UPPER’ LEFT - EDG yO L U M E L 5 N U M B E R •] «PR.1L .A'YZ' A i -..-a UfPLRUJT CQhST PRODUCTIONS-P0 BOX l l t t ChHNON BtXCH OR THIO • XfrVfc-ZUS 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 CORRECTED FOR PACITIC BEACH TIDES A pril - High Tides l> A IT: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Mon Tue W ed © Thu Fr. Sot 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 IB 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Sun Mon Tue W ed > Thu Fri Sat Sun Mon Tue Wed « Thu Ft! Sat Sun Mon Tue W ed Thu e Fri Sat Sun Moo Tue | AM lim e 1 7 7 78 0 16 047 1 20 8 7 89 90 W ASIIIXH . | ( ) N A N I > M 11 [ tu n c 1042 11 27 11:14 ,1 45 12:10 12:53 1:37 2 :2 3 A M I 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 9 1 90 86 82 7.7 75 76 7 8 80 0 :3 2 1 09 1 44 2 :18 2:51 3 26 4 :0 4 4 :4 9 546 658 8 15 9 24 10:24 11:17 9 1 9 1 90 88 86 82 78 7.3 6.9 65 64 6 6 68 7 1 IID I X P M II D A T !' t im e II 8.1 8 4 7 9 7.9 7 8 7 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 Mon 'u e Wed © Thu Fri Sat 4 48 5 30 609 6 48 7 26 806 15 0 9 04 0 0 0 3 0 .5 7 3 70 6 8 6.7 70 75 80 8 5 8 9 8 1 8 1 7.9 7.7 7 5 7 2 69 66 65 65 68 7 1 76 80 84 7 8 9 10 1 1 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Sun Mon lue wee 9 Ihu Fn Sat Sun Mon Tue Wed Ihu Fri Sat Sun Mon Tue W ed Thu e Fri Sat Sun Mon ’ ue lim e 5 05 5 40 6 15 6 49 7 24 8 :0 2 It 0 8 0 8 0 9 1.1 1 3 1.6 DAYLIGHT TIME BEGINS DAYLIGHT T ME BEG NS 2 56 3 37 4 25 5 25 6 40 803 9 21 10:28 11:27 Low Tides APRIL - VX A X lI IN t .l O N A M X l R H Z l N O M S I 111)1 S S I V S H A K It I IM F ! CORRECTED FOR PACIFIC BEACH TIDES 4 13 5 :0 8 6 12 7 :22 8 30 9:31 10:24 11:10 1, 53 12 20 1:09 1 56 2 42 3 :2 6 4 11 4 :5 8 5 :4 9 6 45 7 43 8 39 9:2 8 10:11 10:49 11 25 9 49 1037 1134 0 5 0 4 0.1 0 49 2 9 2 10 2 7 3 :2 6 2 1 4:31 1 3 5 :2 8 0 6 6 18 -0 1 705 0 5 7 49 O 7 8 3 0 -0 7 9 11 -0 6 9 50 0 3 TO 3 0 00 1 1 .1 3 04 0 13 1:22 2 32 336 4 30 5 18 3 2 3 2 2 9 2 .3 1.6 0 .9 9 44 10 34 11:34 12 4 0 1:52 301 4 02 4 :5 5 5 43 6 26 7:08 7 :47 8 26 9 04 9 :4 3 10:2 6 11 14 12:02 12 58 1 58 2:57 3 49 4 35 5 :17 20 2 4 2 7 02 0 4 04 0 3 03 04 0 .6 09 12 1 6 20 2.4 2 7 3.0 08 II 1 3 1 4 14 1.4 1 4 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. UfftR L ift LbSL (VRML Tfit I