Just like the last few days, I’m writing this in arrears. We ratcheted down our screen time over the weekend and the first part of the week while taking a brief trip. We saw a lot of lovely things and I wanted to share them here. So we’re catching up. So, yes, this is published for Friday, June 25, the day we returned. But this particular post covers Monday, June 21th.
Do you remember where you were on Monday? I do. Here’s (a lot of) visual proof.
This is Bell’s Overlook in Cape Disappointment State Park. Not so much a trail as a short walk that features the flora of the beautiful Pacific Northwest, a bit of local coastal history and these terrific views.
This is in a different part of the same park. We’re near the place where the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean meet. In fact, you can almost just make out the river in the background in the first shot.
The confluence of the river and ocean make the waters here quite dangerous. So, though it looks calm here, no swimming, if you please. (Also, the water is quite cold.)
You’ll also see the North Head Lighthouse, which began operations in May of 1898. There’s another lighthouse nearby, which we couldn’t get to it, unfortunately. They are apparently the closest two light houses on the Pacific Coast, but even still the waters was nicknamed the “Graveyard of the Pacific.”
There was a print in the place where we stayed that marked the high profile shipwrecks. At least it wasn’t cheerful.
The North Head Lighthouse still works as an automated beacon. If you could go in the place — it’s a small, simply place, but closed to tours because of Covid — you could enjoy commanding views of the Pacific Ocean, Long Beach Peninsula, Columbia River Bar, and the northern Oregon Coast.
We went down to the beach.
And then retired to our own beach (doesn’t that sound awesome?) to watch the sunset.
When you watch the sun slip beneath the Pacific Ocean on the day before you have to return to … wherever you came from … you find yourself ready to stay right there, or go somewhere else.
Sadly we didn’t go to another getaway place after this one. We did enjoy another day in Long Beach, Washington, and I can milk a few days worth of posts out of those photographs, I’m sure. So we have that to look forward to next week!
Same as yesterday, I’m writing this in arrears. We deliberately ratcheted down our screen time for a few days, but we saw a lot of lovely things and I wanted to share them here. The easiest way to do that, I figured, is in sequence. So, yes, this is published for Thursday, June 24, the day we returned. But this particular post covers Sunday, June 20th.
Do you remember where you were on Sunday? I do. Here’s (a lot of) visual proof.
First things first, it was our anniversary, our 12th, and the general reason for our long weekend trip. Just one of countless lovely adventures.
And it started with a simple two mile run along the Pacific Coast, which is just out of the frame and over that dune and behind the boardwalk on the left:
And here you’ll not see the coast again, just out of the frame and over that dune to the right:
But how? How did you manage to move the Pacific? It’s a giant ocean!
I turned around.
… Yeah … that makes sense I guess. Got me there.
Lunch was takeout lunch from a hopping a local bakery — where I discovered the joy of a locally made bread I’ll never be able to try again, one so full of flavor and appeal that I described it as a sommelier does a wine (with a lot of complimentary adjectives). They describe it as “A multigrain bread we developed for that special beach flavor! Sweetened with honey and molasses and full of whole grain taste.”
They’re underselling the bread.
Anyway, just reading the About page for this post, you don’t get these stories when you walk in the door. At that time of day in a returning tourist season, it felt very much different from this.
On June 10, Bob and Judi Andrew officially turned the keys of the Cottage Bakery over to its new owners, Jeff and Casey Harrell and Mark and Lindy Swain, Casey’s sister and brother-in-law. The sale comes about 46 years after the Andrews bought the bakery in 1974.
The sale had been in the works for more than a month, and came after staff shortages forced the bakery to close for a day on April 21, and then again from April 30 through May 6. The staffing issues, coupled with the challenges presented by the covid-19 pandemic, made it the right time for a change to be made.
[…]
Jeff Harrell, president of Peninsula Pharmacies, said he and his wife weren’t actively looking to purchase the bakery, but things moved quickly when he struck up a conversation with Judi after the Andrews sent faxes to local business owners inquiring if they’d be interested in taking it over. Harrell thought about how much the bakery — which has been in operation since 1908 — means to the community, and the way the community rallied around his family over the past two years.
“It was a purchase that was done with emotion for the community, and it was done for emotion with my family,” said Jeff Harrell, referring to the passing of his and Casey’s 6-year-old daughter, Dylan, this April.
Dylan passed away after a 20-month battle with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, an incurable cancer that primarily affects young children. She captured the hearts of many on the peninsula, who admired her strength and attitude in her fight against a devastating illness. Dylan loved visiting the bakery, Jeff said, and said they plan on incorporating some special things into the bakery itself to honor her.
This was a summer 2020 story in the local paper. The new owners promised few changes. New POS options, away from cash only? Check. Online ordering? Check.
(But they don’t ship halfway across the country, and I’m going to need some of that Willapa Harvest Bread, Mr. Harrell.)
“Really, it’s iconic. We’re not going to change too much,” Jeff said. That’s how the story closed. And if you read the Chinook Observer, you are familiar with Dylan’s and you sat there with the paper or your phone and thought, Exactly right. It’s one of those things people would point to and say, That’s what’s right about us.
One of the many things.
After lunch we went on a hot picture-taking date. For the uninitiated, it’s where you go do this:
The location was Fort Columbia. It was the home of the Chinook tribe. This guy was running the show when the white men showed up. First, in 1792, there was Robert Gray who “discovered” the Columbia River. It’s the largest river in the Pacific Northwest, he spent nine days on it, trading furs with people who were surely mystified that this thing they’d lived their whole lives on was finally discovered. It is named after his boat, Columbia Rediviva, which just two years prior became the first American vessel to circumnavigate the globe.
Five decades hence comes James Scarborough and the sign out front assures us he is the first settler north of the river, which probably came as a surprise to his wife, a Chinook he met there, and the many other people already living on it.
Near the end of the 19th century this became an important military feature. The coastal fort was part of an interlocking coastal system that guarded the mouth of the river until the 1940s. (At which time planes and what not rendered this military enterprise obsolete. The federal government transferred this to the state of Washington, and it’s been a park ever since.
Let’s see it!
If you walk up the trails behind the barracks installation you can make your way to the remains of some of the observation and radio structures. They were small and utilitarian and are being overgrown now, but the walk is lovely.
The little splotches of sun and shade in the woods are always such an attractive feature.
This is pretty close to one of the observation points. Soldiers would be on duty up here looking for ships entering the river and trying to attack inland. They could call down to the weapons batteries, below, and order fire missions. You have to imagine, though, that the sight lines were better prepared for that job over the 60 years of this being an active duty station.
You get up high enough and you earn yourself a commanding view. The barracks, which are maintained and used as a visitor center in non-Covid times, are in the low foreground. Just to the center right you can see one of the guns that would have commanded the river, and some of the other structures that supported the job.
Take time to smell the flowers. This flower had no smell.
As we’re walking back down to the fort’s main area.
You could spend days in these woods and only see a fraction of what’s in store for you there.
Also, the signs make a point of illustrating how isolated a duty station this was. It seems difficult to imagine, today. There’s a fair amount of traffic nearby. We’re actually walking over a tunneled section of U.S. Route 101 here.
Another view of the river, below:
Here’s that gun we saw from above. This was to be the model that went in here, but the fort was decommissioned before the third-generation weapons battery arrived. This particular weapon, and it’s sister nearby, arrived from a U.S. Naval installation in Newfoundland, Canada in the 1990s, as museum pieces.
They are apparently two of six surviving versions of this six-inch weapon system. It fired a 105 pound armor-piercing projectile at a range of over 15 miles at a rate of up to five rounds per minute.
This view, below the observation points, is between the barracks and the various gun placements.
If you go all the way down to the water you can see the removes of a little pier. This was how the soldiers stationed here were re-supplied. They didn’t have to lug it far, or high, but it would have still been a chore.
And off to the side of that there’s a little quiet sandy spot. You can climb along some of the rocks and play my new favorite game.
Is it fresh or is it salt?
It is brackish.
Back at our room, we had ideal conditions for a Pacific Ocean sunset.
That, as they say, ain’t bad.
This is somewhere after 9 p.m. We’d picked up a small takeout meal and sat at our little circular table and watched the ocean reach up to meet the sun.
And we completed our hot picture-taking date on the balcony.
For tomorrow, I think I’ll show you a lot of videos. Stuff like this, which we saw at Fort Columbia.
Saw the first headline about the upcoming fireworks shortage. (We’ve got two weeks to set off a series of stories and scavenger hunts.) But if you can’t find some, come on over. Most assuredly our neighbor bought them all.
We sat in the backyard last year and watched, which was much better than having to find the perfect spot and a parking spot, besides.
He had four false finales last year.
(Update: A week later, at the grocery store, I noted they’re selling sparklers on the end caps nearest cashiers. I think we’ll be fine.)
Anyway, we’re on the road. The Yankee has booked us a trip to I-know-not-where. It’s a long weekend, anniversary getaway. She booked it and said something about it being a surprise and we decided to play that out, just to see how it went. She told me what days to take off from work, what to pack and all of that.
I knew we were going to the airport, and the weather, milder than we’ve been experiencing, was the only clue I had. So I figured Pacific Northwest or Maine.
Turns out that Maine was a possibility, but we went another direction. We made it to the pay-to-park lot, to the airport, through security and down to the terminal and I still knew nothing. Out of habit I looked up at the sign at the gate and saw our connection was in Detroit.
I know it’s not Canada, because she didn’t tell me to get my passport. She could have just grabbed my passport. But also, there are still those border-crossing issues related to the coronavirus.
This is, by the way, our first flight since who knows when. Masks are still required in airports and airplanes, but don’t count the number of noses you see, it’s demoralizing. We were doing an over/under and realized, within 10 minutes or so, that we set the number far, far, faaaaar too low. At one point in Detroit I started wondering aloud, for the benefit of the ill-fitting mask wearers around me, how it was that people managed to put their pants on.
It’s really not that much different, I said, a bit of fabric worn over parts of the body that society has deemed, ya know, necessary.
No one answered me. No one ever answers those.
Aside from a few car-borne family visits this is also one of the very first times we’ve been anywhere that wasn’t at least somewhat necessary. And we have lived and worked in something of a bubble. Be it by institutional mandate or county orders or people’s concern, people we’ve encountered have generally taken great care to take great care. Today’s trips through the airports, then, have been an eye-opening “how the other half live” experience.
Anyway, in Detroit I carefully avoided the sign at the gate. No idea where we were headed next. We got on the plane and the flight attendant did the old welcome aboard speech — still the same spiel, even after that long layoff — and before my lovely bride could distract me (She went with a very loud “SHHHSHHHSHHSHHH!!!!”) I heard the guy say we were heading to Seattle.
Which, really, at some point you have to find out. And while I didn’t want to set my expectations for one place or another, the heat index in Indiana was 105 degrees today. We’ve gone the right direction, is what I’m saying.
Even still, that’s not the actual destination. We were to take a shuttle to an airport hotel tonight. It never showed up, so we hailed an Uber. Tomorrow we’ll rent a car and drive a few hours away. The mystery persists.
This weekend I completed the last of my pocket square project. I have … way too many of these things now. But my breast pocket will always look colorful. It’s not quite homemade, not hardly bespoke and definitely not artisanal, but some of them will look good on me.
You know what I’ve learned recently? There isn’t a logical way to store and present pocket squares. The best option I’ve found so far involves rolling them all up. Think of a giant recipe box or a card catalog or something. Then again, I don’t think most people go into an accumulation stupor as I seem to have done. Just yesterday afternoon I added these eight to my collection. I’ve got the whole process down now, it takes very little time.
Good thing I’ve called the collection complete then, no? Most people think paisley is a gateway design, but I think it’s a moment of clarity. It says “You’ve used everything you like and you should stop.”
Of course, the ones that I’ve made are all cotton. I could try my hand at making some silk squares …
She said it, and I’d been thinking it, but listening to the cicadas has become a soothing thing. Seemed weird at first, and sure, if you find a big cluster it’s so loud it hurts. But if you’re hearing them from a distance, or from inside, the ebbs and flows have a certain enchantment.
Stay all summer, you guys. But stop trying to land on.
That recording doesn’t do them justice. But I might be looping it a lot, anyway.
We took a nice and casual bike ride this evening. This is at a turnaround spot, just under two-thirds of the way through the route.
We go this way a lot. And it is easy, after a time, to know where you’ll drag and where it’ll feel like you are flying. And while it was more former than the latter, I managed to set six Strava segment PRs in that particular portion of the ride.
So what we know is nothing, basically.
Here’s another installment of Barns By Bike, though. This has to be one of the nicest barns in the area.
I always wonder what is inside. I bet the floors are immaculate. I bet there isn’t the first streak on that glass. The glass alone should disqualify it from barn consideration. It’s probably less of a barn and more of a “Somebody finally got my spouse to agree to what I want” structure.
Just in case you’ve managed to not hear the cicadas yet … we are, perhaps, nearing a peak of Brood X here. Today was very noisy, indeed. If you weren’t deep inside a well-insulated building they could become part of the general soundtrack of any given moment.
You’d need to break out some proper field recording equipment to do it justice, I assure you. And in that area, which is on a section of campus that was developed 100-plus years ago, it sounds like you can hear different dialects of cicadas in the trees.
So far in the last few weeks I’ve only had two or three land on me. Each has been far less traumatic than when it happened to me as a child. I don’t remember my young age or the year, but one just flew in and settled on me, in that most cicada way. It was upsetting, that’s what I remember.
It’s been interesting, riding my bike around, how some places seem to have great concentrations of cicadas and others seem to have none. I’m sure there’s some good entomological answer.
Let’s ask the shadow of someone who took an entomology class 25 years ago:
Experts think it has something to do with urban developments since the brood went into hibernation. Maybe older neighborhoods had less soil disturbance in the intervening years. Tree reduction, cement and asphalt addition, are very impactful on the local population’s health. Maybe, also, it has to do with chemicals we put into the earth. Maybe it’s a combination of things, or other natural features, but it’s still something of a mystery. Where you see them is close to where the best part of them went into the soil in 2004, they don’t seem to go far.
And it was a different time back then, no one thought to ask them back then.
That’s what my shadow said on my bike ride today. I heard a lot of them. Saw a few. But none of them landed on me in two hours in the saddle. For which I am grateful.
