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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (June 2, 2016)
22 // COASTWEEKEND.COM BOOK SHELF // GLIMPSE // WILDLIFE // POP CULTURE // WORDS // Q&A // FOOD // FUN PHOTO BY LYNETTE RAE MCADAMS Tim and Michelle Wunderlich, owners of Seaside Coff ee Roasters, outside their downtown location. A G LIMPSE I NSIDE By MATT LOVE Seaside Coff ee House I walked into Seaside Coff ee House on a gray Thursday afternoon and Michelle Wunderlich, the owner, didn’t waste any time greeting me warmly like the semi-regular I am. My order was the same: the angst-ridden writer special — black coff ee in a white mug. After handing me my mug, Michelle launched into a wonderful story about her teenage daughter, an ob- sessive reader, who recently exhibited signs of impres- sive writing ability by cranking out a dystopian tale that caught the attention of her teacher. Per- haps that teacher’s attention will light a fi re in Michelle’s daughter to become a writer. It can happen that way. It did for me at 16 when one of my teachers noticed. What a lucky kid! She can hang out in her mom’s café all day and write her dystopian novel series and coff ee is eternally free! My advice: set the series in Seaside after global warming has caused sea levels to rise and all the tourists have disappeared. Maybe have the surfers running everything. No zombies please. The Seaside Coff ee House boasts one of the most delightfully eclectic interiors of any coff ee joint I’ve ever pa- tronized. It acts as a de facto art gallery for local artists, a quasi museum of vintage bicycles and toy wagons, a library with books, magazines and old Seaside High School yearbooks, and a groovy time warp back into the 1970s when potted and hanging plants were the decorative rage. What I particularly enjoy about this place is that a customer has an astonishing array of choices of how they want to sit: couch, stool at window counter, student desk, plush chairs or plain old wooden chair at a table. My preference is typically wood seating at a table where I can look out the window and watch people come and go. On my most recent visit, I saw an elderly bald man wear- ing camouflage shorts. His head was covered in a green and orange tattoo of the most intricate design. He seemed very much like a possible character in a dystopian novel set in Seaside. I bet Michelle’s daughter is already on it. NW word By RYAN HUME Cormorant [kor•mɚr•ent] noun 1. any number of spe- cies of large coastal birds of either the genus Phala- crocorax or Nannopterum. Cormorants commonly have long necks, dark plumage, four webbed toes and hooked bills that they use to feed their vora- cious appetites by diving for fi sh in the ocean. Common throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas, the three most typical cormorants found on the Oregon Coast are the Brandt’s cormorant, the double-crested cormorant and the pelagic cormorant, which nest on off shore islands throughout the lower Columbia River estuary and upon rocky Origin: Enters English with the -ant suffi x in the early 14th century. Borrowed from the Old French, cormarenc, by way of the Late Latin corvus marinus, which means “raven of the sea” or “crow of the sea.” Corvus is still used today in taxonomy as the genus for crows, ravens, rooks and jackdaws. “‘Is there any cormorant fi shing in Japan?’ ‘Yes, I have brought back some excellent photographs showing how cormorant fi shing is done,’ said Dr. Smith. ‘I do not know that the cus- tom originated with the Japanese, but it is mentioned in Japanese literature as far back as 700 A. D. The people go out with cormorants, sometimes using as many as 16 birds to one boat. ‘Before the birds are started out, a string is tied tightly about the neck of each to keep it from swallowing the fi sh. They are also tied by long strings to the boats. Sometimes metal rings are put around the throat to prevent the fi sh from sliding into the stomach. ‘The birds dive down into the water and bring up the fi sh, whereupon the boatmen pull them in, force open their bills and squeeze the throats until the fi sh drop out. Then the birds are started out for a fresh catch.’” — Frank G. Carpenter, “Enterprising Fishermen Are the Japanese,” The Sunday Oregonian, Dec. 25, 1904, P. 36 “To lower predation on endan- gered juvenile salmon migrating downstream, the (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) started last year trying to cut the number of birds on East Sand Island from 13,000 to 5,600 over a four-year period. “The agency estimates East Sand Island holds the largest dou- ble-crested cormorant colony in the world, with the number of breeding pairs growing from 100 in 1989 to more than 15,000 in 2013, making up 98 percent of the breeding popu- lation in the estuary and eating about 12 million salmon.” —Edward Stratton, “Activists release video of cormo- rant culling,” The Daily Astorian, May 10, 2016 Matt Love is the author/editor of 14 books, including “A Nice Piece of Asto- ria.” His books are available at coastal bookstores or through his website, nestuccaspitpress.com “Offi cials say thou- sands of cormorants abandoned their nests on East Sand Island in the Columbia River and they don’t know why. Reports indicate as many as 16,000 adult birds in the colony left their eggs behind to be eaten by predators including eagles, seagulls and crows. The birds’ mysterious departure comes after the latest wave of government-sanctioned cormorant shooting.” 102.3 fm the Classic Rock Station headlands along the coast. nerd A double-crested cormorant. — Cassandra Profi ta, “Thousands of cormorants abandon their nests,” The Daily Astorian, Reprinted from Ecotrope, Oregon Public Broadcasting, May 20, 2016
