"I of my own knowledge…"

9. Tillamook Air Museum

Saturday Sept. 17, 2005.

Standing on the deck of the lightship Columbia in Astoria, chatting with the caretaker, I had told him I was going to be driving down the coast, and asked him what he would recommend seeing. He mentioned two or three things, but the one that stuck was the air museum at Tillamook. I made a note, and the next day, here I am.

It’s huge. The top of that arch is something like 190 feet in the air. Eight full-sized blimps sheltered there during the war, and eight more in its companion building. The buildings were made entirely of wood, because during the war metal had to be reserved for building ships and trucks and tanks and artillery pieces and shells and communication wire and all the million other things needed in an all-out war effort. Each hangar comprised something like two million board-feet of timber, designed and slapped together as quickly as possible, because of the desperate need.

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Chasing Smallwood

Conversations with a “past life” American

about the challenges, opportunities

and meaning of his time and ours

by Frank DeMarco

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8. Governor West

Saturday Sept. 17, 2005. Driving down the coast from Seaside, Saturday morning, I come to Neahkanie, a mountain that juts into the seacoast, interrupting the long flat highway of sand that extends, otherwise, down the Oregon coast from the Columbia River to the California state line. At a scenic turnoff at Neahkahie is a marker honoring Oswald West, the state’s Governor from 1911 to 1915. He deserves that monument. He helped save 400 miles of beaches for the public.

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7. Seaside

 Friday Sept. 16, 2005. From Astoria I retrace my steps to 101, figuring to make my way down to Florence, where I would turn inland, but not caring how or when I got there. A sign catches my attention, and I turn off toward the sea. At the end of the road is a parking lot and beach access, and I spend a good while on that wide, flat, gritty beach, with its backdrop of dark blue sky and ever-changing, delightful clouds. Across from the lot is a Vacancy sign, and so I spend the afternoon on the beach and the night in a rented condo unit whose windows open up to the sea

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5. Cities

Thursday Sept. 15, 2005. At suppertime I go back to Lewis and Clark and pick up Ari, and she and I go for supper downtown. (We get lost a little, or rather, get carried by traffic and slow reflexes across the river, and have to find our way back without being carried into Washington state.) The last time I had seen her, she was in high school, and here she is a sophomore in college, poised, intelligent and happy. (I can’t remember being poised, intelligent and happy at that age – or, for that matter, since.)

We eat at a nice Indian place she knows and we walk to Powells, for why would anyone visit Portland and not see Powell’s? But I have no real taste for book shopping. For the moment I have had enough of books, and besides, I have been up since 4:30 a.m. eastern time. I do find a Robert Crais I had been waiting for, but I am too tired to do the extensive browsing that once would have been a matter of course.

We have to cut the evening short, not only because it was three hours later for me than the clocks said, but because I am loathe to be driving after dark. Ever since a night a few years ago in Denver when I found myself road-blinded by some construction arc lights and couldn’t see the lanes of the road, I have had a healthy distrust of my ability to drive safely at night, especially in unfamiliar areas. So I get Ari back to the dorm and say goodnight, expecting to see her again the next day, after her classes were over.

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3. Vandalism and Pride

Thursday Sept. 15, 2005. I get into Portland around noon pacific time. After picking up a rental car, I make my way to the older, western part of the city, and  (in order to be sure I can find it later) drive down to Lewis and Clark College, which is where my niece Ari goes to school. Then I find a hotel and, a few blocks away, the Oregon Historical Society Museum, a handsome four-story building with a research library and several floors of interactive exhibits, well chosen to hold one’s interest while bringing out a firmer sense of the reality of other times. I am fortunate enough to be there on almost the last day of  the seven-month long exhibition, “A Fair to Remember: The 1905 Lewis & Clark Exposition.”

In museums, I gravitate toward films. Film provides more information, in a shorter time, presented in a way that makes that information more meaningful, than does any other means of visual education. An old film shows you two things at once: How things used to be, and how the people at the time thought things were. These can be two very different things.

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In October, 2005, when I came back from my first visit to the Pacific northwest, I wrote up a short piece on a day at Crater Lake and emailed it in various directions. I wrote another, and another, and before long I found that I had written more than a dozen little pieces on one or another aspect of the trip. So I decided I might as well pull them all together, fill any remaining gaps, and annoy my friends with yet one email more. And this is that set of essays. 

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