me reading Lolita was taken (Click to enlarge).

On Tuesday, the weather turned a lot less “changeable” than Monday; unfortunately, its needle got stuck on “nasty”, and we spent most of the day reading and watching the regimental waves roll hypnotically ashore. This was fine with me, as I’ve carted several half-finished books along with the intention of getting them finished and off my mocking nightstand. For a current book club read, however, I was in the middle of re-reading Nabokov’s Lolita - a nicely annotated version I bought in the 70s - and left it on the floor next to the bed at home. The lodge has a large library of books, but they’re mostly naturalist’s guides and environmentally inspirational testimonials of various sorts - not much fiction, and no nymphet lore to be found. I asked one of the owners if she had a copy, and she said she didn’t, but called a friend who had a used bookstore and found one available for $2. She seemed to welcome the excuse to run into town, and the book was waiting at my door that evening. It wasn’t my annotated edition, but it’s a “complete and unabridged” ca 1960 printing, with a sorta lurid cover, and I’m nearly finished.

We did get to scramble down to our beach here, visit the seals and collect a few agates. Later, we gathered up my mother in law, who is here with us (more on that later) and headed into Yachats for dinner at a restaurant that has become a favorite of ours called the Drift Inn. I know, it sounds like it should be full of smoke, fishermen, their lies and their molls, but it’s just this really laid-back place with reasonable prices and a terrific menu. On this night, there was a heavy-set 60-ish fellow with a Santa Claus beard playing acoustic guitar VERY nicely. His tune selections were an eclectic pastiche of 50s-60s-70s stuff, like some Peter Paul & Mary, some James Taylor, delta blues, the “If I Only Had A Brain” song from Wizard of Oz. My wife said he was like a sort of timeless jukebox, and told him so on the way back from the bathroom. He said, “yeah, but I don’t take no dimes.” The tip jar loomed at the door.

You never know when one will hit you. It might be while you’re in an elevator, or the supermarket, or a rental car whose radio is stuck on an AM band. And you can’t predict what song it will be - Hall & Oates, Harry Chapin, some country thing you’ll never ever hear again. But you’ll be in a mood or situation, or have been brooding about something, and this song, with exactly the right lyrics or evocative of some point in your past, will come screaming out of the ether and hit you right in the gut. On this night, it was Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game, played by our jukebox friend.

As I’ve noted, we’ve been coming to this same lodging on the coast for almost 20 years, beginning when our son was 4. Almost everyplace we go here, there’s some memory of him associated with it: hauling logs to build a crossing over a creek, hunting agates, playing catch on the beach to keep his arm fresh for Little League, hikes he hated to do (loves to hike now), the image of him perched on a window seat with earphones in, reading or playing his Game Boy. The last time we brought him here, he was 14. We brought along his best buddy, partly because the kid’s parents treated Andrew so well and partly as an insurance policy against his being terminally bored by us. Our bad - boredom in teenagers is a multiplicative art form, and these guys were a dream team. It didn’t help that the weather socked in, much worse than this week, and just hosed us constantly each day. The friend had brought along a 9″ black-and-white tv that he’d rescued from a dumpster and revitalized, and a vcr, and they spent almost the entire week, in this very room, playing Forrest Gump and the Star Wars Trilogy in an endless loop. Talk about your Circle Game. We ended up leaving two days early, and for the next three years spent spring break on Maui.

Since he’s been in college, our spring breaks haven’t coincided (my wife teaches in elementary school), and we’ve been coming down here without him, and there’s a certain freedom to do things we like to do without regard for teen angst. Then some song comes along in a seaside restaurant and it’s all you can do to keep your tears in your head:

We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

The weather, after Saturday’s stunning summer preview, has turned decidedly.. changeable. Meaning, it changes every 5 minutes or so. It’s beautiful and fascinating to watch from our heated and well-caulked redoubt, but tougher to deal with if you have designs on vigorous physical activity.
We have a couple of short hikelets among our favorite things to do here that take advantage of breaks in this sort of weather, and we did one of them Monday. It starts in a beachside campground, meanders for a mile or so on a wide, sandy beach, heads inland through salal and spruce forest, climbs a 700-foot headland ridge, then drops down to one of the most scenic lighthouses I�ve ever seen. The picture attached to the Road Trip entry below looks back at the beach/starting point of this hike from the headland.
When we arrived at the lighthouse, we saw that it was open for tours. We took the tour last year, and weren�t inclined to do so again, but one of the volunteer guides, a gentleman about 60 � 65, was hanging around outside and engaged us in conversation immediately. It looked like a pretty slow day for him, and when he asked us if we�d like the tour, we felt like we�d be disappointing him mightily if we refused, so up we went.
The lighthouse was built around 1890 using materials hauled up by ship from San Francisco - there was no coast highway at that time. It was fitted with the Fresnel lens shown below, and was fired by kerosene. It revolved using a grandfather-clock-like mechanism and a 200-pound weight. It required 3 keepers, all part of a federal lighthouse service, to reset the weight and replenish the kerosene every 4 hours, plus keep it spotlessly clean. It was electrified in the late 30s, and now is completely automatic. The keepers are long gone, and their former residence is operated by the National Park system as a bed & breakfast.
Lighthouses themselves are now more or less an anachronism, now that most vessels are fitted with GPS and other guidance gear, and you may have read that many of them have been decommissioned and are being given away to municipalities and charitable organizations.
Our guide was part of a retired husband and wife team who spent a couple months each year volunteering with the park service, and had done similar duty at a number of other little museums and monuments. He ventured well beyond lighthouse lore, and we learned, for instance, that some Japanese submarines that patrolled the Pacific coast during WWII actually carried disassembled float planes, which they could launch for sorties such as dropping incendiary bombs in an attempt to start forest fires. Apparently there is a monument to such a mission near Brookings, OR, the dedication of which was attended by the Japanese pilot and submarine captain. We eventually extricated ourselves, signed the log book and hiked back over the ridge, hoping to reach the beach before the tide completely engulfed it..
A successful afternoon � we took very little rain and got 5 -6 miles of pleasant hiking in the bargain. In the final frame of the picture below is an epitaph of sorts which we found attached to a bench in front of the lighthouse. It�s a perfectly succinct telling of a story, needing no further embellishment (Click to enlarge).

We happened upon the place we�re staying about 20 years ago while sampling the Oregon coast on another spring break trip. It�s a house-like structure set on a rock outcropping between US 101 and the ocean, divided up into about 6 units. It�s a bit on the funky side, comfortable and well-furnished, but unapologetically lacking amenities such as telephone and TV. It compensates by offering this killer view from our window (Click to enlarge):

And ready access to a really nice beach. From the windows, you can see a gang of sea lions sunning themselves on a rock, and, in this season, grey whales headed north to Alaska after their winter�s debauch in Mexico. If you hike down to the beach and walk along, you can find tidepools laden with mussels, anemones, hermit crabs and starfish� (Click to enlarge)

It�s a 5 � 6 hour drive from Seattle to our destination on the Oregon coast, which is halfway between Florence and Yachats (ya-HOTS). Our route involves two cognitive segments: a 250-mile slog down I-5 to Corvallis which, to be fair, can be really scenic if it�s clear and you can see Mts. Rainier, St. Helens, Hood and Bachelor, as well as the Columbia River crossing and a panoramic view of Portland; and a winding 70-mile run from Corvallis thru the coast range to the ocean that nicely draws a curtain on the I-5 corridor.
We reached the coast about 5 pm, had dinner in Yachats and then headed south to our lodgings. It was an uncharacteristically warm, sunny day on the coast � nearly 80 degrees � and I felt a kickass sunset coming on as we drove along US 101, the coast highway. I pulled off the road at Cape Perpetua, a campground and scenic area maintained by the Forest Service, and laid my trap for the sunset. Here are the results, framed by a Sitka spruce (Click to enlarge):