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A Newspaper is the
first rough draft of History.
Wc are delighted to grace our front page with a likeness of
Terence O’ Donnell, to celebrate the publication of his latest
book; Cannon Beach. A Place Bv The Sea. We are honored
to know him, always happy to share his company. Our
readers will be able to meet him personally, either April 13th
at 2PM at the Coaster Theatre in Cannon Beach, or at the
Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon Historical Center at
1200 S.W. Park in Portland some time in April (please call
the Society at (503) 306-5200 for dates and times). Copies
of the book will be available for purchase ($14.95, Oregon
Historical Society Press) and Terence has agreed to
autograph them as well.
Terence has written three other books on Oregon;
Portland; an Informal History and Guide, That Balance So
Rare; the Story of Oregon, and An Arrow in the Earth; JcxH
Palmer and the Indians of Oregon; and is considered a
regional treasure by Oregonians. He has received the
Northwest Bookseller’s Award for Non-fiction, in 1980; the
Oregon Institute of Literary Arts Retrospective Award for a
Distinguished Career in Letters in 1992; and the 1995
Governor’s Arts Award. The following is from the
introduction to Cannon Beach, A Place By The Sea.
T h e re was no seashore in the Garden of Eden, indeed
through most of human history the seashore has been feared
as a place of danger to be avoided. Mountains might have
their w ild animals and freezing snows, their avalanches and
crev asses, the forests even wilder animals as well as goblins
and witches. But neither could match the terror inspired by
the sea and its shore.
For good reason. There was, lor example, the sea s
deceptiveness, its capriciousness. Serene as a mill pond on
a summer’s day, it could suddenly leap with fury, flinging
ships and men against the rocks or pitching them down into
Davey Jones’s locker. There were its attacks on the land,
grinding it down, breaking it up, submerging it beneath great
tidal waves. Feared, too, were the monsters of the deep -
that sea dragon pictured in the corners of old maps, the
octopus, the shark, and that great leviathan famed for
gobbling up poor Jonah. Then, something by no means
minor, that sickness of the sea, the dreaded zzw/ de m e r ,
w hich from the beginning of lime has driven its victims to
pray for death. Finally, it was the sea that served as the
instrument of God’s wrath at the sinfulness of man, the
Flood, turning the whole world into an ocean. At least so
far as the distant past is concerned, the sea’s reputation was
not the best.
Scholars disagree, but some argue that a favorable view ot
the sea began in theseventeenth century and through the
agency of that remarkable people, the Dutch. In part, it is
sad, this came from the fact that the Dutch tamed - or
anyway partially tamed - the sea in two respects. In their
exceptionally seaworthy ships, they roamed the seas to an
even greater’extent than those earlier seafaring peoples, the
Phoenicians, Vikings, and Arabs. The trade these ships
engaged in brought great riches to the Dutch, and that
naturally predisposed them to look with favor on the medium
that literally supported their trade. Secondly, the Dutch
successfully defied the sea by diking their land, the sea at
last at bay.
Another clement in this changed attitude toward the sea
came not from trade or engineering but from art. Painters,
by their choice of subject, have often determined our taste in
scenery. In Holland where the sea was not only
omnipresent but beneficent in the riches it bestowed,
painters, palette in hand, turned to it. The result was that
people began to see the sea as it had never been seen be I ore
- as beautiful.
It was not more than a century or so later that three other
dev elopments came along that further enhanced our view of
the sea and its shore. One was a movement called
Romanticism, which took as one ol its landscape ideals not
the fun-filled and sheltered pastoral valley but the dark and
storm-fraught coast.
The second development w as the belief that sea water and
sea air were therapeutic. In the eighteenth century and down
into the nineteenth, this belie! in the sea s curative propcitics
became at times a mania. People drank sea water for gout,
for worms, and as a laxative. They bathed in sea water for
hypochondria, sterility, and nymphomania. And they
breathed in the sea air for everything. Though faith in these
particular cures has passed, there is still the notion about that
sea air is healthful by v irtue of its ions; and, until the
increase in skin cancers, sunbathing at the coast was
considered a protection against the ills of w inter.
The third development to draw people to the shore was the
nineteenth-century industrialization of the cities, which in its
first phases befouled urban centers with smoke, dirt, stench,
and racket. Those who had the time and money fled to the
fresh and cleansing breezes of the shore and the soothing lap
of the waves.
The idea that the seashore was a place of beauty (and
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particularly of romantic beauty), the belie! in its curativ e
powers, and finally the shore as an escape from “the dark,
Satanic mills” of early industrialization - all these finally led
to that relatively new kind of community, the seaside resort.
*********************
Over the years, then, from their beginnings in the mid
nineteenth century, the character of t^aside resorts has
changed. On the other hand there are certain constants.
These appear to lie in the attraction the seacoast itself has had
for certain kinds of people, as well as the particular effect the
seacoast seems to have on almost any kind ol person.
One type the coast has always attracted, at least since the
time of the Romantic movement, has been those seeking
self-knowledge, self-discovery, people who, to use the
current phrase, are out to “find” themselves, to reassess their
lives. It may be for this reason that so many “dropouts” -
and not only in the 1960’s and 70’s but before and after as
well — have ended up at coastal places. Why the sea and its
shore should encourage such searching is a mystery, but that
it may do so can be attested to by almost anyone who has
walked a deserted beach under the bow l of the sky and gazed
out to the sea’s infinity.
A related, curious and enduring effect of the seashore has
been described bv the travel essayist Jonathan Raban.
“Legally, socially, morally the beach is a marginal zone to
which marginal people tend to grav itate and where
respectable folk tend to behav e in marginal and eccentric
wavs.” Raban’s assertion that the coast draws “marginal
people” brings to mind the friend w ho once opined that the
whole of Oregon is slanted down to the west, with the result
that all the kooks slide down to the coast. Despite the
exaggeration, there is no doubt that seacoasts, including
Oregon’s, have always drawn the mildly eccentric - in the
view of some, one of the pleasing features of coastal places.
As for Raban's other assertion, that respectable people at
the seashore tend to behave in “marginal” w ays, he goes on
to characterize the coast as a place “where the social rules
grow lax.” Other writers, too (as well as police
departments), have commented on what some would call the
“ liberating” influence of the seashore. Certainly, it is
common experience that people at the seashore are wont to
“let go”, “ unbend,” “kick over the traces,” and those other
expressions indicating a lifting of inhibition. Yet somehow
the sea air seems to gloss over - to redeem, as it were -
whatever errancies may result. The process has been
charmingly described by the American novelist Henry
James, vacationing on the Riv iera near the end of the last
century. Observ ing a French actress bathing in the sea and
reflecting on the suggestion of vice conveyed by her
“liberated limbs” (except for the audacious ones, women’s
bathing costumes were still all-enveloping), James wrote:
“There are some days here so still and radiant that it seems as
if vice itself, steeped in such an air and in such a sea, might
be diluted into innocence.”
“Innocence.” James is right, and perhaps in an even
broader sense than he intends. For in general, when we
think of the seashore, the association of innocence often
hovers near. Why should the two be linked? One reason
mav lie in the memories of childhood summers so many
have. The bucket, the spade, the sandcastle. Scampering
into the wavelets, under the summer sun, holding tight to
someone’s hand. Eating marshmallows off the end of a
stick in the light of a driftwood fire. A five-year-old I know,
on seeing the beach for the first time, exclaimed: “Oh! What
a big playground!’ Indeed.
And not just for children, cither, but for all o! us is the
seashore a kind of playground, a place to play - even it
would seem, for those who liv e there, so laid back arc they.
This mav be the root of the association of seashore and
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BASEBALL
MlMM■» <■
“Take me o u t to the ballgam e, take
m e o u t with th e crow d, buy me som e
p e a n u ts a n d C rackerjack, I d o n ’t c are if
we e v er get back. ‘Cause it’s root, root,
ro o t fo r th e Cubbies, if th ey d o n ’t win
it’s th e sam e. For it’s, one, two, th re e
strik es y o u ’re out, at th e old b allg am e.”
(T he u n -official Cubs v ersio n .)
Jim Fraser's
Tax
Service
Will Come To Your
Office o r Home
(P h o n e/M ail o p tio n )
Licensed A cco u n tan t
20 y e a rs ' Experience
(5 0 3 ) 3 9 2 -4 2 8 8
innocence, for play by its very nature is innocent, even w hen
a little errant.
And so, the seashore: the haunt of monsters, a scene for
painters; a remedy pushed by the quacks, a rclugc lrom the
Satanic nulls, an ashram for'the discov ery of self, a getaw ay
for the libertine, and finally, for all of us, child or dotard,
saint or sinner, a place to play in our different w ays, here in
these places by the sea -- like Cannon Beach.
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