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.