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Victoria Stopplello
ES o o k ^
U SE .D B O O K 5
-JP E LC IA L ORDERS
The Professor sends his missive down along the
grapevine this month, aiming at those sentimentalists o f
a musical bent who recall Cannon Beach in the
Ratskeller days. During the nasty Seventies, a flock o f
musical groups drifted like cigarette smoke through the
bars, taverns, homes, and coffee houses o f Cannon
Beach. Phil N' The Blank Spots, Carl Smith and The
Natural Gas, Plum Barrie, The Juan Man Band, The
Sage Brothers, Boden and Zanetto, all rocked and reeled
in the loosely strung community. Just about anything
flew. The old Ratskeller Tavern, formerly the Sunset,
was like a roundhouse in the community from whence
all sorts o f loose trains departed. Larking was the spirit
o f the times
Tim Hersha, a lanky, rugged, rollicking, piratical
Ratskeller barman, set a certain tone with his high jinks.
He and his buddies would arm themselves w ith
numbered flashcards on a summer’s day, seat
themselves on the Group W bench next door to the
"Rat," and judge female passersby, commenting loudly
on their criteria for judgment. The village seemed
giddy with tomfoolery and the Ratskeller exerted a
certain influence.
One man painted his house with red, white and blue
stripes An impatient gentleman patron o f Appalonia's
Restaurant across the street from the Rat rankled the
morning waitress w ith his insistence on cream fo r his
coffee. The waitress, a nursing mother, yanked out a
pendulous breast and squeezed a squirt o f m ilk into the
shocked man's cup. Oh, yes, dearly beloved. Those
were high times in Cannon Beach.
The Rat was quite a joint. A delightful gang o f
miscreants, scapegraces, and scalawags frequented the
place: Charlie Brown, Steve McCleod, Judy Hawkins,
The Three Barbaras, Sean "Grenades" Fenwick, the
Frojens, a string o f owners from Charlie Sperrs to Jim
and Jim, (Oyala and Nicmela).
Most nights Hersha gave last call around 1:30 a.m.
and started clean up to the strains o f Ravel's Bolero. He
commenced work at that late hour w ith the stereo
volume dial set at about "5." By 2 a m. closing, he'd
bump the dial up to "10," the windows and walls
shuddering and vibrating, and the building quivering in
its rotting bones. Many stories and legends float around
about the place. Kris Frojen once recovered $62.00
from its thick orange shag carpet with a White's Metal
Detector. That same orange shag would squish like a
sponge covered tide flat after beer fights.
W ell, this is all by way o f telling those folks who
cherished those times that a reunion is brewing.
Jim Stewart, John Mersereau, Jim Craighead and
Lisa Fraser-The Good Buddies-are getting together
September 16th at the Cannon Beach Chamber o f
Commerce B uilding about 7 p.m. for a concert. Their
music characterized those times and the event should
conjure a memory or two.
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-
Another drizzly morning that hopefully w ill clear for
a sunny afternoon W hile most o f the country bakes in 90 and
100 degree weather, here we are under a high cloud cover that
masquerades as fog This morning the sky is as dense and gray
as a spring day in northern Europe -- in other words, nothing
to lift your spirits or write home about
The street is slick with moisture, there are even
puddles in the low spots There's the soft touch o f dew-like
mist on everything that isn't protected by an overhang Perfect
weather for breeding slugs among the vegetables and mold on
Í 50 A ve .U, S e a s id e -
♦
♦
♦
In the Greenhouse
of the time.
the ever-bearing strawberries
The sun rises "in a sack" as the Danes say, its light
suffused through a greenhouse translucent from clouds. For a
gardener, this weather brings all the problems one has when in
fact maintaining a greenhouse. You must be diligent in
controlling pests, you must select plants that w ill tolerate these
m ild temperatures, and strangely enough, you must water,
water, water, and then water some more
These cloudy skies have fooled us into miscalculating
our watering program. Our squash's failure to thrive we ve
blamed on the lack o f warm temperatures and adequate sun,
but once we began to water them deeply every day, they began
to flourish Ironically, we have cloudy weather without the
benefit o f rain
We're gardening in an outdoor greenhouse, and that's
an irony too, because my hunch is that another sort o f
greenhouse, the planets atmosphere, heated to pepper-raising
temperatures from greenhouse gases, is the cause o f this
peculiar summer weather. According to the Worldwatch
Institute, there's a direct correlation between the amount o f
fossil fuels burned, carbon dioxide concentration, and rising
global temperatures
This is my sixteenth summer on the Northwest coast.
The first 13 summers had easily-predicted foggy weather
When it got hot in the Willamette Valley, a fast-moving, low -
elevation fog would move in o ff the ocean late in the
afternoon. That fog was the result o f cool air from the ocean
interacting w ith hot, drier air from inland When the tw o
masses o f warm and cool air connect, the moisture in the air
condenses, and we get fog.
What's notable about the fog we're experiencing this
summer is that it isn't low and fast-moving; it*s high and
pervasive. Perhaps this was the typical pattern in the fiftie s
when Ilwaco always seemed so dreary to me. Perhaps this has
been the normal weather pattern for hundreds o f years, and it's
only been during the last 20 or so that we've had atypically
stable and sunny summers at the coast.
M y hunch, however, is different. The US has been
experiencing the hottest summers on record. When you look at
the colored maps in the newspapers, you see a red continent,
with a thin strip o f yellow, indicating lower temperatures on
the Pacific Coast west o f the Coast Range from San Francisco
north. There are spots o f cool temperatures in the high Rockies
o f Colorado and northern New England, but that's it. The rest
o f the US is experiencing 90, 100, and 110 degree weather
People are cranking on the air conditioning and the Bonneville
Power Administration is selling more and more power to
California.
M y husband suggests we adopt a winter blizzard
response I f the weather is causing so much stress on the
electricity supply as to cause brown outs and black outs,
perhaps businesses should shut down, or go to night
operations. It's a paradox that so much o f our country's
economic activity goes on in high rise buildings w ith acres o f
sun-catching glass, but no windows that open. W ithout AC,
people in those buildings would either suffocate or fry. Most
o f us Americans live in truly temperate zones, not climates
that k ill. We are ignorant o f the heat-coping habits o f the
tropical, desert, or Mediterranean cultures — w orking in the
early morning, taking a siesta, then working again in the early
evening
Meanwhile, before the reality o f a changed climate
sets in, w e'll probably continue to act like lemmings, driving
our green-house gas enhancing vehicles to jobs in air-tight
cubicles People w ill continue to say global wanning is bogus,
as glaciers in the Alps recede and 50 b illio n tons o f water a
year melts from the Greenland ice sheet And 1 w ill continue
to water my garden, but Til stop cursing the overcast, and be
thankful I'm not liv in g in the San Joaquin Valley or the m id
west, w ith real drought and 100 degree weather.
Victoria Stoppicllo is a writer living in Ilwaco,
at the lower left comer o f Washington State.
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O u r inequality materializes or upper class,
vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our
lower classes.
M atthew Arnold
ANTHONY STOPPIELLO
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Architect
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UPPER LEFT Eb&E SEPTEMBER 2000