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

Blue Highways: Newport, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

This is the first time that we see the Pacific with LHM.  Aahhh...for me, smelling the ocean, hearing the crash of the waves and the crying of the gulls and terns, and being able to sit on the beach in the late afternoon sun, well, there's nothing like it.  Of course, LHM doesn't stop here - it's too touristy.  We'll explore the idea of coastal tourist towns in this post.  To get your elegeomental bearings, try the map.

Book Quote

"Newport has been a tourist town for more than a century and it showed: a four-lane runway of beef-and-bun joints and seashell shops; city blocks where beach bungalows jammed in salty shingle to shiplap."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 4

Harbor and bridge in Newport, Oregon. Photo at the newportoregon.com website. Click on photo to go to host page.Newport, Oregon

In terms of being a tourist town, it sounds like Newport has the advantage on my hometown.  With a over a century of practice, it most likely knows what it needs to do to attract and keep tourists occupied.

You see such towns all over the U.S.  The Eastern seaboard has many of them.  From the founding of our country onward, people began identifying places where they wanted to go to escape the crowded towns and cities.  Usually, if they were close enough, they flocked to beaches.  Cape Cod and Long Island are classic places where people got away to beat the heat and get out of the metropolitan areas.

My wife's parents live in Sarasota, Florida.  It is a beach destination, but it is now becoming somewhat more metropolitan itself.  However, one can drive to the east coast of Florida and find little beach communities with the classic bungalows and surf motels that LHM writes about.  These cater to tourists with beachfront bars that generate an ocean and surf feel, restaurants that serve seafood (whether it's locally caught and fresh seafood is another matter) and maintain their attraction simply because of the beach itself.  We found this type of atmosphere when we visited New Smyrna Beach on Florida's east coast.

Many of these communities, probably a lot like Newport, have large and stately houses that were the beach getaways and retirement homes of some of America's wealthy, and the towns sprung up around not only tourism, but the infrastructure needed to provide services to those wealthy families.  The attraction of such coastal places to America's elite also attracted people from lower classes, who for a while might dream that they too were beachfront dwellers with unlimited resources to enjoy some of our country's natural wonders.  Newport itself had a number of seaside hotels, according to Wikipedia, and regular ferry service even before it was reached by its first permanent road in the 1920s.

Some communities have made a practice of touting their beaches and their nightlife to draw visitors in certain demographics.  Daytona Beach in Florida and South Padre Island in Texas are places that play hosts to thousands of college students on spring break each year.  Other places prefer a more sedate clientele and focus on local history and culture.  The Outer Banks, which LHM visited earlier on this journey, tout their historical connections to England and their accent as the last bit of spoken Renaissance English in the world.

This lies in contrast to those places that relied on industry and therefore did not need to cater to tourists.  My hometown of Fort Bragg, California is one of those places.  Almost completely dependent on the lumber industry and fishing, when both of those industries began to slow and die, Fort Bragg was left to tourism as a replacement.  Unfortunately, it did not have much experience as a tourist town, and it is further hindered by the fact that the defunct lumber mill property occupies all of what would be oceanfront property.  Still, it has made an admirable go of it, partly through the resourcefulness of a new generation of natives and the influence of some newer residents who have brought their entrepreneurship in arts, crafts, culinary arts and other fields to the town.  In contrast, Mendocino, it's neighbor to the south, embraced artists, crafters and culinary artists early and made a name for itself in those areas.  I feel for my hometown.  It is difficult to take what was essentially a blue collar town and remake it into something else.  But I am really impressed that it has survived.  The landscape of America is littered with the remains of towns that died soon after their main industries died, but Fort Bragg lives on and each time I go back, I am heartened to see another new shop, or a new hotel.  And even though my mom complains about the traffic each summer, I am heartened by the tourists who come to partake of sport fishing, camping, beachcombing and sightseeing, thereby keeping things alive in the corner of the world that I hold close to my heart.

I have never been to Newport, and probably my idea of what it is (or should be) would clash with the reality.  I would predict a quiet community, with some small local shops and restaurants that cater to the tourist community.  Aloof from the tourist part of the town, there would be large houses belonging to families that have held the town together since its founding.  Newer residences would be occupied by those more recent arrivals, who would also have created their own social structure.  Their interests might sometimes clash with the old-time families.  The town would have some sort of special celebration or two during the year, when everyone - older residents, newer residents, and tourists - comes together.  Tourists sprinkle the town in the winter, but flock there in the summer.  Because it is on the coast, it rains a lot.  The rain and weather adds character to the town, which given its site on Oregon's rocky coast, is surrounded by beautiful coves and lonely beaches. 

The reality seems a little different.  On reading about Newport, I find that it has over 80 local restaurants, and 1500 rooms ranging from inexpensive to upscale.  LHM writes that a four lane highway (U.S. 101) runs through town, and that was 30 years ago that it had that many lanes.  However, no matter what the town looks like now, ultimately, the natural wonders in the area plus the unique things that Newport itself has to offer will keep people coming to what would otherwise be an isolated coastal town.

There will always be complaints from those who remember the town as it was, and frustration by those who envision what the town could be.  For those towns that rely on tourism, however, all depends on how visitors experience these places in the present.

Musical Interlude

LHM has regained new purpose, as I explained in my last post.  However, he is still struggling the things that brought him on the journey in the first place.  Bob Schneider's Big Blue Sea conjures up some of that struggle, as well as acknowledges that with this post, we touch the Pacific with LHM for the first time.  If you want to see the lyrics of this song, find them here.

If you want to know more about Newport

Discover Newport
Essential Links: Newport
Historic Nye Beach in Newport
Newport Chamber of Commerce visitor page
Newport News-Times (newspaper)
Oregon Coast Aquarium
Wikipedia: Newport

Next up: Agate Beach and Cape Foulweather, Oregon