By Samuel John Klein of Portland, Oregon - Graphic Designer without Portfolio, aspiring artist who dawdled too long.
The city center of Depoe Bay is a delightful place, really; a few blocks of charming tchotchke shops, souvenir shops with an artistic bent, and placed to get food and candy
There's been changes, of course. The most notable is the aquarium that used t be there. In the middle of that block of storefronts is one with two gabled details, and for many years it was an aquarium. It was faced in rock stucco, all the passages inside were faced in the same, and it had windows to small aquaria that let you look salt water fauna both common and a few uncommon, but the big draw were the resident pinnipeds at the back. They were loud and smelt like you think they would, and they'd sell us little bags of cut-up fish and we'd all throw it to them.
The other thing I remember the most about it is the salt-water taffy we'd always get specifically there. Naturally, we stopped by Ainslee's, which has been killing it the taffy department since before I was alive. We're going through it piece-by-piece now; it's just as nifty as I remember.
Ainslee's have a taffy-pulling and -wrapping machine in the front window but they were done with the day's manufacture by the time we stopped by. But it's still there, which is a plus.
Just a bit of historical fact to drop here: Depoe Bay was named for an indigenous resident who our history remembers as one Charley Depoe. He was a Siletz indian (part of the Tututni tribe from southwest Oregon) who was given land allotments under the Dawes Act of 1887, and some of that allotment got sold and became the land that became Depoe Bay. Cutler City, the neighborhood at the south end of Lincoln City, also sprang from one of Depoe's allotments.
Depoe Bay is a little, fun place between Lincoln City and Newport.
(Look, friends, you can only say 'small Coastal town' so many times before you realize that that's hardly a unique thing. Anyway).
It is promoted that Depoe Bay is the 'world's smallest navigable harbor'. Again, as with the 'D' River in Lincoln City, there is no universally recognized authority that has the say. There may (or may not) be working harbors that are just a s'kosh smaller, there's no clear way of telling even in this internet-besotted age (and, to be sure, being connected to that vast mass of info seems to faithfully confirm little-to-nothing any more). But when one looks at it, it is pretty small and it is a busy place to be.
That's the whole of it, right there from my vantage point on the north end of the US 101 bridge over the cove's mouth. A lot of commercial fishing and charter trips come out of here, and the reputation of Depoe Bay as the place to watch the gray whale migration on the Oregon Coast doubtless boosts its economic throw-weight all the more.
The sign boasts similarly to the sign at he 'D' River crossing up in L.C.
I snapped da pix while the Brown Eyed Girl looked for souvenirs and salt-water taffy and there's a very friendly energy in Depoe Bay.
There's also a blockhouse on the north end of that bridge ..
Small, old type over the entry proclaim DEPOE BAY PARK, and the banner in the far right hand window there proclaim WHALE WATCHING CENTER, but the small sign in the entry way states closed-due-to-Covid.
There's a pandemic on, you know.
But we've got enough of our heads on straight, and our masks on those heads, that we can go out and enjoy.
And, just as off Boiler Bay, there were boats. Oh, buoy.
Just on the north side of that small place called Depoe Bay is a notch in the shoreline called Boiler Bay.
There is a State Parks wayside there and we took the opportunity to pull off, go down, and listen to the surf.
Boiler Bay is not named as such because of the turbulent surf.
The boiler still remains, and can be seen at extreme low tides. Don't bother looking for it in the picture I've provided, in other words. And if you decide to climb down there when it is extreme low tide, be careful. People get hurt that way.
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| Your puny rules, they do not apply, to me, human. |
Thing about seagulls is they knew how to spot the main chance and know who the soft touches are. When we arrived at Boiler Bay, we had a big WinCo bag of bulk pretzels; by the time we left, less than half, which made their ways into the happy gizzards of a small flock of seagulls (hey, that'd make a good name for a band, don't you think) and a couple of crows. Several juveniles amongst that flock, and at least one of them was using their baby-gull creel to pour on the cute. It worked on these soft-touches like a charm.
This is US 101, the main street of Lincoln City, as you approach the D River Crossing at the middle of town:
Note that I said the middle, not the center. Lincoln City doesn't have a center. It has four or five of them.
L.C. is a town of towns. In 1965, the communities of Oceanlake, Delake, Nelscott, Taft, and Cutler City, some organized towns and some not, decided they were stronger as a unit than they were separately so, like big stones on a bangle bracelet, they unified. Lincoln City was chosen by vote because it was seen as arrogant to name it after one of the larger towns. And so it became, a small town on the Oregon Coast that was scarely a mile wide ... but was about seven miles long.
And the string that holds those pearls together is US 101 (as a matter of fact, one of the rubrics for each urban center that strings together in L.C. is just that, pearls. They know what they have there, I guess).
Now this may seem a little daffy, but for me, for a visit to the beach, one of the simpler pleasures is watching the miles of L.C. roll by via a car window; watching the numbered streets count down from 40th Street in the north (at least that's where 101 joins the grid) to D River then up 69th Street in the south.
And a picture of cars along 101 as you go through that gangly long town is one of the fondest memories I have.
Lincoln City geography has this much in common with that of Portland, and it's this: a river divides it and forms the basis for how the numbered streets are determined.
That's where the similarity ends.
Another few words about Lincoln City geography: It's a long, slender city. Along its northeastern side is a body of water called Devil's Lake (attributed to indigenous legend which may or may not have been misremembered by those who displaced those indigenous people ... provided it wasn't made up entirely). At its south end, Devil's Lake turns a point toward the Pacific and, from that point, issues an outlet.
It's about 400-some feet long, and it drains Devil's Lake directly to the ocean. Most of the time, though, it hardly seems much of a stream at all.
This, then, is the "D River", a vast majority of the time anyone crossing the bridge over it on Hwy 101 in the middle of Lincoln City is likely to see it. Prepare to be awed.
It was documented by the Guinness Book of World Records as world's-shortest for a very long time and the State's road signs at the time exalted it as such as it does today.
However, in 1989, Guinness changed that after a group of school children in Great Falls, Montana, had the channel that allows Giant Springs to drain to the Missouri River, having rendered a result of 201 feet. L.C. boosters countered by arguing that the D was 120 feet long at 'extreme high tide', a claim seeming to try too hard even if you love Oregon having the most remarkable of everything (as I do - my Oregon chauvinism is second to nobody's, as anyone who knows me will tell you).
Faced with having to adjudicate between a group of Oregon Coast boosters on one side and Montana schoolchildren on the other, Guinness took the utterly Solomanic approach of fully recusing itself from further authority, never to declare the world's shortest river ever again, and removing the category from their famous compendium altogether.
While rolling up the court and going home on the Guinness part is something of a downer, it does mean that we can continue to insist it's the world's shortest river, and there isn't a thing anyone can do to contradict us about it.
And the sign still exists at the 101 bridge: D RIVER -- WORLDS SHORTEST.
This is both just a restaurant and more like a landmark. It also comes with a bit of controversy in the world of today, an interesting history, a certain misconception, and no small amount of affection.
After waking in Tillamook and driving south down 101 to Lincoln City, we decided it was well past time for a real breakfast. Like legions of people who grew up in the mid-Willamette Valley the place we usually found ourselves larking of to to see the beach was the central coast, and that meant Lincoln County, and that meant, for starters, Lincoln City.
I'm old enough that I dined as a kid at what was then called Lil' Black Sambo's, a family restaurant whose brand was taken from Scottish writer and illustrator Helen Bannerman's 1899 children's tale of a clever Indian boy who escaped being bullied by tigers by convincing them to chase tail 'round a tree until they melted down into ghee, which was then enjoyed on pancakes by the protagonist's family. And the old restaurant would serve us kids pancakes with a side of 'tiger butter'.
Latterly, it has evolved slightly. It's now simply Lil' Sambo's, the protagonist being elided in favor of the tigers, and has lived through a fire that destroyed the building in 2004 and the 2019-now pandemic. Located at 3262 NE Hwy 101 in the Oceanlake district, it has a spiffy, more modern building built on the footprint of the old ... and a proud tiger with his stolen shorts and parasol marching on top of the sign out front.
The interior has mementos from its now-64-year history of being in the main drag in L.C., and the decor is all about the tiger.
There is also a trinket-filled gift shop part of the restaurant, because selling such things is what you do when you've been a landmark as long as that.
The history of the business is pure 20th Century Oregon Coast. It actually exists because the Pixie Kitchen did. The Pixie Kitchen is a coastal legend that existed from 1953 to 1985 in the same area of L.C. and was the place for families with kids to stop at through the 50s and 60s (I still have fond memories of the funhouse mirrors they used to have near the dining room entry). They didn't serve breakfasts, though, so in 1957 two of their cooks opened a spot called "Pixie Pancakes" a little ways down 101.
The restaurant history does not mention when they decided to brand as "Lil' Black Sambos" or when they decided to omit the word black from the name.
There's another misapprehension about the name, in as much as there was once a national 24-hour diner chain called Sambo's. The name similarity tends to suggest to people that Lil' Sambos was once part of this, but that never has been, indeed, the national chain's name was derived from its two founders, Sam Battistone Jr and Newell Bohnett, and not from the children's story (though that didn't prevent them from also trading on the images from Little Black Sambo for a while).
I really ought to mention the food, because that is, indeed why we stopped, but a place with this much history and modern issues generates more than its share of digressions, I suppose; the breakfast here is not to be missed. I had the closest thing I could find to a taco omelette on the menu, the Spanish omelette, combining salsa, sour cream, seasoned meat, olives and cheese, and it was superb. The Brown Eyed Girl treated herself to her bliss, basted eggs.
They know how to put on a good breakfast. It was worth the trip.
The name and the heritage behind it is an issue that'll have to be resolved and it's being approached quite slowly, as any BIPOC resident of Oregon presumably might not be surprised to hear. As recently as 2020, as Willamette Week reports, there are current calls for the restaurant to retire the old and problematical brand. And the current owners are, if slow to rise to it, not wholly unaware: the WW quotes the current general manager as acknowledging that change is in the air, but is reluctant to say when.
I don't know about anyone else, but I think they had a winner in the name "Pixie Pancakes".
After all, pixies still ride seahorses on the outside of the building. Maybe they should embrace that.
About the only thing that Western Wildfire Season 2021 didn't have that the one in '20 did was thick smoke spilling into the Willamette Valley.
Not that it didn't try, though.
On a recent evening me and The Brown Eyed Girl found a picnic area in Mount Tabor Park that we'd not known existed (and we are now in love with, because ...) that has a splendid view of Montavilla, Russellville and points east.
In the last missive I spoke of a visual miasma on the eastern horizon hiding the volcanic peak I dote on so, and it was heartbreaking, having occasionally very blue skies overhead only to mute into an unidfferentiated off-gray on the horizon. Well, as we've all seen in the news, the wildfires have been very very busy again this year, and this view from that picnic area on the slope of Mount Tabor clearly (there's irony for you, yes?) explains why:
That long, low, level nimbus in the distance is the edge of the smoke pall from all those fires. One can just name out Larch Mountain there about a quarter of the way in from the left-hand edge of the photo, and Wy'East is typically very prominently just right of that, but the smoke is completely obscuring it.
Signs and wonders.
The dryness of the year is only enhanced when one looks at the state of Wy'East as it is, now.
A few weeks back, a friend (and several others) posted up pictures of California's Shasta, utterly bereft of snow. I'm not a local to that and I imagine that late in summer, Shasta's usually down to next-to-nothing, but it was not only unsettling to see it that bare but that bare that early in the summer. That heat wave we endured took some thirty per cent off Tahoma's (Rainier) snowpack along.
Wy'East being a more modest peak than either of those two, I had to expect no small amount of white gone. The wildfires being what they have been, I've not seen the mountain itself for a few weeks; the mantle from those east-of-the-Cascades infernos spreading westward enough to turn the eastern horizon into a visual miasma (I'll comment on that in a subsequent entry).
Work being what it is, I come home during the afternoon now instead of the morning. And when I passed by my favorite photo spot, NE 122nd and Shaver in front of Rossi Farms, this is what I saw today:
Now, I've looked back through my historic photos and have determined that Wy'East looking this way in September is not really all that unusual (I'll post some comparisons in another subsequent post). But when seen through the lenses of this historically torrid Oregon summer and the mounting anxieties about the changing climate, it seems a little drier, a little more dessicated.
The only white left on Wy'East are its modest glaciers. Here's a close-up with the two most visible from my POV called out:
And so it, so far, goes.
One thing I didn't realize is how much cropland there is in Tillamook County. I mean, you don't think of coastal counties as farmland; they're mostly hills and mountains. Not much flatland.
The character of US101 changes after you pass south of Tillamook Bay. It goes from surf-and-mountain hugging vistas to meandering around small valleys and hollows with small farms. It feels more like a highway in the interior; if it weren't for the knowledge you were in Tillamook County you might forget you were near the ocean.
Many more cornfields than I expected ... and, well, this:
A bumper crop you can bounce off of. I didn't know marshmallows that large were a thing, but I wonder if it's like a connoisseur's market, you know, like Yamhill County Pinot Noir only more exclusive.
Probably won a blue ribbon in France, or something.
This is just a nifty sign in downtown Tillamook. I didn't get a pic of it at night, but those windmill blades' lights are animated.
It's a 50's themed burger bar (and what isn't) at 260 Main Street in Tillamook. We came through too late to dine the night before and left town before it opened in the AM but, judging by its online menu, it's burgers and sandwiches are right up our street.
When we pull through Tillamook again, we'll go.
If there's one thing Tillamook is known for, it's for what was once there, just a little south of town.
The municipal airport (Port Of Tillamook Bay, to be precise) is, as some large airfields that seem too large for the small towns they serve turn out to be, is a legacy of the USA's air defense during World War II. Tillamook Naval Air Station, commissioned in 1942 and decommissioned in 1948 once had two huge hangars, Hangars A and B. Constructed of wood and built in a hurry, they were made to house blimps, and was the home of Squadron ZP-33, with a complement of 8 so-called "K-class" ships. They were, and Hangar B remains, one of the largest wooden buildings in the world.
In 1992, Hangar A was destroyed in a fire. Hangar B remains and is home to the Tillamook Air Museum, which seems to still be going great guns, somewhat contradicting the news down the last decade which suggested that the Air Museum, featuring WWII aircraft, was destined to remove to Madras.
Still, anything is possible one supposes: while Hangar B is an architectural wonder, wooden structures require constant attention ... and anything that large has got to be a maintenance armful.
Still, it's impressive even if you don't go, which we couldn't, this time. But at the corner of Long Prairie Road and US 101, about 5 or so minutes south of Tillamook, it's easily visible from the highway ... one full mile distant.
When we finally got into Tillamook,where we were destined to spend the night. I saw these patterned squares on buildings all about town.
I started calling them 'hex signs', as in: since when does Tillamook decorate its building with hex signs? That, as far as I knew, was a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, and those were all circles, not unlike a mandala.
There were several examples I caught in passing:
This one, on a lumber and building supply house just north of the city center, on the north bank of Hoquarton Slough (or, as the sign on the bridge deemed it, "The Hoquarton"):
... and this one, which was on the side of the motel (the Red Apple Inn) where we spent the night:
... and this pretty one, which I caught while very much in motion, as we left town going south:
... and this one, too, on a barn a couple miles south of town along US 101:
We were eager to go south, so we didn't explore any further. After we got home, I web-searched for "Tillamook County Hex Symbols" and came up empty-handed. Just before I wrote this, however, I did zoom in on the little name plate in the lower left of the one on the motel and it begat a web search that bore fruit.
They're large renditions of quilt squares, which led me to discover that the "Tillamook County Quilt Trail" is a thing ... with a Facebook page as well as a web site that'll tell you everything you need to know about it. The TL;DR abstract of it it is summed up on the webpage thus: to create a tie between our rich local history and the wonderful talents of local quilters. with the added benefit of encouraging tourists to spend a little more time in our community.
I find that incredibly charming. I don't see how anyone could not.
This is still a new thing for me.
When I was but a neat thing, a baby Oregonian, and I started loving road signs, State Highways in Oregon were simple things. There were the big ones, trunk highays, I suppose, like 99E and 99W and 22 and 18, and there were all the rest, that started with the number 2.
Downtown Silverton, for example, exists at the intersection of Hwy 213 and Hwy 214. The "2" apparently denoted less regional roads. There were no notable highways I knew of that started with "1" (and there never has been a State Hwy 1.
Before I go any farther, let me define my terms in the vernacular. The technical nomenclature for a signed State Highway is, as in other states "Route"; the rubric is "Oregon Route", so my old hometown highways were OR 214 and OR 213, where OR is the abbreviation for "Oregon Route". That is not what us proles called it though. The colloquial term for an Oregon Route, as I was growing up was "State Highway" or just, most often "Highway". More discriminating language, especially in Marion, Polk, and Clackamas counties where there were only Interstates and State Highways, just wasn't all that necessary. No US routes run through the heart of the Mid-Willamette Valley.
To ODOT, though, the term "Highway" always had a very specific meaning, quite like an internal file or catalong number. While there is no "OR 1", there is a State Hwy 1; it's OR 99 (Pacific Hwy 1), OR 99E (Pacific Hwy 1E) and 99W (Pacific Hwy 1W). Signed routes in the State Highway system function like bus routes in a city bus network: one numbered route can follow many named streets. A very typical example is the Hillsboro-Silverton Hwy No. 140: It's signed as OR 214 from Silverton to Woodburn but is OR 219 from Woodburn north to Hillsboro. A lot of state highways, however, while maintained and owned by the State of Oregon, had no route numbers.
In 2002, ODOT decided that may be it would be a useful wayfinding thing to have those highways sport route numbers, and so it was determined that all unsigned state highways should have route numbers and those route numbers, wherever possible, should simply be the highway numbers that ODOT always used internally. Prior to 2002, the road from Tillamook to Oceanside was known by local names and to the state as Netarts Hwy No. 131;, after 2002, it would be OR 131.
It's an ongoing process. Many formerly unsigned Routes have shields up; many do not. And it gets stranger, to the lifelong 20th Century Man; whereas before, all state highways ended at other state highways, now, state highways just end. OR 131 is a route with a stub-end, and that stub-end is in Oceanside.
So, now, I'm confronted with this signage, which fascinates me as does a shiny thing a corvid:
One other thing of interest here: the red post on the STOP sign. This is a Tillamook County thing, as far as I can see, and I saw it often in that county, but this is a clever and good idea and I think it should catch on.
In Tillamook County, see, no matter what else you tell Mr. Officer Sir, you cannot tell him you didn't see the stop sign.
The sun was setting and we made it as far as Oceanside.
Tillamook County is unique on the north and central Oregon Coast that there are significant areas of inland settlement - from Lincoln north to Clatsop, towns and people tend to cling to the shore. Tillamook, the county's seat and largest town (not saying much there, since there's not even 6,000 people that call that town home) is more than 5 miles inland, though not far from the southern end of its eponymous Bay, so to go to the beach from Tillamook takes about 20-30 more minutes.
Protip: don't head out west from Tillamook on Hwy 131 toward Oceanside near sunset. That road is pointed straight the sun during this time of year and it is brutal.
'Twas the Brown Eyed Girl's hope that we'd find a small, old-but-not-too-shabby roadside motel that we could hear some surf from. We never did, but in the end it was okay. We did get to Oceanside, which is where Hwy 131 ends, just as the sun was setting.
It was setting behind Three Arch Rocks.
The Three Arch Rocks, are, from left, Finlay Rock, Middle Rock, and Shag Rock. These three large seastacks and about six smaller rocks nearby are quite unique; they form the Three Arch Rocks National Wildlife Refuge. Created in 1907, it's the first NWR west of the Mississippi; at about 15 acres, it's amongst the smallest (if not the smallest). Oregon's largest puffin colony can be found there, and it's an important nesting ground for murres. In the foreground is the parking area for the state wayside there.
From this POV, if one turns 'round, one sees this:
... which is downtown Oceanside. Oceanside isn't a city so much as it's an unincorporated community, a small charming patch of Tillamook County with a handful of business and a number of people who live there as well as a number of people who come and go occasionally.
I've developed the impression that many Coast communities don't have people living there so much as they have people staying there, if one follows my distinction.
Turn around and look up the hill, and you have uptown Oceanside.
Pretty vertiginous perches, no? Those things are gonna rock and roll when Cascadia Next happens.
But they are enviously luxurious.
Garibaldi is the next town on the road, a little fishing port on the north end of Tillamook Bay but, this being Oregon, fishing wasn't always what it was all about. Not near all those forests.
About 800 people live there today. It was bigger in the past, but not by all that much. When you come into Garibaldi, you'll notice two things: the big letter G on the hillside overlooking the town, and a tall smokestack.
Back in the early part of the 20th Century, a lot of lumber came off those Coast Range hillsides, and a fair portion of it came through the lumber mill in the town which was at a spot that is, today, basically the east end of Main Street. It was owned by a number of people, most notably a coastal lumber baron named Hammond, and in 1927 the smokestack was constructed to keep mill emissions from settling directly on the town.
It's almost a century old and is undoubtedly one of the tallest man-made things on the Oregon Coast.
For my money, though, the real tragedy is what used to be on the northwest corner of 7th and Garibaldi. In all the world there are, it seems more names for
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| Kyped from Google Street View |
STUFF and THINGS.
Which is what we say around here when we're woolgathering. You know. That something you can't remember. With the stuff and the things.
Stuff and Things ... I'm sorry we missed you.
