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About Seaside signal. (Seaside, Or.) 1905-current | View Entire Issue (April 13, 2018)
6A • April 13, 2018 • Seaside Signal • seasidesignal.com Authors pitch in to spread joys of reading Write on Seaside! raises money for libraries By Brenna Visser Seaside Signal A librarian, a ghost librarian and a dog. These were the main char- acters in the short story “The Ghost in the Stacks,” by local author and library foundation board member Melissa Eskue Ousley. As she read her ex- cerpt about a haunted library on Saturday, the audience sat in anticipation with bidding paddles in hand, waiting to bid on a chance to become a part of the story. One of those bidders was Madeline Ishikawa of Port- land, who for $50 now had to decide what she was going to name the character. “I think it’s a fun process to be a part of a story I otherwise wouldn’t be apart of,” Ishika- wa said. This process continued with eight other local authors as part of Write on Seaside! — all with their own stories shared and adjusted at the will of a room full of library donors. The event, held as a ban- quet in the Seaside Civic and Convention Center, was a meld between two causes: Write on Seaside!, which started last year as a writing conference COLIN MURPHEY/EO MEDIA GROUP Christian Zupancic entertains the crowd at the library fundraiser in Seaside. and fundraiser for the Seaside Public Library Foundation; and the Little Free Library silent auction fundraiser to support Reading Outreach in Clatsop County, a program that sub- sidizes about 700 library cards for children who live in rural neighborhoods to encourage childhood literacy. By the end of the night, both causes reached their $10,000 goal. “Ultimately, the goal is to get books into hands of kids in the community any way we can,” Seaside Library Director Esther Moberg said. The two organizations de- cided to combine efforts into one large event and make the writing conference portion more interactive by allowing donors to become part of the stories. Authors were asked to sub- mit short stories about libraries and books, which will all be published into one anthology and include all of the revised character names. Ousley was inspired to blend her love for the paranormal into her li- brary-themed short story. “I wanted to include librar- ies as a theme, but I always love a good ghost story, and what better place for a ghost than at the library?” she said. Some deviated from the prompt. One was about a brain, and another about a magic di- ary. One story centered around elk crossing on U.S. Highway COLIN MURPHEY/EO MEDIA GROUP Diana Kirk signs her book for two fans during a fundraiser at the Seaside Convention Center. 101 as a tribute to the Gearhart and Warrenton elk herds. But the point was less about the “eccentric” plots of the short stories and more about the creative process, Moberg said. “Before (the foundation) created (Write on Seaside!), we didn’t really have a writ- ing event like this in Seaside,” Moberg said. “One of our goals is for people to get a sense of how the writing process works.” Ousley said it was an inter- esting experience writing a sto- ry with audience participation in mind. “I wrote this story knowing it was going to belong to ev- eryone. Sometimes when you write a novel you are writing it for yourself, but with this I wrote it with the audience in mind. It was fun putting in some of those details, wonder- ing what names they will come up with,” she said. Holly Lorincz was one of the presenters to stray from the prompt, with a short story centered around a 10-minute phone call between in-laws before a wedding day. While libraries weren’t a source of inspiration for this story, they inspired much of her love for writing in general, she said. Growing up in Clatskanie, Lorincz remembers spending hours in the Seaside Public Library, reading and rereading one of her favorite books, “The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett. “It was a small life, but I read all the time. I was al- ways putting myself in other worlds,” Lorincz said. Lorincz has since spun that love of reading into a full- blown career, which began as a writing teacher in the Neah- Kah-Nie School District. There she wrote her first book “Smart Mouth,” which eventually helped her launch into a ca- reer as a literary consultant and collaborative writer for biogra- phies and memoirs. She is list- ed in the top 25 Kindle Biog- raphy/Memoir writers for work on “Crown Heights,” the story of a man named Colin Warner who was wrongfully convicted of murder in New York City, which was made into an Ama- zon movie last year. “By the time I left (Clats- kanie) to go to university, I still couldn’t imagine myself in this big world of publishers and clients in Manhattan,” she said. “But now that I’m in that world, I’ve realized they are all people who just want to talk about books.” So it’s only fitting that Lorincz, who now lives in Manzanita, would come back as one of the presenting authors to support the library that once enabled her love of reading. “I want to help the library whenever I can,” she said. “It feels like I get to give back a little bit.” District leans to base expansion plan Survival of the marbled murrelet Bond from Page 1A Board member Mi- chael Hinton said the bond measure might not pass the first time around, but it would be worth making the effort. “It makes sense to go out and ask for the bond, and we’ll play to win,” he said. Board member Jeremy Mills expressed concern that the community would support the bond. “I don’t know if it’s going to float,” he said. “I believe we need to do it. But I struggle with asking for more money. … It’s not going to be easy.” Board member Ve- ronica Russell said she favored expanding the facility, particularly with rising construction costs making the project more expensive by the year. The timeline will un- fold over the next month or two, Archibald said after the workshop. The district has until Aug. 17 to file with the county for the November elec- tion. The expansion proj- ect won’t be “an easy sell,” Alan Evans, the board president, said, “but you never know un- less you ask.” The small seabird’s future depends on deep forests, ocean prey By Nancy McCarthy For Seaside Signal SEPRD Architectural design plan for an expansion and renovation of Sunset Park and Recreation District facilities. ‘Selling preparedness’ at Gearhart event Workshop stresses individual preparedness By Brenna Visser Seaside Signal As Marty McCullough scanned a table filled with makeshift toilets and water fil- tration systems, she couldn’t help but wish her neighbors were by her side. McCullough was one of the dozens of people who attend- ed an emergency preparedness town hall in Gearhart on Sat- urday. The event, organized by the Community Emergen- cy Response Team at the fire hall, featured a panel of speak- ers who addressed topics like emergency communications, go-bags, sanitation in a crisis and other tools. It was the first time Mc- Cullough, who has owned a home in Gearhart for five years, had ever attended an emergen- cy preparedness event. But after some troublesome con- versations with her neighbors, she felt compelled not only to come to prepare herself, but to convince her neighborhood to do the same. “A lot of our neighbors are older, and they’re simply not worried about (a tsunami),” she said. “I guess I just thought to myself, ‘Someone has to worry about this.’ There’s something I can do to help them be aware of what they need to do.” Reaching out to people like McCullough and her neighbors through town halls is part of Gearhart’s growing effort to bolster what is considered to be the beach town’s No. 1 resource in a tsunami: residents. With less than 1,000 full- BRENNA VISSER/SEASIDE SIGNAL Pat Wollner of Gearhart CERT shows sanitation techniques. time residents, limited staffing and very little land out of the inundation zone, the city’s ge- ography and demography has brought focusing on individual preparedness to the forefront as the first line of defense for a major disaster. “Like most municipalities, we are underfunded and under- staffed to take on the great bur- den of preparing our community. So we really do need the citizens to take control of preparedness for themselves,” said City Coun- cilor Dan Jesse, an emergency preparedness advocate. Gearhart has plenty to do on its own. In 2019, the city is hop- ing voters support a bond to move an aging fire station out of the inundation zone. Cach- es of medical supplies have been stashed in a few private residences around town. As of this month, the city secured a $15,000 grant from the state Department of Land Conser- vation and Development to be used to evaluate tsunami haz- ards as well as give guidance on how to craft land use measures to reduce the city’s risk. But many of these projects are just in the beginning stages, making individual prepared- ness even more critical. “If it happened today, we would have to rely on our neighbors,” Jesse said. Challenges One of the biggest challeng- es Gearhart faces is unfortunate geography. “If you go to many other cit- ies, they have ground everyone knows is high enough to evacu- ate to, and we don’t have that,” Jesse said. “So for us it’s about trying to figure out our best ap- proach.” These factors lead to a con- fusing message that is hard to communicate: When a tsunami hits, run toward the ocean and head north, where the dunes reach the highest elevations in town between 50 and 70 feet. When common wisdom tells people to run for the hills, the job to educate people about how to evacuate becomes even more important. “It’s definitely counterintui- tive,” said City Councilor Pau- lina Cockrum, who volunteers with the Community Emergen- cy Response Team. But engaging the town in emergency preparedness has been an uphill battle. Almost 60 percent of homes in Gear- hart are unoccupied — second homes with owners who may or may not be involved with community efforts. The fact the town’s population trends older can make selling preparedness a challenge, as well. “We have a population that’s on the older side,” Jesse said. “If you’re 50 or older, the chance of the event happening in your lifetime is pretty small. But if you are a 20-year-old or 30-year-old, the chance of this happening in your lifetime is much greater.” Appealing a thousand ways But there is reason to be hopeful. As Cockrum and Jes- se spoke about the difficulty of getting people interested in emergency preparedness, every seat filled up on the fire station floor — a turnout noticeably higher than in previous years. While a full house at a town hall is a good start, Cockrum said one of the troubles CERT faces is not having a clear sense of how prepared residents are after the town hall clears out. One way Cockrum hopes to do this is by establishing CERT representatives in each neigh- borhood to lead preparedness efforts in less-than-enthusiastic places like McCullough’s. More than anything, pre- paredness is an exercise in persistence, CERT member Pat Wollner said. “There’s a million reasons not to do something. I’m too young to plan. I’m too old to plan. You have to chip away at the reluctance,” Wollner said. “You have to appeal to them in a thousand different ways to make preparing worthwhile.” When they are nesting, marbled murrelets stay silent and well hidden. In fact, the coastal seabirds remained a mystery from the time they were discovered in the 1700s by Capt. Cook until 1974, when the first nest was dis- covered in California. “There was nothing known about the bird at the time, or at least white man thought,” said S. Kim Nel- son, a research biologist with Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Nelson spoke at a “Lis- tening to the Land” lecture sponsored by the Necanicum Watershed Council in Sea- side March 21. “The native Americans knew about the marbled murrelets, they knew where they nested,” Nelson said. “They knew about the beau- tiful dance they do in court- ship where they put their bills up in the air and swim across the water and they dive under the water and come up together.” But nobody thought to ask the Native Americans about the bird that nests deep in forests and forages for prey at the ocean’s edge. “The Tlinget tribe revered the marbled murrelet. They wouldn’t eat the murrelet be- cause they thought they were so special and mysterious,” Nelson said. In the early 1900s, or- nithologists still wondered where the murrelets nested. In the 1970s, the National Audubon Society offered $100 to the first person to find a marbled murrelet nest. That occurred in 1974 when a tree climber found a nest in a Douglas fir tree in Califor- nia’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park. It wasn’t until 1990 that the first nest in Oregon was discovered. There are about 70 known murrelet nests in Oregon, Nelson said. Formerly listed as a “threatened” species, marbled murrelets recently were relist- ed as “endangered” in Wash- ington, Oregon and California. Although they can live for 15 to 20 years, they have a U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE The marbled murrelet. low reproductive rate, Nelson said. They don’t breed until they are 2 or 3 years old, and they don’t breed every year. When they do breed, they lay only one egg between April and July, and if that egg fails, they won’t always renest. They often return to the same forest stand during breeding season every year. The birds, which fly be- tween two ecosystems — forest, where they lay their eggs on large tree limbs, and marine environments, where they feed in shallow water — are experiencing a decline in the habitat they depend on for survival because the old- growth buffer they need is disappearing, Nelson said. As a result, 70 percent of nests fail annually, she added, and chicks aren’t surviving the fledge from the nests. If they do fledge, they aren’t surviv- ing at sea until they’re old enough to breed. One potential method of reversing the decline of failed nests could be preserving a larger buffer of trees between clear cuts and older forests where the birds nest, Nelson said. The larger buffer may prevent predator birds, such as stellar jays, American crows and common ravens from reaching the nests, she said. Because murrelets are finding less suitable food in the ocean due to predators, over-fishing and warmer tem- peratures, Oregon’s five ma- rine reserves will be “great” for the birds, she said. They will find prey in the reserves, which are either closed to fishing or allow only limited fishing. The reserves will be “nurseries for the fish,” she added. “What murrelets need is dependable, abundant prey, right where their nest sites are,” Nelson said. “So they don’t have to fly up and down the coast; they can fly straight out from their nests and find their prey.” The Cape Falcon Marine Reserve, near Oswald State Park, will support a known murrelet nest in the park, Nel- son said. “As the (marine reserves) are there longer and longer, we can look at the impact, and from what it’s shown so far, it can only be beneficial for the murrelets,” Nelson said.
