to Astoria 30 May 2024

We awoke with bellies in recovery, but not too bad – maybe just eating sparingly today? As promised, here's the morning view from our deck.

Shorter travel day today, and through the upper left corner of Oregon, home to some of the most beautiful, and also most abused, countryside in the state.

Beautiful wooded hills, sweeping highway, broad flat agricultural valleys with lots of water running through them . . .

Did I hear someone say ‘wooded hillsides’? Are we seeing a pattern here?

Whoever thought that clearcutting a huge tract of difficult terrain, land that the forest needed centuries if not millennia to inhabit, was a good idea should be burning in Hell with Redwood splinters under his fingernails.

His successors, however, infest silviculture programs at Oregon's otherwise fine institutions of higher learning (guess who finances those departments) and reassure legislators (with their hands out) that clearcutting is the right way to ‘mine the resource.’ And if you're blinded by greed and unable to see past ten years from now, you've come to the right state . . . although Washington State is of the same mind(lessness.)

In fact, the patchiness you see here is either stunted monoculture of ‘merchantable species’ or broadleaf ‘trash’ that exhaust already stressed soil while providing the chips and sawdust being exported to other countries. Oregon (and Washington) share a culture of eating their children.

Another overlong parade of cars following an erratic snail-mobile driven, I suspect, by flatlanders, and followed by a grunting big rig in a hurry, we accepted the offer of Tolovana Beach, and pulled out to get a look at another one of Oregon's magnificent white sand beaches.

A funny thing happened on the way to lunch. Both R and I thought Cannon Beach was on the highway – maybe it was within our memory – but we must have missed the signs coming north, and the Nav Lady (that's not what we call her in private) told us to turn where there wasn't a turn then gave up on us. We consulted the map, and discovered that Cannon Beach is off the highway, a lovely little haven of elitism with a great fish store.

That's lightly battered wild caught Salmon and (maybe a little over-potatoed) clam chowder.

I'm working on a theory of how entitled Oregonians drive. Here's a clue.

Captain’s View, Astoria

We're in our lovely aerie above the Columbia. If I stand in the northeast corner of the big living room I can see the bridge to Washington, and that’s Washington State in the image below. We're here until Sunday, taking it easy and enjoying this sweet town.