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RANDY JONES
SUMMER GOLDRUSH
The Silly Season is in full avarice. Cash registers from coast to
coast and amusement parks inbetween are playing America's song
Our Oregon and Washington beach towns are emporiums of prosperity,
their streets and sands swarming with an annual infestation of sun and
fun hungry protoplasm.
Everybody wants a cut of the tourist buck. Tourism attempts to
fill the void left by depleted natural resources whose exploitation built
and sustained the local coastal culture until the forests were cut down
and the great fish runs decimated by the impetuous greed of white
settlers and their descendants. A magnificent land that had thrived for
millennia was ravaged in a century.
Now sultans of fun replace loggers and fisherpeople. They build
shopping malls, condominiums, bigger and glitzier motels, restaurants
and bars that remove the remaining trees and block ocean views
Cannon Beach, which in an earlier era resisted opportunities to be
a second Carmel, has acquiesced and booms like a goldstrike town.
Seaside mixed its sand with water and remade its graceful downtown
into a cement mall. Astoria hustles its failed history and carpenter gothic
houses to draw tourists from the beach towns.
Complaints about tourism are usually whines about discourtesies,
inconveniences and crowds of noisy, fussy impatient strangers. But
sometimes criticisms are registered about the sort of environment that
is being imposed upon a previously neglected string of coastal towns
and the ambivalence of residents between tourist revenues and environ
mental quality The current practices of coastal entrepreneurs are a local
symptom of a national malady: that money is all that counts and anything
in the way of making a buck deserves to be deep-sixed.
Tourism has a habit of destroying what it seeks, and amidst the
commercial glitter and singing cash registers the real gold is slipping out
of our hands. Connie Rose Anderson, who used to live in Cannon Beach
and in 1980 wrote an article for the Times Eagle, ‘A Short History of
Seaside’, perceived clearly the changes tourism has wrought:
"Somewhere behind the pavement, the aluminum-framed, junk
filled windows, the pinball machines and snowcone litter lurks the ghost
of a pretty little beach town. A town that welcomed progress as a friend,
resisted not at all, and in the short span of a man's lifetime, died under
its feet with little more than a whimper. Seaside, whatever it is today,
is not a pretty little town, either in physical appearance or character.
"The Oregon coast wears on its shores a string of such pretty
little towns.... Cannon Beach, Manzanita, Nehalem. All today facing the
same forces and models of thinking which have transformed so many of
Oregon's coastal gems into a string of tasteless clunkers.
"Like Godzilla in a greenhouse, the tourist industry is a powerful
force plowing through the small town's natural environment, leaving in its
wake a trail of highway architecture, parking lots, condominiums, mobile
home courts, souvenir junk outlets and the threat of legalized gambling
And the pretty little town loses more than just its physical beauty to
the impersonal wasteland of the commercially controlled tourist trap.
It loses its small town energy and character, which are the truest sources
of its beauty and grace and which loss no cosmetic compromise by
developers can remedy. Or replace."
-MICHAEL McCUSKER (JULY 1988)
SHALLON
»■WINERY
1287 COMMERCIAL ST
ASTORIA 325-5221
1688 DUANE ST. ASTORIA. ORE 97103
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Cannon Beach, Oregon