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: 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