FROM
THE
LOW ER
LEFT CORNER
IMPRINTED ON A LOVING MOTHER
Victoria Stoppiello
My old high school baseball coach began his
introduction o f the team each year by telling the student body
"I'm like a mosquito in a nudist colony. I know what to do; Í
just don't know where to begin!" This month 1 find myself in
a somewhat analagous position. Hobos frequently dined on
"rainbow stew," a slapdash melange o f potables thrown
together in a common pot. Tins column may take that shape.
A patchwork duck. A crazy-quilt o f dibs and dabs. I know
my vector but the moss often grows on all sides o f a tree
around here. If I wander off in circles like a puppy dog on
his first trip to the beach, please forgive me.
With an abrupt seasonal wrench this week, we seem to
have begun our slouch toward the dark time. The wagon-
masters are circling up the Winnebagos for the long trek
home, pelicans surf the fall swell south toward the land of
cucalypts, wine, and smog. Garden spiders erect their insect
gill-nets in dying blackberry vines, bent on the fall harvest of
buggish beasts. This week was the short rain. Soon will
come the wind and long rains.
So Enough shilly-shallying. It's time to cut to the ease at
hand Last month the Cannon Beach Arts Association
notified me that 1 am recipient o f a grant to write what I
proposed to be an "anecdotal history" o f Cannon Beach. My
friend Terence O'Donnell authored a fine history o f Cannon
Beach for our own Historical Society. Based on
documentation and research, his work stands as the current
approved record o f city history. Now that the rains have
commenced its time for me to stop cutting bait and begin to
fish. In short, it's time to write. My historical fishing will be
slightly different than Terence's. Éssentially anecdotal, the
material will be filtered through my recollections and
imagination, albeit based on contact and conversations with
characters, many deceased, who ranged about in Cannon
Beach in a time gone by. In my view, all history is by nature
to some degree subjective. If I fail mildly in historical
veracity, oh well. Custer didn't give much o f an account o f
his skirmish at Little Bighorn, but the Indians and deserters
did the best that they could in the aftennath. My scratchings
may not be sanitized and tidy like some other accounts o f our
village history, but trails through human memory arc often
rough, tangled, and messy. I like good stories. For four
decades I've listened to our people talk here at the edge. I
think I'm ready to prepare a manuscript that suggests what
the flavor o f life in Cannon Beach was like in the city's
earlier years. I hope not to offend anyone's memory. I'm
naming names and nosing around in some scruffy matters. I
favor slices o f life that are jocular and foiblcd. You know
how your Professor is.
I have about a year to crank this thing up. That's about
100 inches o f rain and 12 months time. I'm soliciting your
help, dear readers, in locating additional sources o f
recollection: oral histories, interviews, accounts. If you
know individuals I should contact or pertinent materiel,
please contact me in care o f The Upper Left Edge, or at
home: Peter Lindsey, Box 454, Cannon Beach, Oregon,
97110 (503)436-1732. Your help will be most appreciated.
G ovrmft P iz z A
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The preliminist is never in the same place once.
"You can't go home again.” What is
meant by that phrase? You can't go home again
because you're no longer a kid and the relation
ships hate changed, because you're unwilling to
live the way you used to, or because your
memory has lixtlcd you. Things aren't the way
you remember them and they never were—you
just made it all up with your kiddie brain.
You can't go home again—that's w hat I
think when I visit familiar places which arc now
so changed as to be unrccogm/ablc. A lew w eeks
ago w e visited my grand-parents' house in
Clatskanie. Out Sw edetow n Road, left on
Hat cnacrc, then down a long driveway. When I
was a kid, this would have been an intrusion
because there were only three houses, all
occupied by people we knew well. Above the
drive was a two acre hillside w here we kids
played. At the end of that pasture was a line of fir
trees and nestled in their shadow was the sauna.
After both grandparents died, the house
was sold. When I visited during the 70's, the
house and yard were generally unchanged, but the
sauna—someone had purchased the uphill
properly and had pushed it over with heavy
equipment. Still intact, the sauna lay on its side,
a cast-off. That's the first time I thought "you
can't go home again.” The happy times, the
ritual of grandpa firing up the sauna on a
Saturday , the evening bath, the cool walk back to
the house in my pajamas, followed by a snack
and bed — those arc the memories that were
shov ed aside w ith the little building and with
progress.
Last week, a visit to the same spot
didn't arouse the same emotions. The inexorable
process of filling in the land has been steady and
I've become numb to it. Trying to show my
husband the sauna location was difficult—no
natural landmarks remained. The big firs were
toppled long ago. A patchwork of houses and
yards have turned the seemingly vast pasture into
a small neighborhixxl. Where there was mystery’
and adventure, deerand wild kids in the upper
orchard, there is only predictability. Grandma's
house, however, remains a citadel of memory .
Whix:vcr lives there now liked it the way they
found it and they're preserving w hat they found.
The more shocking experience of "you
can't go home again" was a drive through
Gresham last week after five years absence. When
I told others about my experience, they laughed
and said "it's a different world isn't it?" In
Gresham, I felt the bulldozer of population
grow th. Houses, apart-ments, strip malls,
parking lots tilled a landscape that not long ago
was some of the best berry growing land in the
US. The prtxlucc stands that used to be a
delightful aspect of the drive to Ml. Hixxl arc
now non-existent or so obscured by fast fixxl
joints that I couldn't find them. The field where I
picked straw berries now has an office building. I
was stunned: This is the population explosion
and it's finally reached the Northwest. My first
reaction was, with all these people and all these
houses covering farmland, where are we going to
get enough food? But my other, more senti
mental reaction was, will there be no part of the
landscape that remains intact? Will there be no
place near human habitation that will retain its
natural features?
You can't go home again. One friend
experiences it when she Hies back to San Jose
and the orange groves and fields of her youth arc
now dev clopment as far as the eye can see. For
another couple, it was a road trip around the
Olympic Peninsula, her dismay at what she
termed "the devastation, the rape of the land," and
his advice, "we just can't go back there any
more."
Konrad Lorenz, in "King Solomon's
Ring" described the landscape in his book as "the
most beautiful on earth, as every man should
consider his own home country." Lorenz coined
the term "imprinting", the idea that animals
become automatically attached to whoever cares
for them at birth. Perhaps I, and so many others,
became imprinted on our I íxíü I landscape when
growing up, and it pains us to sec it harmed, just
as it would pain us to see harm come to a loving
mother. The same sad feeling emerges, just as it
would if you returned to your parents' house al ter
a death, the sudden emptiness, the feeling of loss,
when home will never be the same.
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