Your Professor has never been much on
pretense, flexing his scholarly muscles, flashing
credentials degrees and such. He’s more the
“professor” style, something on the order of Mark
Twain’s scoundrel, playing to a rube crowd at The
Royal Nonesuch. I guess I hark back to those
professors who operated out of the back end of a
wagon in frontier towns, dispensing snake oil and
wonder salves to the country bumpkins, traveling
through towns called Paradise or Climax, or
Clearwater. I’m cut from the same cloth as that old
salacious professor in Raintree County , a blusterer
and blatherer, presiding at bull-breeding events and
the odd tavern horse-shoe toss.
I like to engage in dallying and lollygag, first
chair at Bill’s Tavern, dabbler at verbal riposte and
parry, chronicler of local shortcomings, an old
Sergeant-Major reviewing the troops. A Major
Hoople sort of professor. When no one’s available
for a salty chat, I eavesdrop. Nothing purposive you
understand. Strictly inadvertent. I cop a listen here
and a glance there just to test the public pulse. I ’m a
spectator bird gathering a nest of impressions. The
term “eavesdrop” or “eavesdrip” was present in the
language by the 1600’s. In 1641, in Kent, English
Law made it illegal for the rain that dripped or
dropped directly down from a house’s eaves to land
on neighboring property. Eaves could be built no
closer than two feet from an adjoining property to
avoid erosion. By extension, anyone inside of that
line of raindrop fall was inside of private property
and snooping, listening, violating privacy.
Your saintly Professor wouldn’t snoop, but he
can’t help listening. My, the things he hears!
I overheard a couple discussing their amours one
morning in a restaurant.
“Jim kept me up ‘til all hours last night! He just
wouldn’t leave me alone and go to sleep!”
“I wanted to sleep,” the gentleman responded,
“but that new Japanese crouton mattress you bought
kept me up all night!”
Reading on the beach one summer’s day, I
witnessed the following. Glancing up I saw a small
boy helplessly chasing a kite string down the beach.
Kite and string sailed irretrievably toward the
firmament. The little boy crumpled near me,
defeated and crying. An elderly gentleman stopped
and consoled the child.
“Don’t cry son. You should be happy, not sad.
You’ve given that kite what it wanted most.
Freedom. All its life it dreamed of soaring in the
heavens, and you’ve set it free at last.”
The crying stopped, and I choked back a sniffle
or two myself.
Once I listened while a father discussed trees with
his young son.
“Trees,” he told him, “are terribly important.
Their roots are like feet and toes. They grip the earth
and hold it together and keep it from washing away.
Their long arms reach up into the sky to catch the
clouds and squeeze out rain. When a storm comes,
you can hear them sighing and straining, struggling
with the wind like wrestlers. All would fall apart if
they weren’t there doing their job.”
A woman Ordered from a menu in a Thai
restaurant
“What does that taste like?” she queried, and then,
“Do you think I’ll like it?” How does a waitress
respond to that, I ask you?
Osburn’s Grocery Store bench is a prime spot for
tourist eavesdropping. The next two conversations
were collected there in the last few years.
“I know it’s true about the President, you know, I
heard it on television!”
The only more truly true source would be
Reader’s Digest, I suppose.
Last fall, an enormous harvest moon inched up
behind the eastern foothills, a great grinning fall
pumpkin of a moon. A group gathered on Osburn’s
Porch commented on the inordinately swollen moon.
“That’s one of the biggest full moons I’ve ever
seen,” a man suggested.
“Mighty big,” another agreed, “but nothing like
the size of the full moons we used to get in Texas!”
Your Professor sees some odd bits, dearly
beloved. I watched a man seated on a commode,
answering nature’s call, speak to his office on a
cellular phone. Strapped for time, I guess. Busy
schedule.
Two women seated several tables away from one
another chatted via cell phones.
“See me over here,” one said. “I’ll wave. Hi!
Yes, I see you there. How’s Jim?”
There are many strange stories in the village these
days. A haggard family stopped into the cookie store
last week. They couldn’t find the beach. How can
the species survive, I ask you?
Pgl The Writers' Bloch
M KMIJN 9 1 .9 FM/Afetfe
A t //fa.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells
better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make
a better soup.
H. L. Mencken
un’Ex LEFT ED&E. 7ULY
Jim
On the hills behind town, industrial forestry chums
along, turning green hillslopes dirt brown. Mountains grow
shorter, it seems, as the trees come down; the topographic
relief drops a tree’s height. Summertime clearcut air crackles,
hot and dry, and wet forest soil turns to dust. Different birds
fly there. Different animals scurry. Have a look; a thick
tangle o f new rock roads zig and zag across nearby mountain
tops, obscured by the first row o f trees. Their portentous paths
mark the configuration o f abundant clearcuts yet to come.
This is nothing new. Mid-century roads wind down below the
forest canopy, adorned in red alder, a tolerant tree which - by
virtue o f its roots’ ability to generate nitrogen - can set up
housekeeping on a badly scarred pit-gravel surface. The trees
being cut today popped up as seedlings on clear-cut lands a
generation ago. And yet, for all o f this industrial forestry,
Cannon Beach stands out as a non-industrial town. The trees
are toppled in our backyards. But they are processed far away.
The wood and the profits fly to the four winds. Despite
industry’s ragged mark our c ity ’s scenery, industry leaves little
trace, for better or for worse, inside our city limits.
We occupy a peculiar place, this non-industrial town.
For thousands o f years, the land belonged to a non-industrial
people (what we might term “ pre-industrial” during moments
o f Eurocentric chutzpah) who got by just fine without ever
stripping the hills bare. Then, residents beheld a b rie f and
faint industrial moment - spruce logging camps, a handful o f
gyppo loggers, a small dory fleet launching into the surf - and
then this moment too was swept away, swiftly, by late-20lh
century currents. Now we inhabit a place visited by some o f
the w orld’s preeminent software engineers, getting away from
their tidy and virtual assembly lines, doing nothing in
particular, consuming scenery. It is a time o f “ post-industrial”
economies, and the town o f Cannon Beach sits at post-
industrial ground zero - an aberrant outpost o f the information
age, a town o f few big machines, its fortunes tied to the
capricious business o f human amusement, postmodern, post-
Fordist, post-this, post-that, post, post, post. But can we really
be “ post-” that which we never really were??
A t best, we can pretend.
Historical society
enthusiasms may be directed toward that very b rie f moment o f
first European occupation, the hard and dirty scramble to get
by, the successful crafting o f genteel small town life amidst the
coarse clank and bang o f resource industry machines, sounds
rising and falling in uncontrollable, life-shattering booms and
busts.
And yet this period - this “ historical period” -
represents an infinitesimally small portion o f the total human
history in this place. The vast majority o f our local history is
o f a different sort, non-industrial, pre-industrial, downright
aboriginal. And this period, even i f it may seem alien to us,
deserves some sort o f commemoration. As the bicentennial o f
the Lewis and Clark Expedition approaches (an Expedition
which brought the intrepid explorers to visit the longhouses o f
villages on the Cannon Beach shoreline) our editdF, the
venerable Reverend B illy Hults, has proposed the construction
o f a commemorative longhouse. A place o f historical and
environmental interpretation, celebrating those things unique
to this town - a tourist-friendly meeting place where the beach
and the watershed converge, where the tribal village visited by
Clark and his team once stood, on a comer o f the city land to
be vacated by the proposed relocation o f the Cannon Beach
Elementary School. And 1 would like to second the motion.
In the past, longhouses sat in long waterfront rows,
and each served several functions: living space, storage area,
meeting hall, ceremonial space. The largest ones sat close to
the center o f the village, the homes o f elites, the primary
staging areas for large gatherings and momentous ceremonies.
Today, not far to our north, tribal villages may consist
prim arily o f modem, single-family homes, but still contain a
single longhouse at their core, tidier and better lit than its
predecessors perhaps, but s till central to village social and
ceremonial life. Longhouse events hold these towns together.
They link tribal communities to their shared past, and serve as
a place for communities to assess where they have been and
where they are going. The functions o f a Cannon Beach
longhouse would be somewhat different, o f course, but it could
become
quite
an
asset,
socially,
economically,
environmentally. An appealing interpretive center, without
equal on this coast, where tourists could visit. A meeting hall
where local organizations could gather. (And both input and
assistance could be sought from members o f the federally-
unrecognized Tillam ook and Chinook tribes, which currently
attempt to regroup nearby and revive some o f their cultural
traditions.)
There are many questions that arise at the beginning
o f such a project. One o f the biggest: what would a Cannon
Beach longhouse look like? Ethnographic accounts, and the
Cannon Beach diaries o f W illiam Clark give us some ideas.
Adventurous building contractors take note!
Most local
longhouses were rectangular, permanent structures, roughly 50
feet long and h a lf as wide, each facing the waterfront. They
were made almost entirely o f cedar planks, with floors sitting
slightly recessed into the ground. Cedar plank walls supported
a gabled, cedar plank ro o f which sloped downward at low
angles on both sides o f its central ridge. (Temporary houses
for summer use at fishing, hunting, and plant gathering sites
often were smaller, and had a “ shed” type o f roof, sloping in
one direction only.) Here in Cannon Beach, Clark reported
that the floor pits sat roughly 5 feet below the outdoor ground
level (often mounded almost this high with insulating soil). A
short ladder, made by cutting foot-holes in a heavy cedar
plank, would descend from the door to the house floor.
Cedar planks were placed side-by side, usually
horizontally, to construct the walls, packed with moss in the
crevices. These planks were cut from downed cedar logs or
split from the sides o f huge living trees, a practice which kept
the trees alive with a discernable notch which can still be seen
on some standing ancient cedar trees today; these planks were
about three or four feet wide and up to about 30 feet in length.
Trees from high-elevation sites, with dense wood grain, were
preferred i f they could be obtained. Charred on their exteriors,
these planks were then chipped smooth with a hand adze to
two to three inches’ thickness. Short spruce pegs and spruce
roots, peeled and steamed, were pulled through drilled holes to
connect board joints, functioning like nails.
House support posts, usually square planks o f roughly
one-foot cross-section, set in holes in the floor, stood vertical
along the center o f most houses; some may have been carved,
though little information remains on the content o f their
carvings. These posts supported a long, horizontal plank
which ran the length o f the house, serving as the center ro o f
gable. Clark noted that Cannon Beach longhouses had one or
two house posts, in the middle o f each house, not including the
posts lining exterior walls. A smoke vent board ran along one
side o f the ro o f gable, left loose so that it could be moved to
allow smoke to escape. Clark reported doors at either end o f
the houses at Cannon Beach - each door was probably covered
with a wide cedar board suspended at its top by flexible spruce
root hinges. Floors were often covered with woven rush mats;
firepits, aligned along the center o f the room, were surrounded
by split boards laid on their sides, rocks, and fresh sand. This
sand was replaced regularly to keep cooking areas clean. In
addition to these fires, houses were illuminated by torches o f
spruce or Douglas fir pitch.
Extended families lived in each longhouse, often
including approximately four “ nuclear families” as well as
some distant relatives and slaves. Each fam ily’s area often
would be partitioned o ff with walls, either o f planks, or o f
wooden post frames covered with thickly woven mats. One
couldn’t see through these walls, but could hear through them,
and at the end o f the day people would continue conversations
back and forth from their respective rooms. A wide bench
lined each wall, about two feet above the floor, lined with
cedar planks
Divided by partitioning boards, this bench
served as seating i.rea, bed, and storage area. The head boards
delimiting shamans' beds would be carved and painted with
images o f their sprit guides. Skins and woven mats served as
bedding and seat cushions. Shelves above these sleeping areas
held clothes and other personal belongings.
A contemporary Cannon Beach longhouse, lacking
human residents, would look a little different, but it could be
retrofitted to conform to our post-industrial, non-industrial
town o f the present. A place to tell the tourists our local tales
in the summertime. A place to gather year-round - distinctive,
smelling o f cedar, lacking the antiseptic flicker o f fluorescent
lights. It would look sharp, sitting there where the creek rolls
down from the shrinking mountains and tumbles across the
beach.
Sort o f like how it looked when W illiam Clark
stumbled into town. Envision it. Look at the pictures o f
longhouses compiled for such sources as Stephen Dow
Beckham’s The Indians o f Western Oregon or the
Smithsonian’s Handbook o f N orth American Indians, Volume
7: The Northwest Coast.
Like what you see? Anyone
interested in this project, who wishes to pledge their allegiance
to the concept, is encouraged to contact our editor, B illy Hults,
care o f this paper.
Casual Dining
Overlooking the Piestucca River
Spirits • riot Sandwiches
fresh Seafood Dinners • Home Baked Desserts
(5 0 3 ) 9 6 5 - 6 7 2 2
)Or
pacific city , orecom
fun at tHe ‘StacH!
PAILS & SHOVELS • SAND MOLDS • BEACH BALLS
BOATS • BUBBLE TOYS • THINGS THAT FLY
GAMES • BOOKS • TRAVEL TOYS • TAPES & CD’S ,
k
’
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