E s titte
Br bous
My father was a canny Scots gentleman given to prudence
and value. He counselled us to purchase or acquire the best
we could possibly afford, with an eye to durability and
longevity. He repaired and restored our household
possessions and took pains to avoid shoddiness or
disposability. When I heft the fine old Plumb shingling
hatchet that passed from my grandfather through my lather to
me, 1 sense its appropiateness o f purpose, its worth to me as a
tool and means o f livelihood these past 20 years. He revered
a fine straight-grained timber and his vintage Record and
Stanley planes for working wood. The home he built on
Laurel Street in liis 72nd year, testified to the value of his
skill and the merits of his trusted tools sharp and oiled. The
Lindseys repaired things, fixed screen doois, darned socks,
patched tires, honed knives, glazed windows. We winced
when consigning some failed item to the trash heap.
I remember my mother carting home a loaf o f "balloon
bread" from the store as a concession to modernity. My
father squoze the entire loaf into a golf-ball sized lump and
launched into a tirade. I wonder how he would respond to
the latest Stanley tools, cheap, stamped-out items fabricated
o f plastic and reclaimed steel.
I guess this piece is a short grumble, a mild peeve about
modern things, the "stuffiness" of our time. So much o f what
comprises our current world is short-lived and cannot be
repaired, re-used or salvaged. Attribute my irked condition
to a Saturday spent at garage sales, if you will. For two
horns this weekend I wandered through four homes staging
estate sales and watched buyers picking over the bones.
Relatives manned the cash box hoping to scratch a few
dollars from sales o f grandpa’s effects, the money helping in
some way to finance the cost of a rest home. The four homes
were like cultural core samples. An astute archeologist could
assess the contents and see what makes us tick. The picture is
not pretty. Boxes o f Tupperware containers, rusty T.V.
dinner stands, water-bed heaters, eight-track stereo cassettes,
unspeakable racks o f viper green and tangerine-orange rayon
and "virgin acrylic" clothing-unfit as even dustrags-
souvenir trivets, haggard electrical appliances o f every race
and ethnic background, "air-pop" popcorn poppets. Do we
have no shame? Even Sanford and Son would shake their
lteads in dismay. Most o f tliis junk is unfixable and
unclaimable. How many holes in the landscape can we fill
with this unspeakable mass?
In a time gone by, things could be repaired and re-used.
Even automobiles. Two decaades ago Phillipne merchant
vessels would dock in Astoria Empty vessels periodically
tied up at the Port of Astoria from that nation. Foraging
parties of merchant seaman from those vessels would scour
Clatsop County, searching for used automobiles that could be
purchased for a song. Once acquired, those autos rode home
to the Phillipines where inventive mechanics tinkered and
patched and fiddled until they had useful transportation. A
cunning person could fix those cars with a modicum o f
imagination and tools at hand. In the fine drama Teahouse of
the August Moon, the playwright describes the delightful
skills employed by Okinawans in modifying the humble Jeep
fo ra wide range of practical purposes. I suspect the current
crop o f Lexus sedate and Mercury town cars, with their
computerized circuitry and throw-away componentry, would
not even rust away in a seemly fashion to add iron to the
landfill.
I spend my life in the building trades. All the decent
timber is gone. Two by four dimensional lumber from
"super trees" shows up with bark on both sides o f a board,
three or four growth rings to a stick. Composite materials,
"faux wood," and Wolmanized wood products with a lifetime
guarantee are the order o f the day. When buildings using
these products are dismantled, the refuse cannot even be
safely incinerated, and the arsenic salts in Wolmanized wood
shouldn't be introduced into the soil when decomposed.
Vinyl windows, carpeting, laminates, composition
roofing...Christ, it gives you the creeps. Old boards from
wood buildings, stone, cedar shingles—these materials could
be resurrected, reclaimed, refashioned.
The tilings we consume now are touted as "no
maintainance" and guaranteed for life, a short life in most
cases. Just try to repair a ten-year old micro-wave oven!
I drought I’d close with a design for an early-forties
aircraft that my friend Vi Thompson and her friend Bob
Lamson, a test pilot for Boeing's B-29, conceived and drew
in that era. Geared to the needs o f agriculturists in lonely
places, the wings featured modules that could literally be
hay-wired back onto the fuselage o f the aircraft. Pretty keen,
huh? Your Professor isn’t anti-technology, he just likes to
see things created with an eye to prolonged usefulness. Let’s
stop building things we can’t fix!
*
W alking, recently, through pulsing
downtown Boston streets, 1 attempt to describe
Cannon Beach to a colleague from the Midwest. We
have words in common, but we know well that we
do not share much common, environmental ground:
I speak o f our big trees, beaches, waves, cliffs, elk,
whales, tourists, but I can’ t shake the feeling that his
Midwestern imagination paints a picture very
different from the realities o f our native terra firma.
We duck into the crowd entering the city aquarium,
built amidst skyscrapers, subway stations, and
highway bypasses, on old, industrial piers. Winding
through blue aquarium luminescence, the crowds,
surge pulls us outside, to face a tank o f harbor seals.
Here, in the narrow, recessed space between our
viewing platform and a schmaltzy seascape mural,
seals sw im, chase, perch on artificial concrete rocks,
snort, and blink their huge, water)’ eyes. (Here they
live, every hour o f every day, half o f these hours
with an audience.) Tourist swarms jostle and crowd,
seek the best view, light up the blue tank waters with
cameras, flash. A neon-clad woman fights her way
to the front, and holds a boy aloft with pale, fleshy
arms, so that he may press his face and fingers
against the protective glass, shrieking at the
spectacle, leaving mucous streaks in opaque zigs and
zags - like the signature mark of an perverse anti-
hero, I think: Zorro’ s evil and expectorating twin.
M y eyes rise, scanning the painted, mural seascape.
Here, through the confusion and snot, 1 am
confronted with the outline o f familiar shapes:
Haystack Rock, Chapman Point, Silver Point, the
Needles. It is the view from Ecola I point and grin:
"Get in there. W ith the seals. Up close to the
mural," I say to my friend, "And you w ill know
exactly what it feels like to live in Cannon Beach."
Certainly, wherever you go, there is a chance
o f seeing images o f Cannon Beach: in East Coast
"Free W illy" promotional flotsam, in European
pharmaceutical ads, in Deep South books o f
inspirational sayings, in car advertisements on
televisions flickering in the chilly light o f Los
Angeles malls. And always, these images reinforce
my sense that we are doomed. For millions o f
people, our home fits some preconceived, idyllic and
scenic coastal ideal. Many want to see this place.
And they want to move here. Wherever I travel in
this country, people, good people, most, tell me:
"You are from the Pacific Northwest? I plan to move
there!" And often, their decision is based on little
more than a smattering o f media images and a desire
to escape the place in which they now live. I never
know how to respond. Certainly, our retail outlets
w ill thrive, our real estate developers w ill clim b into
yet higher tax brackets, and our realtors w ill earn
their commissions, ceremonial titles, and colored
jackets. And most of us are immigrants, or their
progeny. But what w ill happen to the land, the
creatures, and the people who live here already?
Already, the population density in the
Willamette Valley and the Puget Sound are
approaching that o f the United States’ hyper-
developed east coast. A hundred years ago, or so,
when the first hotels were being built on the north
coast, cities the size of the modem Seattle or Portland
metropolitan areas would have been among the
largest cities on Earth. Today we complain bitterly
about population pressures, but demographers
estimate that the population o f western Oregon and
Washington may double in the next two to three
decades. And growth w ill not simply stop at this
point: it w ill probably bound upward in the decades
that follow. What w ill that look like? How w ill that
feel? How many o f us who live here now w iil pack
up and move elsewhere?
O f course, this isn’ t new news. Long ago,
some native peoples o f the Oregon coast
prophesized: they would be annihilated, wiped away
from the face o f the earth, and would be replaced by
the "M oving People," freakish, antsy beings who
would arrive, develop no meaningful attachments
with the land and its creatures, take from the land,
destroy the land, and move on, to be replaced by
successive waves o f Moving People from elsewhere.
Surely, gathered around longhouse fires, native
peoples hoped that these incomprehensible beings
were mythical inventions, tales told to frighten
children into compliance with some moral tenet or
another.
But here we are. We Moving People retain
an optimistic belief in the potential for self-
improvement over the next hill. And more and more,
our freedom to move and live where we choose
collides with our freedom to live in healthy,
sustainable communities. By the millions,
Americans have hopped, locust-like, from farm to
city to suburb, from east coast to west coast, from
rust belt to sun belt, from old community to new
community. Populations surge, problems emerge,
and the people with the means to do depart once
again for greener pastures, leaving much blight in
their wake. And I fear that, at this particularly
mobile and media-rich point in Western history, our
pastures look very green indeed.
For the entire history of the Northwest,
humans have lived in islands o f population amidst a
sea o f forests and mountains; increasingly we w ill
live in a sea o f developed areas, encircling shrinking
islands o f managed wildness. (This, despite
Oregon’ s urban growth boundaries, which, by law,
must expand to accommodate population growth.)
Despite protected areas, some native plants and
animals w ill become extinct, as they are mowed
down, pushed back, and restricted to genetically
impoverished pockets. (In the last hundred years,
fo r a number o f reasons, we have lost a host o f
creatures from the Northwest, wolves and grizzlies
among them, and other creatures may soon follow.)
A stunning percentage o f our waterways w iii become
"urban waterways," clad in concrete and blacktop:
the landscape w ill be "hardened," causing
downstream floods in winter and summertime
aridity. Small amounts of pollution w ill emit from a
m illion new households, and fish w ill not fare well.
Left to the unregulated supply-and-demand logic of
the real estate market, farmland w ill not persist, and
we w ill need more fuel, more money, more machines
to obtain our food. Every' summer on the coast
brings us a bigger burst o f human activity as the
exploding urban population attempts to fit into the
finite scenic spaces in which we live, but you ain’ t
seen nothing yet. We w ill see unprecedented
pollution and congestion. We w ill see severely
trampled trails, beaches and intertidal rocks. We w ill
wake every morning to the deaf ening din o f power
equipment.
But not all o f these symptoms are inevitable.
Blight, at its root, is ideological. It can be
ameliorated, directly and indirectly, through
education and legislation. As Moving People, we
seldom have learned to live for the long-term on the
land: to set down roots, to learn the names o f the
trees, the calls o f the birds, the smells o f spring, the
way the wind blows before a storm, the curves and
feel o f the land. To go native. Too often, places are
reduced to abstractions, parcels and experiences to be
bought or sold, boomtowns to be mined for quick
bucks, fitting our aloof, a priori expectations like the
anonymous seashore scenes in an aquarium mural.
Despoliation has deep, cultural roots. But, it is
important to consider, as we prepare to be besieged,
that we live in places in which humans, plants,
animals have co-existed for thousands of years, and
in which they must co-e.xist for thousands more. It
is a pivotal moment, but in historical terms it is a
flash in the proverbial pan. And those o f us who
know this place, who know it intimately, carry a
special responsibility in all this. While we still have
the chance, there is a strong incentive to set the stage
for the boom ahead - to find alternatives for lower-
impact living, and to identify and designate places
which we feel should survive into the coming
decades. And we might try to help the people who
move here learn to cherish this place in a way they
may not have back home: to see the coastline as
something more than a generic and disposable source
o f scenery, to recognize their intimate relationship to
the places they occupy — to love, honor, and protect
the landscape, in good times and in bad.
We probably cannot keep more Moving People
from moving here; we have little choice but to
search, quickly and intently, for ways to live with
them.
People interested in learning more about Oregon’ s
growth management strategy might want to check out
H.J. Leonard’ s Managing Oregon’ s Growth: The
Politics o f Development and Planning. (Washington
D.C.: Conservation Foundation, 1983) or look up
the subject "Land Use Oregon Planning" at your
local library. Certain organizations work to lim it
urban sprawl and protect sensitive scenic and
environmental areas in the Northwest, including
1000 Friends o f Oregon ((503)497-1000 or 534 SW
3rd Ave. Suite 300, Portland OR 97204) and 1000
Friends o f Washington (206)343-0681 or 1305 4th
Avenue #303, Seattle, WA 98101). The Nature
Conservancy works to preserve habitats, plants, and
animals endangered by growth and poor land
management - the Oregon chapter can be contacted
at (503)230-1221 or 821 S.E. 14th Ave. Portland
OR 97214.
- T Ä ---------- Q
''tyintShuk^
C iu m
Suur
S kate S now
R entals R epmaa
171 SUNStT
t K ayak G eak
t Mont
OPEN CiMLY
Cannon Beach
In Coaslcr Theater Courtyard
CANNON BEACH
Established 1977
V
3 ^
Wine Tasting
Casual D in in g
O ve rlo o kin g the Hestucca River
Spirits • Hot Sandwiches
Fresh Seafood Dinners • Home Baked Desserts
(5 0 3 ) 9 6 5 - 6 7 2 2
pacific c ity .
O regon
Featuring Northwest, California
& Imported Wines
Collector Wines From 1875
Through Current Vintages
Featuring Over 1000 Wines
W ine Racks, Glasses &
W ine Related Items
Every Saturday Afternoon
1 5 PM
He who will not reason, is a bigot; he
who cannot is a fool; and he who
dares not is a slave.
Sir William Drummond
Different Wines
From Around The W orld
Fach Week
Open 11 A M -5 PM - Closed Tues.
436-1100
124 N Hemlock
P O Bo« 652. Cannon Bmch OR «7 110
UfttR LEFT LtGt HM W 8
!