Blue Highways: Fort Clatsop, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) reflects on Lewis and Clark's wet, dreary Christmas at Fort Clatsop, while I reflect on the gifts that were given and the presence of Sacagawea.  To see where the second winter camp of the Corps of Discovery is located, here's the map.

Book Quote

"Inland some distance from Seaside, near the base of the northwestern prong of Oregon that sticks into the Columbia estuary, Lewis and Clark made winter camp, their last outpost before returning home.  Here at Fort Clatsop they celebrated the first American Christmas in the Northwest.  The men who smoked received a gift of tobacco, the others handkerchiefs; Sacagawea gave Clark two dozen weasel tails, and Lewis gave him a pair of socks.  Their dinner on that 'showery, wet and disagreeable' Christmas, Clark said, was 'poor elk so much spoiled that we ate it through mere necessity, some spoiled pounded fish, and a few roots.'  All without salt.  Despite the pester of fleas and mosquitoes, the group was 'cheerful all the morning.'"

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 5

Fort Clatsop, Oregon. Site of the second winter camp of Lewis and Clark. Photo by Glenn Scofield Williams and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.

Fort Clatsop, Oregon

When I grew up in Northern California, I used to look forward to Christmas.  I got excited for all the usual reasons kids got excited - I would get lots of cool stuff to play with.  I remember that each Christmas the weather was usually cold, many times it was overcast or foggy, and sometimes it was rainy.  As an adult going back to visit my mother and sister during the holidays, I think that more often than not we had rainy holidays, and a couple of times I would even worry about getting stuck there.  My hometown was served by only two two-lane roads (Highway 20, and Highway 1) and a third road that was an alternative way to the east (Highway 128) but getting to which meant taking Highway 1 for a few miles.  When a landslide or flooding would occur, I would have to stay until the roads could be cleared.  Since rain is a part of life in the Pacific Northwest, you just live with it.

I used to look forward to the great toys I would get.  I wouldn't say that I was overly spoiled at Christmas - I remember always being envious of my cousins because they would get all the really good stuff like race car sets and Pong in the first year that Pong came out and an air hockey table.  Back in the 70s those were really big hauls.  I never got stuff like that but I got cool things to mess around with.

Occasionally I would hear about the Christmas hardships that families like my parents' dealt with, especially during the Depression.  I heard how families would make do with what they had.  About how togetherness was most important at Christmas time rather than the gifts, which were just the expression of family love.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah was my attitude.  Just give me the stuff.

I imagine a lot of kids are like that in our hyper-consumerism driven culture.  But now that I'm older, I actually discourage people from getting me gifts for Christmas.  My wife and I often have a rule, which we break usually but we try to observe, to not get each other Christmas gifts but to just do something together.  Usually we are at one of our families places, either in Florida or California (though a not so secret dream of mine is to someday celebrate Christmas in a foreign country).  My family has started doing the same thing.  One of my sisters steadfastly refuses to stop buying Christmas gifts, but my mom and other sister, as well as myself, observe the rule.  My wife's family has started giving donations to each others' favorite charity in lieu of gifts.

I think that giving Christmas gifts has become so expected, with stores beginning to promote and advertise Christmas just after Halloween, that the meaning of what a gift really symbolizes has been lost.  Think about it this way.  Out of the blue, you get a compliment on your hair or the shirt you are wearing.  Because it is a surprise it is a gift to you and it is special.  If you wake up every morning expecting a compliment on your hair or clothes, and you get one, it ceases to become special.  It becomes part of a routine.  Christmas is complex, because it comes one time a year and we are expected to give and to get.  So how do we keep the magic and specialness in Christmas giving given all the pressures and expectations.

I like the description of Christmas, as quoted by LHM, of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  It was the first Christmas in the American Northwest.  It was dreary and raining, but that didn't stop the men of the Corps of Discovery from celebrating with a "Selute, shouts and a song which the whol party joined under our windows."  The gifts were simple and utilitarian based on what the people liked and needed.  Tobacco.  Socks.  Weasel tails.  I'm not sure what the weasel tails were used for - most likely their fur which could be traded but I don't know.  However, from what Lewis and Clark recorded these appeared to received gladly.  According to the Lewis and Clark Trail's online timeline, besides Sacagawea, some other Indians gave the Corps some black root before they left that evening.

In other words, Christmas was simple and yet meaningful and the group seems to have been thankful for what they received.  It was also inclusive, celebrated with Christian and non-Christian alike.  I'm sure that, as he smoked his tobacco, the average man on the Lewis and Clark expedition didn't bemoan his gift but was thankful for it.  It met his need, and it made him happy.

Musical Interlude

Sacagewea comes up repeatedly in the Lewis and Clark accounts.  She was the wife of a French scout, and was used mostly as an interpreter, but also loaned her services occasionally as a guide.  She was essential to the expedition, and Clark, as he was returning home from the journey, wrote this to her husband Toussaint Charbonneaum according to Wikipedia:  "...your woman who accompanied you that long dangerous and fatigueing rout to the Pacific Ocian and back diserved a greater reward for her attention and services on that rout than we had in our power to give her at the Mandans."  Written history suggests she died young at the age of 25 a few years after the expedition, while oral history claims she lived to be an old woman and died in Wyoming.  She was taken as a symbol of the women's suffrage movement, and is one of only three women honored on circulating US coinage (Susan B. Anthony and Helen Keller are the others). The only song I could find referencing Sacagawea was, interestingly enough, Stevie Wonder's Black Man from Songs in the Key of Life.  There are two lyrics.  The first reads:

Scout who used no chart
Helped lead Lewis and Clark
Was a red woman

and later, in a shouted question and answer between adult teacher and students:

Who was the first American
heroine who aided the Lewis
and Clark expedition?
Sacagawea, a red woman

Sacagewea was an American hero, fit to be put alongside all other American heroes.

If you want to know more about Fort Clatsop

Fort Clatsop National Memorial
Fort Clatsop Travel Photos by Galen R. Frysinger
Great Oregon Vacations: Fort Clatsop
Lewis and Clark National Historical Park
Wikipedia: Fort Clatsop

Next up: Astoria, Oregon

Blue Highways: Fort Stevens, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon mentions Fort Stevens in this chapter even before he gets to Haystack Rock and Seaside, Oregon, but I wanted to put it in correct trip chronological order.  I'm not really sure he visited Fort Stevens rather than just mention it, so I am including it as a blue marker on the map.  It's an interesting story, however, and it shows that the United States wasn't as invulnerable to attack as we may have thought we were.  To see where Fort Stevens lies on the trip, explore the map.

Book Quote

"...Fort Stevens to the north of Tillamook Bay earned the distinction of being the last place in the forty-eight states attacked by a foreign power when the Japanese shelled it in June of 1942."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 5

Fort Stevens, Oregon. Photo by Bob J. Galindo and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.

Fort Stevens, Oregon

I'm pretty good at World War II history.  I'm not an expert, but I can name several engagements in both theaters of war, and I have a good timeline of events.  I understand what the motivations of each side were, and how they planned to accomplish them.  I knew that the Japanese had made some attacks on a US state.  The most notable that I knew of was the Japanese takeover of the islands of Kiska and Attu in the Aleutian Islands, some say as a feint to draw US forces away from the Battle of Midway while others say it was to protect Japan's northern flank and possibly serve as a staging ground for attacks on the US mainland.  I also knew that there were some sporadic attacks on Oregon, but I didn't know how or where.  LHM's quote gave me the impetus to look up some of this information, which I'll share with you.

In June of 1942, the US was on its heels in the Pacific.  The Japanese seemed to be taking over island after island.  The US fleet had been pounded at Pearl Harbor but luckily, its aircraft carriers had survived.  The Japanese goal, as I understand it, was to create a "Co-Prosperity Sphere" in the western Pacific and, knowing that the US was a rival, Japan's aim was to significantly weaken the US so that it would present little threat to Japanese ambitions.  Japan, having little in the way of natural resources, wanted a way in which they could wield regional power and preserve it.  The Japanese hope was that their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would so weaken the US that it would have little recourse than to watch the Japanese build their empire.  However, the US was not as weakened as Japan hoped after Pearl Harbor, and the onset of war kickedstarted the massive US economy, which fired up to defeat the Japanese menace.

However, none of the outcome of the war was guaranteed in June, 1942.  Everything seemed to be going Japan's way, and the takeover of the two Aleutian Islands continued its string of successes.  Japanese leaders wanted to send a message to the United States that its isolation due to vast oceans could not protect it.  Accordingly, they dispatched two long-range submarines to the West coast of the United States to engage US warships heading for the Aleutians and to engage US forces on land if possible.

One of the subs, the I-25, in order to avoid minefields, shadowed fishing boats heading back into harbor and surfaced near the mouth of the Columbia River opposite Fort Stevens.  The sub fired 17 rounds from it's 5.5 inch deck cannon at the fort, which did not fire back in order to not give away its defenses.  The only real damage was to a set of power poles and the baseball field.  A B-17 was dispatched to look for and bomb the submarine, but the sub avoided the bombs and got away by diving.

The good news was that nobody was killed.  However, it was the first attack on the US mainland by a foreign power since the War of 1812.  In reality, the US had little to fear from a Japanese invasion, because at the time the logistics and costs needed to mount a successful invasion of the US mainland would have been prohibitive.  The only reason the US was invaded during the War of 1812 was due to British troops being stationed in Canada, and therefore Britain had a staging ground from which they could send out ships and troops.  In reality, had we been at war with Spain or France at that time, they might have been able to mount an invasion of the US as well given their territories in the New World.  As US expansionism occurred, however, and Canada became a friendly neighbor, these risks grew more remote.  The US used aggression to remove the threat of Mexican invasion, though Pancho Villa raided across the border in the early 1900s, though not sponsored by the Mexican government, necessitating an unsuccessful return incursion of US troops into Northern Mexico to find and catch him.  However, the fact that it might be prohibitive to launch an invasion against the US did not stop the public from experiencing a West coast invasion scare at the time.

By the 1940s, the US had built itself into a fortress that was, in effect, protected by two large oceans serving as vast moats.  The Japanese hoped to stoke fear and panic by making the US doubt its safety.  Later that year, in August, the I-25, which was one of eleven Japanese subs equipped with a seaplane, sent the plane on a mission over Oregon.  Loaded with incendiary bombs, the mission was to start forest fires in Oregon which would divert US manpower toward fighting them.  The bombs were dropped, the first of only two bombings of mainland America in the war, but factors including weather and two fire lookout personnel kept the fires from doing much damage.  In September, the I-25 launched the seaplane again which unloaded some incendiary bombs on another part of Oregon, but it seems as if the bombs either never exploded or the intended fires never caught.

Later, as the US military muscle exert itself and the Japanese gains were halted and then slowly reversed, Japanese leaders embarked on another program to strike terror into the US.  A Japanese scientist some years before had, through observations of balloons launched near Mount Fuji, discovered the existence of the jet stream.  With this knowledge, throughout 1944 and 1945 Japan launched over 9000 balloons into the jet stream carrying bombs that they hoped would hit forests and cities in the US.  Each carried either incendiary or antipersonnel bombs, and the Japanese hoped that 10 percent of the bombs would reach American targets.  In reality, about 300 of these balloon bombs were observed in North America, but they caused a few deaths.  One tragic set of deaths occurred in Oregon, when a minister and his family were on a forest outing.  One of the children found a bomb lodged in a tree and not knowing what it was, tried to get it down.  The resulting explosion killed the minister's wife and all of his children.

The facts of the attacks on the United States by the Japanese were kept from the American public until after the war was over, which is partly why even today so few people know that the Japanese carried out such attacks.  In reality, the best the Japanese could have hoped for was to be able to shell some American cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles...the West coast, however, was highly patrolled by the Coast Guard and the Japanese called off such a planned exercise.  But, it is an interesting facet of the Pacific War that the mainland US came under attack from Japanese forces, and escaped with very little damage.

Musical Interlude

I'm sure that that all the men at Fort Stevens were singing this song as they cheerfully went to their stations under the shelling of Japanese sub I-25 in the middle of the night.  Okay, probably not, because the song didn't come out until 1943.  But I'm sure that they were thinking in this vein.  Okay, they probably weren't thinking anything like this, either.  But we'd like to think they did.  Enjoy Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition by Kay Kyser and his Orchestra!

If you want to know more about Fort Stevens

ColumbiaRiverImages.com: Fort Stevens
Fort Stevens State Park
Visit Fort Stevens
Wikipedia: Fort Stevens

Next up:  Fort Clatsop, Oregon

Blue Highways: Seaside, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

Salt.  We want it, we need it, and we use it.  William Least Heat-Moon passes through Seaside, Oregon and relates the story of how Lewis and Clark stopped here to make salt out of seawater.  And to feed their men dog meat if they couldn't get beaver tail.  So, there you go.  To see where salt was made and cruelty to canine companions was done, check out the map.

Book Quote

"North of Haystack, at the old resort town of Seaside, was the site of a firepit where the [Lewis and Clark] expedition, in preparation for the long return east, boiled down seawater to make salt, a commodity they ran out of coming west....Although Clark believed the party healthiest on a subsistence of dog flesh, the favorite meat of the explorers, when they could get it, was beaver tail."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 5

Seaside, Oregon seawall and beach. Photo by M.O. Stevens and hosted on Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.

Seaside, Oregon

My homework for this post was to try to make a post out of two things: salt and dog meat.  Of course, there's a connection - salt could be used to preserve animal meat back in the days before refrigeration, and salt could be used to season the meat.  It was probably used for both during the Lewis and Clark expedition.  However, salt has a much more meaningful history, so much so that after learning a little about it I might not look at a salt shaker in exactly the same way again.

Where to begin with salt?  It's an element that regulates the ability of the body to retain water.  Too much salt is unhealthy, as it lowers the amount of fluid in the body and causes high blood pressure.  Too little, and the body begins to suffer from water poisoning.  So salt needs to be maintained in balanced amounts.  The fact is that in most industrialized and modern societies, people are getting too much salt from an overabundance of processed foods, leading to health maladies that our forebears didn't have to deal with too much.

Because of the necessity of salt to life, it has had a profound effect upon the course of world history.  The economics of empires and nations often depended in part upon salt.  China as an empire began to tax salt because it was such a necessary commodity and therefore China's treasury burgeoned due with the increased revenues.  Other nations followed suit, and the practice continued up into the relatively present day.  Gandhi staged a famous protest against the British colonial Empire in India by leading a mass protest of Indians to the sea to make their own salt, illegal because it wasn't taxed by the British.  Gandhi was probably partly influenced by the French Revolution, which may have been caused in part by the French government's onerous tax on salt.  The Spanish were brought to their knees by the Dutch, who blockaded the Spaniards' salt works and kept them from exporting this commodity.  Even farther back in history, the Greeks traded salt for slaves, and the Romans paid their troops partly with salt in the form of rations.  The modern word "salary" comes from this practice, as well as the roots of the terms "sausage," "sauce," and even "salad."

Of course, being so important to human life, salt has a rich symbolic value as well.  Salt has been used to frighten away evil spirits or other misfortunes, and at the same time, make someplace a cursed place.  An example of the former is the old superstition of throwing salt over one's shoulder to ward off bad luck.  An example of the latter is the "salting of the furrows" to make a place symbolically uninhabitable, such as when Rome razed and destroyed Carthage after the third Punic War and salted the earth to make sure that the city would never rise again.

In religion, salt has been referred to many times.  The Old Testament describes Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt when she turns back to see the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Jesus refers to his followers as "the salt of the earth."  Salt has been used as a symbol of purification, and as a portent of bad luck: Judas spills the salt in Da Vinci's "The Last Supper," therefore indicating that something terrible is going to happen.

We take for granted those little white crystals that sit innocently in the salt shakers on restaurant tables and on our dining room tables.  But they are essential.  It may be anathema to us today to spend a lot of time by a seashore wholly for the purpose of making salt, but on an expedition like that of Lewis and Clark, salt was needed for survival and as a handy source of barter with friendly Natives.

Of Lewis and Clark's penchant for feeding dog meat to their men I don't have much to say other than in modern cultures nowadays, the idea of eating dog is greeted with about as much revulsion as the idea of eating children.  But this was not always so, and still is not always so. There are some who say, for example, that South Korea, despite laws discouraging the eating of dog, still has an active canine culinary tradition.  Other cultures have often turned to dog as a way of meeting food shortages - for example European countries that sold dog meat during war or the aftermath of war.  The phrase "you're dog meat" comes from the idea that not only are you a lowly dog, but you're it's meat and therefore will be eaten.  To their creidt, both Judaism and Islam forbid the eating of dog, albeit because they may see dogs as being unclean animals.

As I look at my little dog, who is probably more my child since my wife and I don't have children, I couldn't imagine eating her, even under the most dire of circumstances.  Not even with the noblest and most necessary of seasonings - salt. 

But, what does it say about me that my salt shaker, which dispenses this wonderful and necessary element, is in the form of a wienerdog where the salt comes out of the dog's rear end?

Musical Interlude

Jesus called his disciples the "salt of the earth."  I can think of a few people who are essential to our society and to our civilization.  Let's put it this way...they aren't part of the 1% who has the wealth.  The Rolling Stones paid homage to these people in their song Salt of the Earth, and I would say that they are one of the "salts" of music.  Enjoy!

If you want to know more about Seaside

City of Seaside
El.com: Seaside
Go Northwest: Seaside
Seaside, Oregon Official Visitors Website
Wikipedia: Seaside

Next up:  Fort Stevens, Oregon

Blue Highways: Haystack Rock, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

In Star Trek IV, a thrilling moment comes when Spock sets the transporter controls, and a lot of water containing cepholopods appears in a specially rigged tank in the Klingon vessel the Enterprise crew is using.  "There be whales here, Captain!" shouts Scotty!  This pair of humpback whales is then taken forward in time from the 20th century to the time of the Federation to save Earth from a space probe.  Could this endangered group of sea creatures save us, if we don't hunt them to extinction.  It makes good movie fodder.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) relates a story about a beached whale from the past which makes me reflect on my own experiences with whales, all in the context of Haystack Rock.  To see where this natural feature lies on the Oregon coast, your map is here.

Book Quote

"The long view south down the coast from the steep headlands near Neahkahnie Mountain seemed to reach the length of Oregon.  Northward stood Haystack Rock, a three-hundred-foot domed skerry topped by a mantle of snowy bird stain, looking like a chipped whale's tooth.  And in fact, it was near the great monolith that a whale swam ashore in 1806; Lewis and Clark, camped to the north, got word of the sea beast.  Sacagawea, the Shoshone guide for the Corps of Discovery - as Jefferson called the expedition - who had never asked the captains anything for herself, insisted on making the hard trek to see the whale.  She and the explorers sampled the blubber and found it, in Lewis's words, 'white and not unlike the fat of pork, though the texture was more spongy and somewhat coarser.'....Years later, the story goes, after Sacagewea returned to the Shoshones, of all things she saw in her twenty-three months with the corps, the Bird Woman never tired of telling about the great beached 'fish' that gave milk."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 5

Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, Oregon. Photo by "Baseball Bugs" on Wikimedia Commons. Click on file to go to host page.

Haystack Rock, Oregon

For years and years, I had never seen a whale.  I never even knew that they were a regular sight along my little stretch of Northern California coast.  I guess I wasn't really interested or wasn't paying attention.  But while my attention was wandering, probably toward play with army men, watching football or hanging out with my friends, I missed the fact that each year, a whole lot of whales swim down the west coast of the United States on their way to warm waters in Mexico.

I remember when I first was clued into this phenomena as a teenager.  After that, I would look off the coast each year for the telltale signs of the gray whale migration.  These included spouts, flukes and tails.  The spouts, if you looked carefully, could often be seen as a small plume of white shooting out of the ocean and then quickly dissipating.  If a large pod was traveling past, you might see 10 or more at different times and since the gray whale swims at about 5 miles an hour, it would take them a long time to pass.

I never actually saw a whale up close until I was sixteen.  My family took a cruise on the MV Odessa out of the Soviet Union up the coast of Canada.  One day, while looking out the window on one of the decks, I saw a large dorsal fin knife up out of the water, and just as quickly knife back in.  It was an orca, and the first time I had ever seen anything like that in the wild.

Later on, on my honeymoon, my wife and I traveled up to northern Vancouver Island to a small village called Telegraph Cove.  We took a boat with a very surly captain out to see orcas, and did see them up close and personal even though the orcas didn't play nice and went into a preserve where our boat could not go for a long while.  That made our captain even more surly.  However, we also saw porpoises in the water, swimming fast alongside, ahead and behind our boat.  They jumped and frolicked in the wake.  That was also a first for me.

I didn't see my first gray whale until a few years ago when my wife and I took a charter whale watching boat out off the coast of my hometown.  I fought bouts of seasickness on that trip.  It was a dark, gloomy day with some seas and swells, and my inner ear and stomach didn't handle it well.  But, I did see the whales, mostly their tails as they flipped up out of the water indicating that they were about to dive.

I love that, at least in LHM's telling of the Lewis and Clark story, that it was Sacagawea who insisted that they make the trip to see the beached whale.  In some tellings of the story, the whale was already a skeleton by the time they got there, and the blubber had been carved up by the natives, rather than Lewis carving a piece out of the whale right there.  Either way, the story is compelling.  I've never seen a beached whale, and such an occurrence usually signals that either the whale died and was washed up on shore or that the whale beached itself because of illness or disorientation.  In my hometown, sometime within the past year, a dead giant female blue whale washed up on the rocks.  It had apparently been hit by a boat out at sea and died of its injuries.

Lately, you occasionally hear about whole groups of whales beaching themselves in what seems like a mass suicide.  Footage often shows volunteers rushing to try to help the whales and, if they are smaller ones, pull them back out to sea.  Some attribute the rise in ocean noise caused by shipping and Navy underwater testing as a cause of whale hearing loss and disorientation.

Regardless of the way in which a whale is seen, one cannot help but be awed by the power and majesty of these gentle and highly intelligent creatures.  One of the most moving stories I have ever heard was by a man who told the story of how he and his friends were called upon to save a humpback whale captive in crab pots and lines off San Francisco.  (If you want to listen to the full story in a first person telling by the divers involved, listen to this episode of Radiolab.  The story starts around 4:30 into the program.)  The whale had struggled to the point where it was exhausted and about to drown.  When he and his fellow divers freed the whale, it swam away, but as he looked, he saw its bulk come up beneath him.  He thought the whale might harm him, but then, it paused right near him and looked him in the eye for some seconds, and then swam around to each of the other divers, paused, and looked them in the eye also, before swimming away.  He attributed this to the whale somehow trying to communicate its thanks.

As a big fan of whales, I would wish that they could live in the oceans unmolested.  Alas, too many nations still hunt them.  But I can still be awed by their presence on our planet and the stories about them, and know that in my fascination, I'm connected across 200 years with an Indian woman who counted it among the most meaningful experiences of her life to see just the carcass of one.

Musical Interlude

You can't imagine how difficult it is to find a decent song about whales.  I listened to one by Yes but wasn't too impressed by it.  But then I found one by Lou Reed, who speaks the song in his signature Lou Reed way, and why not?  So enjoy The Last Great American Whale.

If you want to know more about Haystack Rock

Cannon Beach
Cannon-Beach.net
Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce
Living Wilderness: Haystack Rock
Wikipedia: Cannon Beach
Wikipedia: Haystack Rock

Next up: Seaside, Oregon

Blue Highways: Depoe Bay, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

We get into the nitty-gritty of fishing and fishermen, amid the sound of buoys.  In Depoe Bay, I find a lot to compare with my hometown.  And, you get some sentimental feelings about my uncles who were fishermen.  Fishing is a declining occupation in the United States, fast becoming a piece of America that was.  To see where Depoe Bay sits on Oregon's shores, a map is at your disposal.

Book Quote

"A high concrete-arch bridge crossed a narrow zigzag cleft on an inlet leading to a small harbor under the cliffs.  Depoe Bay used to be a picturesque fishing village; now it was just picturesque.  The fish houses, but for one seasonal company, were gone, the fleet gone, and in their stead had come sport fishing boats and souvenir ashtray and T-shirt shops.  In Depoe Bay the big fish now was the tourist, and, like grunion, its run was a seasonal swarming.

"....I went down to the harbor, slipped past the Coast Guard station, and pulled up at the wharf....Cold wind stirred the surf, but the little harbor lay quiet.  I heard laughter and a card game on a boat, and from out in the Pacific came the deep-throated dolor of sonobuoys groaning in their chains (seamen say) the agony of drowned sailors."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 4

Bridge at Depoe Bay, Oregon. Photo by BubbaB0y at the Tripadvisor site. Click on photo to go to site.Depoe Bay, Oregon

Two things stand out to me in the end of this chapter in Blue Highways.  First some setting.  LHM pulls into Depoe Bay and describes it as in the first paragraph above.  Then he finds a restaurant and talks to a local or two.  One guy gives him an earful on how things have changed in the town's main economic activities.  The man has a sport fishing boat where he takes tourists out on the Pacific to fish.  He used to be a commercial fisherman, but overfishing and regulations have killed the commercial fishing industry.  After talking with the man about how the "new fish" are now tourists looking to spend their money, LHM finds a place to pull up his van and sleep down by the wharf, lulled to sleep by the low moan of buoys.

This story is so familiar.  This tragic tale of lost livelihood is one that just missed two of my uncles, one of whom fished almost until he died, and the other who is still fishing.  This conversion of a town's economy over to tourism is the story of my hometown, which lasted longer in its blue-collar ways than Depoe Bay but eventually fell to the same forces.

My grandfather on my mother's side was a fisherman and a lumberman.  He fished when fishing was good, and went logging when it wasn't.  He owned his own boat, and taught his sons how to fish.  They fished out of a little harbor, Noyo, near Fort Bragg, California.  The description of Depoe Bay's harbor could just as easily be that of my hometown.  Back then, there was a fishing fleet, and in the morning you would see the line of boats heading out to sea.  It might take an hour for them all to leave.  In the evening that line of boats came back into harbor.

Fishing is a rough life.  You put up with the vagaries of the catch, the unpredictability of the weather and the water, the rough work of putting out your lines or your pots and then hauling them back in, hoping for a catch.  The work is cold and wet because the ocean is cold and wet.  In Depoe Bay, farther north than my town, the water probably feels even colder.  Fisherman's wives constantly prayed that their husbands and sons would come back safely

By the time fishing was taken over by my grandfather's sons, my mother's brothers, it was starting to get sketchy.  In California, the catch started getting smaller and smaller.  The U.S. territorial waters, once only 3 miles offshore, was extended to 12 miles in an effort to keep foreign fish factories sent by the Japanese and Russians from taking the catch.  Unfortunately, even this was not enough.  I noticed, even when I was young, that my uncles were fishing farther away from our town.  One uncle made regular trips up to the Oregon and Washington coasts.  Another uncle moved up to a town on the San Juan de Fuca strait in Washington and used that as a springboard to run up to Alaska.  The fishing seasons kept getting shorter, and the permits harder to get.  When the halibut season was reduced to 24 hours of fishing, my uncle Elwin would run his boat up from Washington to Alaska and they would fish 24 hours straight, hopefully fill their holds, and then make the run back to an Alaskan town to sell the fish.  My uncle Bob, now in his eighties, still takes his boat out to fish salmon, and has taken it as far as Hawaiian waters.

Of course, when you're in a 60 foot fishing boat, you are nothing more than a speck upon the huge ocean, and the farther out on that huge ocean you are, the more chances that something might go wrong.  Fishermen are always staving off the hand of Davy Jones, who wants to pull them down into the coldness and darkness of the briny deep.  I believe that every fisherman's wife breathes a sigh of relief when her husband decides to hang up his lines and retire.

Another uncle, Rusty, who worked in the lumber industry all his life, bought a small boat in his retirement and took it out regularly to fish.  He had also been taught to fish by his Italian speaking father.  Some years, Rusty filled his freezer with salmon.  But some years, there were no salmon and some years, there wasn't even a season.  Now, there's fewer seasons than non-seasons, leaving many frustrated and angry.  Now, Rusty's boat sits in a garage.

My town used to have a fishing fleet.  Now, our once vibrant harbor is mostly quiet.  Only a few boats leave in the morning, and only a few return in the evening.  My mom, who once got regular supplies of salmon, crab and halibut from her brothers, and who won't eat a fish unless it's s fresh that its practically wiggling on her plate, is getting fewer chances to have a good fish meal.  Where once the sound of boat engines and water rushing over many bows almost drowned out the moan of the buoys, now a silence reigns except for that low wail, so eloquently described by LHM as the agony of a drowning man.  At night, when the fog pulls in and everything fades into a monochrome, you can still sonorous moan of the buoys, their sad song almost, but not quite, conjuring up the sounds of a fishing village's past.

Musical Interlude

I'm dedicating this post to my Uncle Elwin, who died a few years ago after a struggle with prostate cancer.  He was a fisherman all his life, and a nice and generous guy to boot.  His boat, the Norcoaster, was known from California to Alaska.  The song, Fisherman's Dream by Capercaille, always reminds me of him and brings a tear to my eye when I hear it.

If you want to know more about Depoe Bay

Depoe Bay Chamber of Commerce
Go Northwest: Depoe Bay
Lincoln City News Guard (newspaper)
Little Whale Cove: Depoe Bay
Oregon Coast Visitors Association: Depoe Bay
Wikipedia: Depoe Bay

Next up: Haystack Rock, Oregon