Longer than Jesus" continued from page I
Reasonable people started going up there to live,
peop le we had seen every day, the man from the
exaco, a roofer from Florence, the donut shop
Texai
waitress, the dentist's wife. They left their jobs and
lived up there.
The Greek wife stopped coming to town and
pretty soon local women began to dream she had
died. Hippie women are very impressionable and if
one dreams something then they all go o ff and dream
it. O ne woman dreamed he put her in a barrel and
dumped her in the ocean. But someone else dreamed
he buried her on the beach near Neptune Park. And
a tourist from California just heard the stories and
went right to her motel, fell asleep, and she dreamed
he left I ler body in the woods. But nobody believed
that version, w h y would the Greek wife try to get a
message to a tourist, they all said.
People claimed to see the ghost o f the Greek
wife, walking the beach at night. Every time you went
to the Laundromat or stood m line at the post office,
you 'd
d h hear
ea som eone arguing, well so and so dreamed
tier body
barrel but somebody else
dreamed her ghost is walking alongside Highway io i .
You'd have thought they'd be embarrassed later
when the Greek wife was spotted at Clark's Market,
buying produce, but nobody batted an eye. They just
stopped talking about that and started in on
something else.
Later on the land was taken back by the
rnment. Someone at the Post O ffice said it was
.use nobody paid taxes. Everybody who had been
up there moved, w e never saw any o f them again
except for the dentist's wife who settled down and
went home.
In a reasonable place such an event would have
permanently changed the people living there. It
would have been talked about for years and anybody
associated with it would be associated with it forever
and anybody making a wild claim about the ghost o f
someone wno turns out to not be dead in the first
place - why, their humiliation would be complete. But
it's like everyone had amnesia. Like they had been hit
on the head and were wandering around dazed on the
highway. They weren't embarrassed because they
didn't remember long enough to be embarrassed.
T about it but you can still
1 see the
: the hillside,
stripped naked and burnt. All the wild speculation
ana fuss, the end o f the world, ghosts, murder,
levitation, all o f it came to nothing and was forgotten.
The only thing left is the plain boring truth: someone
bare.
m
cut all 1 the trees and left the : mountain
I f you drive through Yachats today, you'll see a
white cross standing on the mountain above town,
surrounded by a clearcut. N o t long ago it was a forest.
Although that much is true, the rest o f this story is
fiction, which means I made it up. This story is part
o f a novel I'm writing and I also made up the persona
who's telling the story. W hile many o f the elements
are not true what's important about the story is.
M U T T E R IN G S F R O M THE M O U N T A IN
by The Opinionated Oregonian™
IN THE
NAME OF
r
A 1
A NO N-PRO FIT O R Û A N IZ A T IO N
M IC H A E L BALESKY
B O A R D O F D IR E C T O R S
P.O BOX 411 SEASIDE OR 97138
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Mount Hood, March 5, 2001-- Once upon a
time, there was a golden age o f curiosity, when
scientists were not skeptical of anything not in
academic journals, a time when museums and
zoos, circuses and news papers, sponsored
expeditions to far distant lands to see if the
natives really did know about animals not yet
officially accepted by the scientific
community.
That age is decades gone now, the
science johnnies will tell you we’ve discovered
all the ‘unknown’ animals and that such
critters as Bigfoot, Nessie, Ogopogo, Champ
and others are merely myths believed in only
by those of a weak-minded and credulous
nature.
Well, maybe so. I just keep remem
bering that some of those native tales preceded
discovery of Mountain Gorillas, Giant Pandas,
Komodo Dragons, coelecanths and other
‘mythological’ beasts.
Some tales did not produce a new
creature, tho not necessarily because it did not
exist but because those who searched didn’t
have the good luck of some of the others.
A fascinating account of one such hunt,
which took place shortly after World War II
ended, can be found in The Search fo r the
Buru by Ralph Izzard [Linden Publishing;
2001; trade paper; 176 pgs; $19 .95 ]
Izzard, the India correspondent of the
London Daily News, with field biologist
Charles Stonor and photographer Frank
Hodgkinson, trekked deep into north India, a
region heretofore never visited by westerners.
There, if the native tales were true, could be
found the Buru, a large [perhaps 2 0 ’ long]
aquatic lizard.
It’s a fascinating tale, this 1946
expedition report, but ends without resolution.
The trio had to make a choice . . . go where the
tales reported living burus had been seen or go
to another area many miles from the first
where burus killed by the natives were
reportedly buried. Izzard and Co. chose to go
for the live ones, but failed to find them.
The Search fo r the Buru reprints,
for the first time in this country, Izzard’s
original account which appeared in Britain
nearly a half century ago. There is no
afterword, no account of any further
expeditions, tho I have heard rumors of one
that looked, unsuccessfully, for those grave
sites.
Were there ever burus? Did we miss,
by only a few years, adding a new creature to
the roster of earth’s animals? Quite likely I
think. Armchair skeptics will disagree . . . but
then they are cut from the same cloth as the
naysayers of yesteryear who dismissed ‘native
tales’ of other animals we now know.
“ Science,” my late friend and globe
trotting zoologist Ivan Sanderson once
remarked, “ is the search for the unknown.”
Linden Publishing of Fresno CA has my
thanks, and those of others interested in
Cryptozoology [the study of unknown animals],
for bringing Izzard’s book back to life. Buy
one for th a t curious child of yours.
Recently I was in my favorite office
supply shop to do a bit of photocopying and on
the way to the cashier, noted a large bin of CD
ROMs. “ Take one” said the sign. “ Free” said
the sign. So I wandered over. Turns out it was
the latest AOL software with an offer of “ 700
Free Hours!” Recalling that I only received
50 free hours when I signed up fo r AOL 3.0, I
picked one up. And noticed the fine print. The
700 free hours had to be taken in the first
month. Well, now . . . as a quick bit of work
with pencil and paper can tell you, a month of
31 days has 744 hours, 30-days = 720 hours
while February, which is when I saw this
offering, has but 672 hours. I guess internet
junkies are not expected to eat, sleep or make
love. As Mr. Spock might say: This offer does
not compute. But it is a prime example of the
low regard in which the average ad agency
holds the average consumer.
It has been a bit over a year since the
U.S. Mint began putting golden dollar coins into
circulation. By mid-year 2000 over 500
million of them had been issued.
So . . . how many have you seen? How
many have you received in change? How many
have you used to buy things? Damn few in all
cases I suspect. Why? One reason is that the
U.S. Mint is still printing dollar bills. Now
bills have a useful life of maybe 6 months as
opposed to 2-3 decades for coins. Another
reason seems to be that folks are hoarding the
goldies, tho given the vast quantities stamped
out, the likelihood they will ever be worth
more than a buck is scant.
Me, I like them for tips as well as
purchases. You can still buy things for a buck
. . . ice cream cones, soft drinks, newspapers,
lotsa stuff. And no one needs to whack down
trees to make paper money.
So stop by the bank, get a fistful of
goldies and spread 'em around your town.
We hoard pennies too. The Mint stamps
out some 13 billion a year [th a t’s 130 million
bucks]. Unfortunately, about half [65 million
dollars!] of each year’s Mint run disappears
during that same year. They get lost, get
hoarded [why?], get converted into souvenirs
[at 504 a p o p ]. . . why do we bother with
them? We all know advertisers love to offer
their junk foi “ less than” some price or other
and that price will be a penny less. Big deal!
Are we really fooled by this sort of mind
bending? Let’s follow the example of our
Australian cousins and eliminate the penny [in
0Z they’ve also done away with their two
penny coins and supplemented their dollar coin
with a $2 coin while we (why?) are still
printing $2 bills].
And if the bargain hunting American
public needs persuasion to cough up all those
hoarded pennies, let the Feds stop printing
dollar bills and sell golden dollar coins, for a
limited time only, for “ Only 98 pennies!”
Such a bargain! 6 6 6
Philip Thompson
124 N Hemlock
P.O. Box 73»". Cannon Beach OR 97110
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architect
Personalized custom designs for your unique site.
a r c h ite c tu r e & e n v ir o n m e n ta l p la n n in g
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THE OSBORNE WORKING
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M arilyn R ooper
Calligraphy
April 7 * -A p r il 30*
A Cannon Beach resident since the 1970s,
M arilyn Rooper has studied calligraphy for 30
years, with her interest in the practice tied to other
Eastern arts and philosophy. Rooper, also
a long-time practitioner o f Tai Chi, is an instructor
o f both art forms.
The exhibit is accompanied by a juried group show.
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503 368 7518
ANTHONY STOPPIELLO
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The Cannon Beach Gallery
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(503) 436-0744
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Seneca
weca.LeercD&e amul zqoi
5