Editor's Notebooks 1991-2002: Life on Washington's Outer Coast

Here are some selected Editor's Notebooks published in the Chinook Observer from about 1994 through 2002. The theme of this group is life on the outer coast of Washington state.

EARLY SPRING

Spring may officially be more than a month away but Sunday had many of the characteristics of spring on the coast: Hail, coal-black rain, drizzle and a shivery wind interspersed with occasional transcendent spells of clear and innocent sunlight.

This time of winter I imagine a dark old movie theater where the management begins interrupting a boring feature two-thirds of the way through to show scenes from exciting coming attractions.

Chickadees tumbled into town a couple of weeks ago like a troupe of Chinese acrobats who accidentally got off their plane at the wrong stop. Now they’re careening through the alder twigs and blackberry vines, and pity the poor spider.

In fact, a procession of birds is moving to and through our little paradise with its many inviting woodlands, rivers, lakes and bays. Pairs of Canada geese on honeymoon sweep lazily overhead, the chill air faintly whistling through their wing feathers. Out on the shoal in front of my house, an old married couple of bald eagles went scratching for worms or smelt the other day, more chicken-like than majestic.

Down around a bend in the road, with a typical uncanny awareness of when it’s not hunting season, elk graze in a pasture, content and peaceful as geriatric dairy cows. Soon the calves will begin mysteriously appearing, just like the skunk cabbage that has popped out from the apparently barren mud on the creek bottom.

My arch nemesis — the evergreen blackberry — is showing signs of rising juice, with fuzzy little buds bulging out from dead-looking canes. On an almost hot day recently, we renewed our seemingly age-old battle, the blackberry and I. After all the scratches and all the sweat that have gone into clearing an acre of the blasted things, the fight has turned a little personal: “Burn, damn you, burn!!” I think as I throw each severed 30-foot-long tentacle into the pile.

But get this: I put some blackberries back where I found them a few days ago after stumbling across what ought to be the engraving on the official Washington State Seal — a rusty old car abandoned and overgrown in the weeds. In fact, I have not one but three, stacked one upon the other against the hillside below my bedroom window.

A flashy chrome bumper turned out to be attached to a Dodge Sierra, last licensed in 1964, about a dozen feet from a pond that may someday be converted into a little water garden. It’s possible to work a lot of diverse elements into a landscaping scheme, but old junkers are a little hard to beautify. With enough money, I could have ‘em dug out and hauled away. Other options include buying some dump truck loads of cover dirt, surrounding them with ivy or climbing roses, or taking the cutting torch to them and dumping the pieces off a bridge late at night.

My answer? For now, I’ve spray-painted them green and piled the blackberries back. (The way things go, that short-term accommodation will drift into being a long-term solution and 50 years from now someone else will hack their way through the thorns, discover what’s left of the cars, and say to himself, “Why in hell didn’t they just have these things towed away?”)

Speaking of ivy, the spring planting campaign is well underway, with many of the seeds ordered last year now sprouting indoors on the desktop. They’re doing fine — seeds really are a miracle, with all that life packed into a tiny little package you can hardly see. They’re doing even better now since my mom come came over from Seaside to dog-sit for a couple days. She noticed right away that I had forgotten to provide my seeds with some things they need. Minor things, like light and warmth. Now, with grow-lights and a heat tape, they’re coming along like gang-busters. Aren’t moms great?

The Garden Show in Seattle last week was marvelous and well worth a trip. If you missed it, do try to go next year. (But as with every other popular event in Seattle, it would be best if you went sometime other than on the weekend, when yuppies go on a rampage like the Mongol hoards sacking Constantinople.)

Many of the carefully tended exhibits by the Northwest’s top landscapers brought home the point that Seattle would still like to think that it’s part of the rest of Washington, rather than off on a planet of its own, as we all know it is. For instance, mixed in with a dazzling display of orchids was a decrepit flat-bottomed boat, paint peeling off every which way, just like you might see in daily use around down here. It’s acceptable for backyard gardens around our state’s major metropolis to express a certain randomness, a chaotic relaxation of traditional outdoor design. Before you know it, dandelions will be in style and we’ll feel pleased with ourselves that we never bothered trying to kill them off in the first place.

Yes, spring is right around the corner, and the rhodies will be in a full fever pitch of bloom before we know it. And then we can all look forward to the seasons turning yet again to summer, when as we all know, the weather turns really nasty.

TANGLED LAND

Lewis and Clark discovered in our area — the north shore of the Columbia and the Peninsula — a country so unremittingly wild, tangled and waterlogged that they sometimes had to spend days at a time camped in their dugouts, tied to branches like bivouacked climbers hanging from pitons on a cliff.

Imagine paddling past trees and brush forming nearly solid walls down to the water’s edge. Chinook villages occupied any flat ground dry enough to be healthy, their backs to an unyielding forest where spirits and sasquatch roamed.

Nineteenth century engravings show a place of clear and inviting waters but with land resembling the Africa described in Joseph Conrad’s great novella “Heart of Darkness,” a dark place imbued with a life and consciousness of its own.

There was little comfort for our ancestors who tamed the Northwest — this was country with the power to bite back. But mostly tame it they did, and we have a wonderful home as a result.

For at least some of us, though, part of what makes this place wonderful is that beneath the tameness there is still a little of the sharp-toothed wilderness, hiding in the imagination somewhere between the cells of ferns, the feathers of birds and in the dew caught on spiders’ webs. There is still something nameless and fundamental here that escapes our power to possess and control.

Settling near the river within sight of places where this land and water conspired to torture Lewis, Clark and company, we give in to our kind’s incessant urge to beat back what we regard as chaos. Where those famous explorers couldn’t find a place to sleep, we fertilize lawns and spray weeds.

But the wildness keeps seeping back, if only in the form of a wild blackberry vine snaking across the rose bed or the wind whipping rain against the windows of our bright warm houses. Within that wildness is the underlying order of our world.

Ultimately, we are enriched and reassured by our inability to defeat this land.

PLASTIC GUITAR

A new little mystery has turned up on the previously tangled acre of river front below my house. Turning over an old wood beam on a tidal plain, what’s about the last thing you’d expect to find? A guitar has to be somewhere on the list.

It’s only a child’s plastic instrument, with all the metal parts long since rusted away. Not only was it under an eight-inch-thick slab of cedar, but up until 10 months ago, it was under 12 feet of blackberry vines. So it’s been there awhile.

How in the world would a child’s guitar end up in such an unlikely location? Starting with the most likely scenario, we assume the boy or girl who owned it was a typical child. As anyone knows, children have an inexplicable ability to lose treasured possessions as if they had been sucked into an alternate universe.

Probably the next most possible scenario is that years ago a guitar that had outlived its usefulness was left lying along the riverbank somewhere upstream, where rising winter water set it adrift along with other less interesting rubbish. It bobbed along into the estuary where it ran into a rising tide and a hard wind from the west, which brought it far upland, depositing it under a block of wood.

But the first thought that came into my mind was this: A cold rain has been falling for weeks on a small claustrophobic cabin into which are crammed a mom, dad and five kids, age three through ten. Emil, the oldest, got a hand-me-down toy guitar from grandpa and grandma for Christmas.

Hour after endless hour, he practices, imagining himself far from the Columbia River, receiving grateful applause from the crowd at the Grand Old Opry, where it’s bright and nothing smells like mud.

Unfortunately, he’s driving his family absolutely stark, raving nuts. One day dad tells him to go up the way to Saari’s dairy for milk and butter. That evening, Emil searches everywhere for his little guitar. “Where is it?” he asks. “Wherever you left it,” he’s told.

Meanwhile the guitar waits in the darkness under a heavy slab of cedar as the river of time flows by, as dreams change, as the world rolls into a new place, as the Columbia rises and falls, silent and serene.

MUGWUMPS

The mugwumps are back.

My neighbor Donna, a direct descendent of the great Chinook Chief Comcomly, explains that mugwumps are birds, the great generic flocks of blackbirds that dart in shimmering unison through the autumn skies. So is “mugwump” a venerable word in Chinook jargon?

Well, actually, no. Mugwumps are so-called because when they sit on the telephone lines, their “mugs” hang over one side and their “wumps” hang over the other.

Ducks are also beginning their migration through the Lower Columbia region, with thousands congregating on quiet waters. It’s still nothing like it will be in another month or two, when they’ll crowd in with geese and swans like frenzied customers looking for bargains at a Labor Day yard sale.

The trees, too, are showing signs of fall. (Of course the vine maples, eternal pessimists, start turning bright red not long after Independence Day.)

Alders are shedding their leaves and it’s one of the only disappointments of living in the Pacific Northwest that this dominant deciduous tree doesn’t put on more of a fall show — instead of first turning bright colors, alder leaves mostly just drop off, putting on a display about as exciting as watching a tall, pale, very skinny man going bald.

In a way, though, the best autumn show comes sometime in November after a long hard blow, when all the remaining leaves come down at once and views open up like the curtain lifting from a theatrical stage. (Once again, across eight miles of river, the flashing red beacons atop the Astoria Bridge towers will be visible from my easy chair, pounding out their slow pulse in the night.)

There hasn’t quite been a bite in the air — more of a nibble — on these early September mornings, but a cold gauze of fog has been weaving along the rivers and through the valleys during my drive to work.

Meanwhile, the shortening of the days seems to accelerate, tobogganing down into those long, black, rainy nights of December and January. Soon every drive to work will be in the dark and every drive home the same. We’ll be warming our toes by the fire before we know it.

Wonderful as this summer has been, we’re nevertheless eagerly anticipating the changes ahead, the next act in the unending play of seasons.

COL-PEN-WAH CLUB

Seventy years ago and more, there was something called the Col-Pen-Wah Rod and Gun Club. Judging from back issues of this newspaper, the club appears to have been the dominant social force from Chinook to Cathlamet and its name calls to mind images of guys standing in duck blinds on misty winter days telling lies while sipping sour mash.

There used to be hardly any reliable roads linking towns along the Lower Columbia or Willapa Bay. To get around, many relied on hand-built wooden boats driven by great old one-cylinder engines. Chugging through the rain heading toward a favorite hunting spot or loaded down with kids and groceries, they must have looked like photos we see of modern-day people on the Amazon.

Back in those self-reliant times, most who lived in southwest Washington were perfectly prepared to be cut off from the world for a week at a time when monsoon rains, towering tides and fallen trees conspired to close the narrow tracks that passed for highways. Hard-working folks gathered in tight houses warmed by cordwood and lit by kerosene. Like always, there were hard times, but with the abundant wild ducks and salmon, everybody got by. Reading and conversation were their ordinary entertainment and radio programs were a big treat.

Last week brought the Col-Pen-Wah days powerfully to mind as flood waters closed roads in Pacific and Wahkiakum counties.

Four feet of flowing water covered the county road near my house Tuesday. All of a sudden, a thousand-foot-wide river separated me and my neighbors from the nearest store. Thoughts of “Damn, I knew I should have bought milk” flashed through many minds. Hectic schedules were scrapped, replaced by a day out of the 1930s.

There are projects that capable of being put off virtually forever. You know the kind: things like painting the house and cleaning out storm drains. Outdoor projects were out of the question Tuesday. It rained, poured, misted, drizzled, paused briefly, and then rained, poured, misted and drizzled some more. But there was no excuse not to do a long-procrastinated indoor chore, cleaning out the workshop in anticipation of some furniture refinishing projects.

We’re talking about clutter and confusion on a grand scale, a real honest to gosh mess of the kind that takes a year or so of deliberate neglect to create. Amidst it all was hidden a perfect delaying mechanism, a forgotten box of old family photos, report cards and letters going back to the time when my parents and their brothers and sisters were young adults, immersed in fighting wars, starting families and beginning careers.

It’s funny how time moves along, slipping past and closing over old passions, fears, love and dreams. About the passing generations, the Puerto Rican poet Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote that “The people have loved me will pass away, and the town will burst anew each year.” Each of us is a prisoner of the instant we are in, yet we share important links with people long gone. Their laughter sounded like ours, their love was as strong, their tears as salty.

My flood day flowed by and my projects got done. The illusion of living in a remote river hamlet of the past was to some extent imperfect since I have a phone and a television while they, presumably, did not. Not long after dark, though, the lights flashed a couple times and then went off. With them went all the unnoticed sounds of a modern house, the low hum of the refrigerator, furnace and water heater. So much for TV and so much for reading, since there were only a few candles for light.

Car headlights popped into sight at Point Ellice and moved slowly around the downriver shore as Astoria’s lights made the southern horizon glow pale blue. I sat watching the lights, scratching my labrador’s ears, listening to the pure, silent heart of the world.

HUMMINGBIRDS

Hummingbirds have been around my place a couple of weeks now, whirring through the storms and dodging raindrops that seem larger than they are.

People who aren’t especially familiar with hummers always sound surprised to hear what aggressive little monsters they are around each other. Scientists say birds are descended from dinosaurs and the resemblance is clear in the case of Andean condors, for instance, which really do look like enormous flying lizards with feathers.

But condors are gentle as lambs compared to hummingbirds, which have much more dinosaur-like personalities. One moment they’re sitting on a twig looking for all the world like expensive Christmas tree ornaments and the next they’re tearing through the air, apparently intent on pecking some other poor little hummer’s eyes out for daring to approach the wrong feeder.

Pterodactyls don’t have anything on an angry hummingbird. They careen around cursing at about the speed of light, resembling the fighter spaceships on Star Wars, whirling through the cosmos trying to vaporize each other. It’s amazing they have any energy left to build their little nests and raise their little families. For that matter, it’s amazing they manage to procreate at all, considering how much they all seem to hate each other.

Rufous hummingbirds are the most distinctive of the species we have in our area, radioactive-copper colored and with dispositions to match. Also common this time of year is the Anna’s hummingbird, which is larger and predominantly green. All species of hummingbirds appreciate being fed, in their surly fashion, and now is a good time to hang feeders since the flowers they rely upon for nectar are still fairly scarce this time of year.

I have four feeders hung on opposite sides of my house and carport so that one bird can’t guard them simultaneously and run all the others off. Even so, we’ll observe one sometimes come screaming around the corner or over the roof to surprise a trespasser whose wing beats he’s heard from a distance.

My girlfriend’s favorite comfortable shirt is the color of a faded hibiscus blossom, and while humans are far too big and slow to really register on a hummingbird’s consciousness, Donna excites considerable attention when she wears her shirt. Even when she’s sitting indoors, the hummers hover near the window, licking their little chops at the sight of this Mother of All Flowers.

But then I’ve seen them hover outside windows for no obvious reason, seeming to thrust and parry like fencers. It took me awhile to comprehend that they were fighting their own reflections in the window. “Who does that blankity-blank bird think he is, anyway, staring at me like that? I’ll show him! I have to admit that he’s a handsome fellow, though...”

ICE CREAM

My grass is intoxicated by all this steamy July sun and it makes my peasant heart feel strong to push through it, watching as breezes from off the Columbia ripple across the man-high stalks, sending pollen ghosting through the heavy air.

Mowing the yard became nothing but a pipe dream when the grass got too high back sometime in May. I tell myself that it’ll do the whole place good to let it go to seed another year to fill the empty patches of soil until recently shadowed by a vast black canopy of evergreen blackberries.

But I know that as it ripens in these high summer days I’ll get an itch to cut it and now I have a way to. No, not a tractor or one of those grossly annoying line trimmers, but a gratifyingly well-made scythe from Austria, my latest toy from Hardwick’s, an amazing hardware store in Seattle’s U District.

Piled high from floor to rafters with every imaginable tool and implement, Hardwick’s is not a place to be during an earthquake, but it makes me salivate to even drive by, thinking of all those artisan-quality chisels, planes and calipers. On my last visit, down a narrow aisle, hidden behind a confused pile of marine varnish and interior latex, was this hand-forged scythe, quietly longing for hands to wield it.

It’s already been put to work down by the creek on the horsetail ferns, those primitive land-gobblers that once grew in compost supplied by dinosaurs. Scything works up a fine sweat in no time, in addition to making a person feel as though he just stepped from a Van Gogh painting of a reaper walking home, whistling in a hard golden twilight.

Someday soon (maybe even today), I’ll begin cutting that tall grass, feeling my hands harden in their leather gloves and the sweat soak into my salt-strained baseball cap to begin dripping from the bill. Scything is a simple art, nearly lost, requiring not so much strength but endurance and a delicate angle of attack, an exercise best performed either with an empty mind or one lightly preoccupied with thoughts of distant fields and the cool refreshments of childhood.

Homemade ice cream is, in my opinion, the best thing. Not just the best compensation for hard work, or the best childhood treat, but the best thing, period. When I was small my grandparents gave us their hand-crank ice cream freezer, a leaky old antique that survived 50 years of use and another 20 of storage out in the cobwebs of the milkhouse on their old dairy farm.

Cracked ice and rock salt, sweet cream and honey, fresh eggs and real vanilla: that is a recipe from heaven. As a little kid you feel like your arm’s going to fall off as you crank and crank, adding layer after layer of ice and salt, before finally the mixture becomes too stiff to crank any longer. Then you wrap the freezer all around with old blankets and gunny sacks and let it season for an endless half hour before pulling a shiny cylinder of ice cream from out of the cold brine. Licking beater’s wooden slates was the purest form of goodness, a treat of near biblical proportions.

Somewhere along the way in my travels to where I am, some parts to grandpa and grandma’s ice cream freezer were left behind, and I think I shall always mourn their loss. But if I can find a replacement somewhere — not a new-fangled electric model but an old hand-crank one — it’s my firmest intention to spend as many as possible of these sunny days working away, cutting grass and splitting wood for winter. And then in hottest part of the afternoon I’ll sit in the shade, make honey-vanilla ice cream and dream of cooler days ahead. Will it be as good as that made with the old freezer? I can only hope...

ALL THUMBS

I got a refresher course last week in the meaning of the expression “all thumbs.”

It could have been worse: it was only an eight-pound splitting maul. And unlike the last time I lost a thumb nail, last week I only smashed it once. I was 14 the first time, straightening a bicycle seat bracket on my dad’s anvil. Smacked it once, danced whooping around the garage, went back to work and — very first hammer fall — whacked it again.

It’s sort of funny how something so small and insignificant as a thumb suddenly becomes your whole world. A sore thumb is magically attracted to hard surfaces, so I’ve been walking around like a hitchhiker, keeping it as far away from everything as I can.

That wasn’t my only discouraging experience last week. I have a shame-faced admission to make: the scythe didn’t work out all that well and I went out and sunk hundreds of dollars on a lawnmower.

Thirty minutes later, proudly mowing where no man has mowed before, I careened into a tree stump, bending the drive shaft and blade to the tune of $100. I’ll probably get it back from the repair shop about the time the monsoon begins. Taking a slight liberty with the Good Book: Vanity of vanity, sayeth the preacher, vanity of vanities. Mowing your lawn is vanity. When will I learn?

But I have to admit, I do like a neat lawn. Maybe, in my old age, I’m becoming what a college buddy of mine used to call a “Lawn Nazi.”

Anyway, preparations are well along for winter at the Winters house, and I’ll probably get back to splitting firewood this weekend, if not before. I wish some of the enormous old cedars had been left standing during the heady early days of Northwest settlement, but there’s no denying that they make great kindling, which is what I was up to before blackening my thumb.

A little cedar smoke in the morning, seeping from a crackling stove as steam rises from my grandma’s old teakettle: Perfection. Then add waffles, real maple syrup and a flock of wild geese coming in for a landing on the Columbia down in front of the house, and perfection gets even better. (Add some sweet corn at dinnertime and my enthusiasm for life knows no bounds.)

September has been my favorite month for as long as I can remember. It’s cold mornings and clear, warm days are how the world ought to be all the time. And with any luck at all, the Peninsula will enjoy its traditional late summer, the year’s really decent weather that sometimes stretches into early November.

WILLAPA BAY

On a late autumn afternoon Willapa Bay glows with a pearly blue light from a surface so pure and still that it embraces the sky like a lover. Gaze across it to the dark encircling hills, breathe slowly until you are as calm and watchful as a heron, and a revelation may come: This place is alive.

Some few may scoff, dismissing this impression, this understanding as mere soft-headed mysticism. They will say Willapa Bay is only a vast flat space, a sticky bowl of colorless muck when the tide is out, a shoal-wrecked shallow pond when the tide is in, a place best left to oystermen and bottom-feeders (which they may privately assert are one in the same thing).

Perhaps those who cannot see can at least be pitied, if not converted, as the bay teems with life in ways not always apparent to those with unknowing eyes. Like the land that surrounds it, the bay has an astonishing capacity for nurturing plants and animals. Stay here for awhile and the great mystery of how life originally began seems transparently obvious: it just happens. Life can’t be forestalled any more than a planet can be stopped from orbiting around the sun.

But except for its whirling storms of birds, Willapa Bay largely enfolds its creatures, concealing a remarkable oasis of life. Some of the Northwest’s most healthy runs of hatchery-spawned salmon swim in its waters. Columbia River sturgeon and gray whales come and go through its narrow opening to the sea like elderly tourists visiting distant relations. Even oysters — so huge a part of the bay’s history, culture and economy — aren’t all that obvious unless a person knows what he is looking for.

The bay is such a prolific environment that something like a million tons of unsavory little shrimp burrow in its warm mud, while an aggressive introduced grass turns thousands of acres into a bright green carpet, displacing native species and destroying oyster grounds.

Despite its problems, it has become axiomatic in recent years to say that Willapa Bay is the last great unspoiled estuary in the nation, maybe in the hemisphere. That is an assertion that stirs almost as much worry as pride among those who have loved it long and hard, through rough waters and calm. For someone from outside to make such an assertion implies a knowledge, an ownership, that only a survivor of this place can rightfully claim. Those same survivors love it and want to protect it, but they damn sure don’t want some pretentious jerk telling them to love and protect it.

Why is Willapa so healthy and alive when so many other places in the world have lost their essence? Oystermen and geography.

Geography’s role is easy to see: Pacific County and the Willapa Bay watershed are a long way from anything. Oh, certainly, early-day promoters hoped to parlay it into a second San Francisco with a deep-water port and a transcontinental railway terminus, but those dreams were light as goose down and quickly blew away. Instead of international commerce, those who survived made it by riding the busts and booms in logging, fishing and oysters. There was rarely much money, but not much was needed. Because of where it is, the bay and the land around it haven’t really been put to the test. Not yet.

Oystering’s contribution is both simple and profound. It also is easily summarized: Those with the greatest economic stake in a place have the greatest incentive to preserve it, and nowhere is that more true than Willapa Bay where oystering lives or dies depending on the quality of water. Historical happenstance in Washington state led to oystermen being assigned ownership rights on Willapa’s vast tidelands and their relentless stewardship has delivered the bay to the late 20th century in exceptionally good condition.

Now, to the considerable surprise of those who have struggled through so-so times on Willapa’s land and waters, there is a slow swelling of outside interest in this remote, accidental preserve. Mirroring the rest of the Pacific Northwest, more people have moved to Pacific County in the last five years than in the preceding 50. Its ocean beaches and, increasingly, the bay, attract hoards of visitors, expanding the area’s population as much as five fold on summer weekends.

Such popularity breeds both promise and great threat. The newcomers and tourists love Willapa country and want to save it. Unfortunately, those places people love, they often in the end destroy, pecking away at the very qualities that attracted them in the first place. Fierce battles erupt whenever this situation arises. Those who first loved a place are rarely the victors.

Around Willapa today, those without a direct economic stake in the bay’s health (and those who have a stake but don’t realize it) are doing as people will: they’re trying to make a living for themselves and their families how ever they can. Critical long-term decisions are being made, all too often based on short-term gain.

A familiar scenario. Will it play out as it has in so many places, with too many people fouling their own nest, or will Willapa be different?

MOVING TO ILWACO

A couple weeks ago, my wife was talking to her doctor in Seattle about the trials and tribulations of moving into a newly remodeled house. He recalled his and his wife’s own experience a few years ago, after which a friend of his asked him if he’d do it again.

“Not with this wife,” he replied.

Well, they survived their safari into the exotic land of paint chips and furniture showrooms and so will we. But for conflict and misadventure, the only thing that rivals our past month is the 19th century search for the source of the Nile.

Much as I admired my dad, especially as a teen-ager I was pretty judgmental about how readily he agreed to my mother’s every suggestion. Now I understand that “Yes, dear,” sincerely spoken and followed up by enthusiastic compliance, becomes just a basic survival strategy, sort of like finding your way through the Northwest woods by paying attention to what side of the trees the moss grows on.

Of course, I’m grossly exaggerating. Our move has, mostly, been genuinely cooperative. We were both plenty ready to leave the remote, tangled hillsides of Altoona — a little old fishing village nine miles northeast across the Columbia from Astoria — for a comfortable neighborhood in Ilwaco. But there’s something about a move that just brings out the Dagwood and Blondie in every couple.

Maybe it comes down to this: Women have strong feelings about how they want their nests to look and are ruthless about getting there, while for men the whole enterprise of moving is sort of like building a wagon train from scratch and setting off across the desert with all life’s possessions. We do it, but we reserve the right to be grouchy.

How many of us can even begin to imagine a life spent all in one place, a life in which the same four walls witness both our first breath and our last? Wouldn’t it be something to never move, to never see the inside of a U-Haul truck, to never wrap a coffee mug in newspaper?

I guess the experience of moving every few years is peculiarly American; I don’t know, having never been anything other than American. But aside from being a humongous hassle, there’s a freedom in it that’s very liberating, the idea that we can just pack up and go, whether to move across town to a different house or across the nation to a different climate and career.

Of all communism’s strange deprivations, its controls on where people could live always hit a nerve in this nation. Especially for people of my generation, being told we couldn’t move would be like being told we couldn’t do anything else we all hold near and dear, like watch basketball or eat cheeseburgers.

At the age of 41, I’ve now lived in 14 different houses, cabins, trailers or apartments in three states — Washington, Oregon and Wyoming. Sometimes I feel I’ve spent more time on the road than the Mongol hoards. And I don’t think I’m all that unusual. Everybody moves. Maybe too much.

But unless President Bill Bradley taps me to be ambassador to Bali, I think I can safely speak for my wife in saying we’re going to be living in our new house in Ilwaco for many years to come.

When I moved back to the West Coast in 1991, all my possessions and two dogs fit in the back of a Toyota Landcruiser. In contrast, our move last weekend took a crew of five men and two women, a 17-foot moving van, and three (or was it four?) trips back and forth between houses.

In our journey through life it seems possessions naturally stick to us, the way black sand clings to a magnet passed through a river’s gravel. When we’re just starting out, we all aspire to have nice things and fun toys. You feel as though you’ll never have the money to buy them. But they accumulate over the years, and before you notice, your life is overstuffed with stuff.

I wonder if real discipline, and freedom, are more a matter of being very careful about what we let into our lives.

Enough philosophizing: The view of the Columbia River estuary from the living room window is prettier than any painting we own, maybe prettier than any painting anybody owns.

We are, again, caught up in the wonder of this place where we all live, and that may be the greatest attraction of moving, to see things fresh and anew, vivid and sharp. We’re amazed as children, and that is worth all the work and worry.

LIVING FASTER

To recreate the power of the sun, cradling its incandescent energy like a tiny star hovering in a kyptonite-lined closet, is the fondest dream of applied physics.

This roiling, focused energy is precisely what I sense in my two-and-a-third-year-old daughter Elizabeth, ironically more when she’s at rest, not careering toward our horrifyingly expensive sofa, a little banshee covered in her Aunt Janie’s raspberry freezer jam.

A first-time father in my 40s, my parenting résumé reads “Woefully ignorant, but willing to learn.” That such a minuscule human being can manifest such strength and intensity is a constant surprise to me. I suppose I thought kids had correspondingly smaller emotions, wills and minds. Boy, am I stupid.

Instead, it turns out children are like the hot points of light with which, as a boy, I cruelly roasted ants by focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass. Though they’re small, kids already contain a large measure of all they will become, plus globs of well-justified frustration about having to communicate with big, arbitrary adults who insist banana slugs aren’t nice pets.

The joy of discovery may be the defining positive characteristic of our species; to walk, as I did earlier this week, with a child on a ridge above Cape Disappointment is to experience a distinct echo of what William Clark saw in 1805. Every flower and hapless caterpillar is a species unknown to science — to be touched and studied and committed to memory.

This makes for a pretty slow walk. Lizzie was trailing me by 50 feet when I turned to call. I found her completely enthralled by a gone-to-seed thistle, studying it eye-to-eye from a distance of three inches with all the fascination of a biologist examining slides of strange bacteria harvested from a comet. Her mind was aflame with discovery, her concentration astonishing.

The ability and opportunity to focus on commonplace things is one of the least appreciated luxuries of our time. Managing multiple jobs, a family, personal stock portfolio and two or three high-profile hobbies is, supposedly, the hallmark of a successful life.

“Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything,” by James Gleick, is a just-published book that examines America’s frenetic pace, apparently portraying it as a trendy lifestyle choice. (I say “apparently” since one way I’m making time for my wife and kid is by only reading the reviews, not the book itself.)

According to the New York Times, in it he writes of a generation of workers weaned on video games who function at “twitch speed.” A study cited by Gleick reveals that Americans spend an average of four minutes a day having sex, 16 minutes looking for lost objects and three hours watching television. The “close door” buttons in elevators are often just placebos, with no other function than to make us feel we’ve speeded up our trip. What isn’t wrong with this picture?

I, meanwhile, remember Lao Tzu’s 2,600-year-old observation: “Always be rushing about, and life is without hope.”

I had an uncle who claimed we’re all bigots about something, and though I loved him, he was bigoted about all too many things. But I have to admit that as I’ve gotten older I have developed a decided bigotry toward the East.

There are many good folks east of the Mississippi whose only fault is a deplorable accent. But I believe the trendily inhuman pacing described in “Faster” is largely the fault of easterners. I have no affection for the place.

Last week one of my best friends sent word he’s moving his family from Montana to Pennsylvania. Coincidentally, another beloved old western friend already lives there with her husband. And I gotta say, I think they’re nuts. On the other hand, I’m sure they feel of me as a big game hunter must as he speeds in his Range Rover past a loin-clothed native kneeling in the grass.

There are disadvantages and sacrifices attached to living here at the edge of the continent. But I have a faith that goes to my bones that one quiet afternoon like I had with my kid Tuesday is far better than making $1,000 a day juggling what passes for life in the city.

Lizzie’s teaching me a priceless lesson in concentration.

INDIAN ART

December’s breath-robbing riot of storms always catches in my throat like a salmon bone, making me think of what it must have been like here 500 years ago, when no white man even imagined this coast where people had already been living for hundreds of generations. It is inspiring, scary and profoundly humbling.

Visiting the Lower Columbia in the winter 1846-47, the artist Paul Kane provided some of what little we know of the twilight of the mighty Chinook empire, describing village huts constructed in pits dug three feet into dry ground, about 20 feet square. “Round the sides square cedar boards are sunk and fastened together with cords and twisted roots, rising about four feet above the outer level.”

He made a painting on paper of the interior of a riverside ceremonial lodge. “It was here,” according to modern authors Diane Eaton and Sheila Urbanek, “that the winter ‘spirit singing’ took place and supernatural powers were sought: power for curing, for hunting, for canoe making. Those who were successful in the quest emerged from behind the dance screen into the firelight to the reverberation of drumming and the rattling of deer hooves. In the flickering firelight, in songs and in dances, they gave proof of the spiritual powers invested in them.”

All this speaks of a cultural sophistication beyond that which most of us in our ignorance ascribe to the Columbia’s first residents. They weren’t shivering savages squatting miserably in the rain. Think of the stories, songs and artworks that must have been spun in those snug, smoky huts over the endless months and centuries of incessant rain; the baby-making and gossip and back-scratching. An uncountable lost fortune of human experience echoes across these broad waters.

What a challenge it must have been to go into these drenching cold months clothed only in naked skin, animal hide and cedar, and yet the Chinooks did so with grace, power and a considerable degree of ferocity. Kane and other visitors in the early 19th century wrote, for instance, of the Chinook Chief Casanov, who could lead 1,000 men into battle in 1829 and ruled by terror through the agency of an assassin known as his scoocoom, a kind of evil genie.

That we know so little of the Chinooks is our own fault. Not only is their eon of history virtually ignored, but we brought the diseases that effectively destroyed them. In the case of the mighty Casanov, Kane wrote “His own immediate family, consisting of ten wives, four children, and eighteen slaves, were reduced in one year to one wife, one child, and two slaves.” His only remaining son later died of tuberculosis.

There’s no making amends for destruction, accidentally or on purpose, of an ancient people and virtually all their encompassing universe of forests, salmon and trade routes. But it is vitally important the Chinook people, living and dead, be remembered. We are much poorer for the absence of their blood-and-bone understanding of how this place fits together. We need their stories, songs and art.

Wandering down the Vancouver, B.C., waterfront recently, I ducked into the Inuit Gallery and ended up spending much of an afternoon learning about Northwest and Canadian Indian carving from Kim Ruttig. Spurred by publication of such books as “Down From the Shimmering Sky” and the recent “Mythic Beings: Spirit Art of the Northwest Coast,” tribal masks, bentwood boxes and other objects enjoy surging popularity and exhilarating prices.

Seems to me local artisans from high school age on up, and particularly those with a touch or more of Chinook blood in their veins, are missing out both on a prime commercial opportunity and a key way of reconnecting to the past in not robustly embracing this region’s ancestral marriage to cedar in all its forms. Visitors to Astoria or Ilwaco — not to mention we ourselves — would relish the chance to own fine baskets, ceremonial objects and everyday tools hand-crafted in the Chinook tradition.

I was awe-struck wandering amidst the masks with Kim, hearing of the guild-like protections that keep families from borrowing each other’s designs, of the taboos that keep inexperienced carvers from using powerful sacred copper in their works. There is real magic in these images embodying the creatures and beings of the ancient coastal world. As the winds come screaming off the Pacific, lashing my windows with rain, I believe these spirits still have power, still deserve honor.

JANUARY STORM

Well, that certainly was something: Even on a coast known for storms, Sunday’s blow was one to remember.

Though it started fairly calm, one look at the gathering western sky told me we were in for it. The charcoal-tinted clouds out over the ocean had the tattered but somehow compressed look they get when they’re getting all pumped full of steroids from a fast-punching front, while high-elevation clouds seen through breaks had the vaguely pearly ripples that presage a monster on the way.

No sooner had my wife hit the road for her every-other-week pilgrimage to Seattle, the storm swept down across the ridge where we live above Baker Bay. The power went off once, came briefly back on, and then went down for the count, and my brave little daughter and I hunkered down for the day.

The wind soon sucked the heat out of the house, but Elizabeth’s been on a recent kick of practicing putting on her own clothes, sometimes adding layer after layer after layer even on warm days, so she was pretty well fixed for the chill. We started a fire in the fireplace, resigned in advance to a little smoke, and ate cold Y2K tuna and potato chips for lunch.

Up the hill from us, our neighbor’s rain gutter came loose and whipped around like one of the giant octopus tentacles in the campy 1960s movie “10,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” The wind violently grabbed up one of my waterlogged wood deck chairs and sent it flying into an old 70-pound bronze thing-a-ma-jig — picked up years ago at old Bill’s junk shop under the bridge — which I use as an outside coffee table and sent it flying like a tin can. My fence is so much kindling. But all in all, I’m not complaining.

It’s sure a wonder more trees aren’t tipped over or ripped apart in storms like Sunday’s — they must be well-engineered. Even in a semi-hurricane, most that come down are the old soldiers that are all rotted out inside and the lonesome ones we’ve exposed to danger by removing all their neighbors.

Having the power out so long made me re-examine how dependent we all are on electricity. Even though I’m basically an optimist, I’m just about willing to bet that if we ever do experience a major disaster, it will coincide with nasty, freezing weather. Granted, temperatures are rarely so low here as to be life-threatening, but Sunday provided a taste of the discomfort and inconvenience that come from losing your primary heat source on a cold day. I’m not quite to the point of actually buying a pellet stove with battery back-up, but I’m sure going to be giving more thought to all alternative heat options.

I’m always impressed with how well people here cope with the challenges of weather. Our many elderly citizens, in particular, set a standard for stoical and brave endurance. I hope any who need assistance know to call for it. We youngsters are willing to help however we can. (But now that I stop to think about it, seniors who lived through World War II and the Great Depression know lots more about backbone and survival than most younger generations ever will.)

The people who really do yeoman’s duty in storm season are, of course, our electric utility workers, law enforcement and emergency response personnel. I’ve said so often before and doubtless will many more times again — these are the heroes that make it possible for the rest of us to live here. Let’s make sure they know they’re appreciated, even as they continue working to repair damage from Sunday. It’s a heck of deal to spend your day off, as utility linemen did, working in outright dangerous conditions getting folks’ power back on. Bless their hearts.

Winter is young, and it doesn’t take any strange mystical powers to predict that we all have more adventures in store before it’s done. But as I write this, it’s a beautiful sunny day, and I’m very pleased to live where we do.

RIVER DAYS

I want to be a Teletubby.

The colorful, bulbous-bottomed English imports are my 19-month-old daughter Elizabeth’s favorite TV characters and we spent much of a day at home last week watching their innocent antics as Grays River spilled over Altoona Road, blocking access to Rosburg Store and all the other sophisticated delights of the outside world.

Teletubbies live in a bright green world not unlike ours here on the Lower Columbia, except that it never seems to rain in Teletubby Land. Nor do we enjoy magical windmills that beam special broadcasts of happy, helpful children straight to TVs mounted in our bellies, or tellies in our tubbies, as they apparently say in Britain.

A small-town editor’s figure naturally gravitates toward that of a Teletubby and I already have prominent ears, so perhaps in a few years all I need do is paste on some purple fur to stand in for Tinky-Winky, the biggest of the four Teletubbies. Then I can live in a world where the sun is a laughing baby and the most serious conflicts revolve around finding who spilt the Tubby-custard and tracked it around our sod-roofed flying saucer.

During a brief sun break Elizabeth and I walked a quarter mile down Altoona Road, she racing along on her 10-inch legs, stopping only now and then to stomp in a puddle or poke at some bit of squashed salamander or something else we don’t want Mom to find out about.

We clambered down to the river bank, where I showed Lizzie the pleasures of throwing pebbles. She was so enraptured that she screamed the whole way home when it was time to quit.

We live in a perfect place for Elizabeth, a place where there is water, water everywhere. Her Mama calls her a little water dog, a virtual mer-creature like everyone else on the Swedish side of the family.

Herrington Point and Altoona, maybe nine miles northeast of Astoria across the estuary, have a richly maritime feel. For anyone in love with the Columbia and with water in general, this remote part of Wahkiakum County is full immersion, like letting a milk drinker swim in a reservoir of cream.

The pure rain dives from the sky and in the winter there’s a little creek every 50 feet or so, coursing toward the river quick as water squeezed from a saturated sponge. It’s awesome how much water there is.

Granted, Altoona’s all too dark on some of these 10-hour winter days, but usually it’s also a place saturated with the river’s light. Down at river level, where Elizabeth and I crouched by the water, sometimes hopping back from the wakes of passing ships, the air positively glows with pearly blue light. The estuary acts as a vast reflecting pond, a whole world in miniature with eagles and terns turning overhead, the bridge enclosing the western horizon.

There was a sad event in Altoona last week, the passing of one of the last Columbia River salmon canneries. We had to step over some of its boards on our way up the pebble beach, solid old rough-cut lumber from 1904 passing from history to mere debris.

Particularly on a sunny day, you could clearly see the cannery from parts of Astoria, its metal roof shining in the sun. I often looked that way and let my eyes follow around the shore to where my house is hidden in the trees. The cannery had a solidity to it that made it a reference point in many ways, a touchstone to our past.

Despite evidence to the contrary in the form of thousands of empty pilings where other canneries once stood, Altoona’s felt permanent. The Stephen family, the cannery’s last owners, took good care of it. It had survived nine decades and seemed poised to survive several more. But a strong wind from an unusual direction toppled it like a domino, and subsequent storms are breaking it to bits.

Much as anything, those old days intrigue me because I think of the flesh-and-blood men and women who lived here in this same place we do, skipping stones with their kids and drinking up the Columbia-colored light.

p>FRANZ BOAS

Maybe most everybody else in Washington and Oregon knows who Franz Boas was, but I never heard of him until a couple years ago. I’m a little ashamed, because without a doubt he deserves to be reckoned among the great heroes of the Pacific Northwest, if not the nation.

It was Boas, a German-born anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology, who captured most of what we know of true Northwest Native American culture, which was fast evaporating in the 1890s as the last native speakers died.

Besides Boas, every school child in the counties of the Lower Columbia ought to know the name Charles Cultee. And we all should be well-versed at least in the basics of what he told Boas in the summers of 1890 and 1891 in the remote Pacific County village of Bay Center.

As described by author Douglas Cole in his excellent biography “Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906” (1999, University of Washington Press), this clever, tough and adventurous man was an anthropological Indiana Jones, a collector of myths and languages instead of lost arks and precious jewels. As a young man, Boas set out into the wild lands of this region as a kind of prospector, and he struck paydirt time after time.

Cultee was pure gold. Cultee’s mother’s mother was a Kathlamet, his father’s mother a Clatsop, so he knew both Chinookan languages. He was only able to converse with whites in Chinook Jargon, a rudimentary trade language, but his “remarkable intelligence” overcame this difficulty and he entrusted Boas with a wealth of legends and religious myths of the Columbia estuary and Willapa Bay. The Smithsonian published Cultee’s Chinook tales in 1894 and his Kathlamet tales in 1901.

“What I now collect exists now only in the mind of a single man,” Boas said in an 1890 letter home, quoted by Cole. Although he despised Bay Center, Boas stayed on and on, “afraid that the old fellow may die before someone else gets hold of him.”

Speaking through Boas, Charles Cultee has bequeathed a remarkable treasure to any willing to listen.

Those of you who read this column from time to time — thank you — probably know my feelings about the legends of this area. For most of us, this mythology isn’t ours in the sense of blood ties, but I think stories that have bubbled down through hundreds of generations can tell us deeply meaningful things about this place we know and love. At the very least, they give interesting clues to what existed before our time, what this world was before we transformed it.

I’m going to devote some future columns to a little of the substance of Cultee’s tales, but there are so many elk enthusiasts in the area, I thought I’d first give you an abridged version of the Chinook myth of the greatest hunter.

A youth was in the habit of setting traps. He always killed bears. One year he had set his traps as usual, and when he went to look after them he heard a woman crying in the trap. She was a pretty woman. Her hair was brown, her feet and her hands were tattooed. He opened the trap and took her hand out of it. She said to him: “You will excel all the people. You have caught even me in your trap. You will be a great hunter. ... When you go hunting carry only a stick in your hand and paint that stick.”

Back in his village, the boy learned from an elder that the woman was the hunter spirit. Cedar bark was dyed red and put on him. A stick was painted red and given to him. Then he went up the river, singing. As his relatives gathered on the shore, one elk after another came out of the woods. They lost track of the number after 70.

Then the boy came down singing. He took that stick and pointed seaward to the water. The elk stood there a short while and then swam. When the boy came to the sea he shouted, and all the elk died. Now he called the wind to blow landward and a northerly wind arose. The elk drifted ashore. Now his relatives cut up only the fat ones, merely skinning the lean ones. The houses of his relatives became full.

Now, whenever he went to hunt elk, he carried only a stick, and shouted. As soon as an elk met him it died. He excelled all hunters.

MYTHTOWN

When I last wrote, I said I’d be relating more legends of the Chinook people. So here, with some reinterpretation and painful abridgement, is the “Tale of the Four Cousins,” as told by Charles Cultee to Franz Boas in 1890 in Bay Center, Wash.:

Imagine a place named Mythtown on the southern shore of Shoalwater Bay, the spring village of the people each year as they make their way down to the great river E’mal-e. A poor old woman lives there in great poverty with her orphaned grandson, who crawls with lice and disgusts his three older cousins.

This elderly lady is employed by the people spinning net twine from willow bark and she slowly saves a little for herself, from which at last she makes a large rope. As his cousins plan a gambling trip north in the bay to a village of the Chehalis people, the poor boy’s grandma tells him to go with them and trade the rope for warm ground-hog blankets.

But among the Chehalis the boy forgets his grandma’s instructions and trades the rope for a pretty sea-otter pelt. On their way back home, as the four cousins camp beside the Nemah River, the oldest says “I shall take the sea otter away from him. He will certainly gamble and lose it.” But the one next to the youngest argues “Let the poor boy alone. Let him lose. If his grandmother gave it to him, let him lose it; if somebody made him happy and gave him something, let him lose it.”

During the night, though, as the poor youngest cousin sleeps shivering in his elkskin blanket with no hair, the oldest wakes the others and they make off in their canoe for Mythtown with the otter pelt. Early the next morning, the boy awakens and realizes what happened. He thinks: “Behold! They deserted me!” Though the rivers are all swollen with spring rains, he has no choice but to set out afoot for home.

Reaching the broad mouth of the Naselle River at ebb tide and waiting for slack water, he first hears mysterious noises coming from underwater, then sees five huge black bears emerge from the river and stand upon it. The boy thinks “I must surely die,” but he courageously throws his elkskin blanket on the shore and begins to swim across. He passes one bear after another, but as he reaches the fourth, it looks him right in the face. As the boy faints, he realizes the bear is really the powerful spirit Itc!xia´n.

In a trance, he wakes in the house of this supernatural being, which is filled with voices speaking different languages. Itc!xia´n tells him “Those women whom you hear now on both sides of the house will be your wives. Thus you will live among the people. This will make you a chief.” And then Itc!xia´n gives him a bird arrowhead made of bone. Waking, the boy finds himself on the south bank of the river, his elkskin blanket by his side, and he resumes his walk home.

Finally, he arrives at the mouth of I´tskuil and crosses. The people of Mythtown are gambling, playing the game of disks, when one looks up and says “A black bear is running about on the mud.” Then the oldest cousin looks up and says “That’s no bear but the one we left behind. What does he want here? Now we must be ashamed of him again.” But again the next-to-youngest cousin pities him and says “Leave him alone in his poverty. Why should you hate him?”

The gamblers go back to their game, but one soon notices the boy’s arrowhead, and says “Let us bet, I will stake an arrowhead against yours.” “As you like,” says the boy, and he wins once, then three times, and four times and soon he has 10 arrowheads. Time after time, he wins. He wins and wins and wins. He wins a canoe. He wins first one slave and then many. He wins all the property of everyone he plays. Now he wins over all the common people, and then the chiefs. He himself becomes a chief. Everyday the people eat in his house.

After many days of this, his oldest cousin guesses “Perhaps he saw a supernatural being. He is too hopeful. I will play him to the accompaniment of our magical batons — that will knock him down to size.” Now the cousins play as the people beat time with batons, but nevertheless the youngest cousin wins all the eldest’s slaves and canoes. He does the same to the second-oldest. Finally, the next-to-youngest cousin said “I want to play with you next,” but the once-poor boy answered “No, I pity you, as you once pitied me.”

That lousy-headed boy became so rich he bought wives among the Quinault, the Tillamook, the tribes up the river, the Cowlitz. And thus, as Itc!xia´n foretold, he was surrounded by women speaking many different tongues.

If his cousins hadn’t stolen the sea otter from him, he would never have seen the supernatural being. Itc!xia´n: He saw him.

KLONDIKE

To my way of thinking, Seattle’s personality was at its scalawag best back when it served as a loading platform and shearing shed for innocent lambs heading off to the Klondike gold fields.

I obviously wasn’t there at the time, but I’ve experienced such a steady decline in affection for the place in the past 30 years that I figure it’d take about a century of backpedaling to get to where I’d like it again. Heck, I’d even settle for a vile personality over what it’s become, a dreary hive crawling with pale bees, alternately torpid and ill-tempered.

That the city and its suburbs are such a magnet for the young says less about Seattle’s energy and charms than it does about a culture that considers “Gladiator” and MTV benchmarks of good taste. Like those cultural icons, Seattle is a product of corporate marketing, a sort of gaudy amusement park that keeps pushing new rubes through its gates even though all the rides are already clogged, and charges $40 for the privilege.

Seattle’s gifts to the modern world — the $3 cup of coffee, airliners that fall out of the sky, nerve-grating music, and computer software whose chief attribute is to require expensive upgrades every other year — all combine to make the city a vast and rather merciless company town, one where the inhabitants are imbued with a pathetic sense of gratitude for being permitted to reside in over-priced houses squeezed cheek by jowl on once-forested hills.

Seattle’s company-town character is nowhere more in evidence than in its two daily newspapers. The Post-Intelligencer indulges in a sad and transparent knee-jerk liberalism that achieves nothing while still managing to irritate. But notwithstanding the P-I’s empty pretensions, both it and the Times kowtow to Microsoft, Starbucks, Boeing and other mega-business with all the avidness of groveling junior salesmen trying to get into a swanky blue-blood country club.

I had little sympathy for the World Trade Organization protesters, who for the most part struck me as silly kids getting a kick out of making a mess on someone else’s property — a street party with no rules and no real aims. I wondered what my old college friend Carlos Aliaga, a Bolivian Marxist-Leninist, would make of college students claiming to be anarchists while commuting from their comfortable apartments in Eugene to throw rubbish at cops. My guess is, working like a dog to try to lift the destitute of his nation out of the stone age, that Carlos would have no more use for the WTO protesters than a hit man has for a water pistol.

But I’ve got to give the kids credit — at least many of them seem to notice something is not quite right with allowing multinational firms to manipulate every moment of our lives from cradle to grave. And along with Los Angeles, Seattle can pride itself on becoming the principle West Coast headquarters these companies that my boorish but occasionally insightful acquaintance trial lawyer Gerry Spence calls the non-breathers. As such, it’s only fair that Seattle become a focal point for protest. Too bad it only happens on special occasions.

Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger, an alternative Seattle weekly, recently said something that kind of had me nodding. “Until the 50’s, all of Seattle was Times Square, filled with whorehouses, and now they’re trying to stamp that out. If this town really wanted to put itself on the map it should set up a red light district and be true to its historical and cultural roots.” Like I said: Get back to the Klondike days, when Seattle made no bones about prostituting itself. Honesty is the best policy.

So why all this animosity toward Seattle, which, after all, basically is an innocent and well-meaning town? Well, I’ve been up there for days, painting one of those over-priced houses, getting set to sell it for too much money. Painting always makes me cranky. Sorry Seattle.

TOO MUCH STUFF

“Uncle Matt, you’ve got too much stuff!”

When your adorable two-and-a-half-year-old niece editorializes on your materialism, you know you’ve tipped into what French intellectuals dismiss as the bourgeois, the small-time property-owning class.

Donna and I have built quite the nest for ourselves and our daughter Elizabeth since I moved to the Long Beach Peninsula 10 years ago with little more than two old dogs and whatever else could be levered into the back of a 1978 Landcruiser.

We know many people with more things than we. But our household does seem out of proportion to two adults and one skinny little kid. In my travels, I’ve visited homes where eight lived in a space no bigger than our living room, where the fanciest thing was the dad’s rice bowl.

But I don’t feel too guilty or embarrassed about our piles of possessions. We’ve got good excuses for nearly all of it.

One of the biggest factors is simple American demographics. We’re a family of three, and the odds of it getting any bigger are approximately zip. In contrast, my grandfather Elmer Winters was one of 12 children who lived past infancy. In other words, we’re at the small end of the nozzle for generations of passed-down furniture, photos and well-worn tools.

To be honest, we’ve also done our share of acquiring — with 11 fewer kids, we’ve had a bit more money to spread around than my great-grandpa and grandma did.

There are the closets of 1980s size-six outfits and a wedding dress we hope Liz’ll someday want to wear. There are the walls of books, the Mexican rugs, the paintings we couldn’t live without. Buying it all made some kind of sense at the time. Only in the aggregate does it make me stop and wonder just when we got carried away.

(Note to potential burglars: Try to break in and I’ll make it my personal mission to see you spend the next 20 years a guest of Washington state in Walla Walla. Not that we have anything you’d want.)

Our house just got more crowded on account of cleaning out the basement of Donna’s old place in Seattle, a corner of which was packed like King Tut’s tomb with many of the things she inherited when her mother died after a profoundly damaged and damaging life.

A cruel alcoholic, Donna’s mother was nevertheless an extraordinarily pretty woman, Rita Hayworth in a cool Viking way, and I’ve gotten a certain voyeuristic thrill looking at her photo albums. It’s been like reading a true crime novel, seeing this woman at each stage of her life, knowing she was on an arc of disintegration and destruction, so full of potential at the start and so rotten at the end.

Perversely fascinating as Betty was and is, I’m more interested in her victims — Donna, her sister Michelle and brothers Joe and Pete. Then as now, as a child Donna was beautiful and intelligent in a curiously innocent way. It warms my heart to see photos of her at the age Elizabeth is now — clear-eyed, serious, trying so hard to be what her mama wanted her to be.

It breaks my heart to think of that little girl and her siblings living with a mad woman in a fancy house overlooking Puget Sound, being awakened to keep her company on nightly binges of drinking and self-absorbed chatter.

Houses and fine stuff can hide a lot of awfulness, at least for a while.

The summer the Rainbow Family of Living Light visited my hometown, my mom struck up a conversation with one of the hippie girls in our local grocery. She was carrying a newborn she had delivered herself and Mom talked the grocery clerk into weighing him in the big, white produce scale.

Mom and I were laughing about it the other day, wondering whatever became of that baby. My cynical side guessed he grew up to be an investment banker, unwilling to give a quarter to a bum on the sidewalk.

But the romantic in me hopes he honors his mother, chuckles about being weighed in a cowtown grocery store at the behest of a kindly lady, and lives a modest life full of joy with a small pack of children of his own.

p>CAPTAIN KEEGAN

Drifting before a tremendous southwestern gale while her starving crew and captain clung to the rigging, the three-masted American schooner Frank W. Howe of Port Townsend, Wash., struck the breakers off Seaview, four miles north of Ilwaco, this morning. Captain Austin Keegan beached his vessel to save the lives of himself and crew. The schooner’s back was broken before she struck, and only her cargo of railway ties kept her from sinking and letting the miserable crew down into a watery grave.

“We left Ballard Feb. 12,” Capt. Keegan said when safe ashore. “All went well until Thursday afternoon, when we were off Yaquina Bay. The seas had been rolling heavily and suddenly the schooner began to fill. She was pumped out, but steadily went down by the head. As she did so the breakers began to come over her, and we took to the rigging. William Van Santer, our cook, was killed a short time before by a huge comber which struck him while he was taking his trick at the wheel. Our provisions were soon destroyed. We clung to the rigging and got along the best we could, patiently waiting for the gale to abate.

“Believing that we couldn’t much longer stand the exposure I determined to make a desperate risk, and by putting on all sail possible, to try to make either the mouth of the Columbia or work my way inside Cape Flattery. Not getting inside the Columbia river bar, I did the next best thing and went ashore on Long Beach. We owe our lives to the work of the lifesaving crew.”

Never in the history of the lifesaving crews stationed about the mouth of the Columbia have they been forced to overcome such difficulties as presented themselves in saving the men from the schooner today.

The Feb. 22, 1904 wreck of the schooner Frank W. Howe still has the power to excite interest, thanks largely to Capt. Keegan’s vivid description printed above from press accounts at the time. Just imagine holding onto a plunging ship’s rigging for days as waves washed over her deck, unsure when she might completely break apart under the strain.

The notable thing is, though the wreck of the Howe was particularly dramatic, its general circumstances certainly weren’t uncommon in the closing days of the age of sail back a century ago. Recently reading James Gibbs’ popular history “Pacific Graveyard” was an entertaining reminder of many similar stories I published years ago in the Chinook Observer by my delightful old correspondent and friend Edith Olson. There’s something very gripping about those times when sailing ships were still the primary but dangerous means of hauling cargo from one port to another on the Pacific Coast.

Soon after reading of the wreck of the Howe in Gibbs’ book, I was thrilled to see a collection of many of Capt. Keegan’s personal papers and photos come up for auction in San Diego. I have a hard time imagining why any family would part with such relics of an honest-to-goodness sailing ship captain, particularly one as relatively famous as Keegan. But being the lucky high bidder, I was tickled to have them end up here in an area where I discovered the captain spent a lot of time on various vessels in Willapa Bay, the Columbia and Puget Sound.

His papers give a good sense of the small cadre of captains who sailed these waters, and of their ships. The next vessel Keegan captained after the Howe, for instance, was the Solano, which also soon preceded to wreck here at the mouth of the Columbia. Thankfully for Capt. Keegan’s career, Solano’s wreck came a few months after he moved on. But wrecks don’t seem to have been a serious impediment to finding employment, as Keegan stayed pretty steadily at one helm after another, despite eventually presiding over another shipwreck, of the steamer Majestic south of San Francisco in 1909.

The greatest appeal of the captain’s papers are the insights they yield into a man’s life, a poignant reminder that even the most action-packed of lives can eventually be summed up in the contents of a couple cardboard boxes. He lived large, but in addition to thrilling stories, I love the little details. His personal expenses while waiting for his ship to be loaded in South Bend, Wash., in February 1906: Two pair shoes $7.50; 1 bottle whisky $1; cigars $1; soap .15; envelopes .10.

Here’s a toast to you, captain: I admire you, I remember you, I salute you.

MRS. ROSS

Do you recall a 1960s TV show about the early settlement of the Northwest? One of my only solid recollections is a line from its theme song, “The sky’s the bluest blue in Seattle,” which always struck my funnybone for some reason.

During its short run — I think it only lasted a season — it was full of rousing adventures of heroic loggers and their attractive blonde wives/girlfriends. Since some of my ancestors were Washington and Oregon settlers, it made a bigger impression on me than it might have otherwise.

I’m prejudiced, but it strikes me as weird our nation so glorifies smelly and illiterate cowboys, while mostly neglecting stories about other colorful working people of the early days, like loggers, fishermen and miners (many of whom, I’m the first to admit, also were smelly and illiterate). Driving a herd of cows over the range to a waiting boxcar and ultimate slaughterhouse just doesn’t strike me as intrinsically any more romantic than felling tall timber or pulling 60-pound Chinook aboard a sail-powered gillnet boat.

The pages of various early incarnations of the Astorian, the Chinook Observer and other long-standing Northwest newspapers are filled with ideas for a thousand screenplays. We’ve lost the gift of creating cultural myths out of everyday experience, but if we had an urge to, these old clippings would be the place to turn. It’s good stuff, with strength and legitimacy no cheesy TV show can ever match.

One of my favorite stories concerns a woman named Margaret Ross who homesteaded in northern Pacific County along with her two adult sons and proceeded to get into a wonderfully awful feud with her neighbors that eventually worked its way into federal criminal court in Tacoma.

People who don’t know any better say there’s two sides to every story. But as someone who’s been in the newspaper business in one way or another since I was 15, I can testify there are as many sides to a story as there are individuals who know anything about it. Maybe more. But in this instance, the passage of nearly 90 years and death of all the principals has boiled the Ross feud down to fairly simple outlines.

To her enemies — pretty much the entire population of Pacific County — Margaret Ross was a hellcat, liar and claim jumper. The early 20th century was a time when ordinary people had to fight hard to make a decent life in these thick woods and then, as now, property rights were a particularly touchy issue. In the forests along North River, which empties into Willapa Bay between Raymond and the ocean, railroads were avidly stealing all they could and selling it to George Weyerhaeuser. Local residents were a might peevish.

Into this settling, Ross and her two boys boldly blundered. Judging from press accounts, diplomats they were not. In May 1913 they moved next to and partially overran another homestead owned by a Mrs. Vanderpool, who previously had staked her claim and then went away to work, clouding her title. A few weeks later, Vanderpool and her son showed back up in a hurry, and fireworks commenced.

To her friends — including state legislators for whom she worked and members of the Monday Civic Club of Tacoma, a suffragette-leaning ladies’ group — Ross was a forward-thinking pioneer. A former newspaperwoman from Sioux Falls, S.D., she was determined to make it on her own and unprepared to take “No” for an answer.

The battle royal gained steam throughout the summer. One example later recounted in court: “Mrs. Ross described how ... as she toiled up the steps leading to her home with sugar, flour, lard and other staples ... Mrs. Vanderpool played ‘You’re old, but You’re Awful Tough’ on a phonograph, and as the disc whirred along its dismal strain Mrs. Ross said her neighbor cranked the machine again, put in a keen needle and started the song anew.”

This in turn sparked one of the feud’s high points, as the Ross boys accidentally-on-purpose dropped a six-foot diameter fir on the Vanderpool cabin, with Mrs. Vanderpool in it.

Finally, deep in the night of Jan. 11, 1913, a dozen local men who came to be called the Night Riders arrived disguised in hoods at the Ross cabin, burned it and the barn to the ground and forcibly escorted Mrs. Ross and the boys to the old Chehalis County line, with instructions never to return.

Like our recent election, this was a dispute that didn’t know when to end. Mrs. Ross and her allies tried to unknot the tightly laced Pacific County justice system for three years. But time after time, state and federal juries found the Night Riders not guilty of any crime.

I haven’t managed to track down what happened to Mrs. Ross after her years of notoriety, but I’ll bet she remained interesting. She probably was a battle-ax. She may even have been a claim jumper. But I’m absolutely certain she was one grand woman.

Asked in court about her prior life in South Dakota, “Did you have any controversies or trouble there?” she simply responded “I was in the newspaper business six years.” The courtroom snickered.

So did I.

WILMER AND STELLA

Besides typical frothy teen-age fantasies centering on a certain terrifyingly winsome and brainy cheerleader, when I was 15 or so I daydreamed of having a home on some nearly deserted estuary in Washington state, surrounded by tall timber and looking out on broad waters. Kind of a weird teen fantasy, I admit, but what can I say?

Altoona, which I came upon one bright November day in 1992 while cruising down blackberry-bordered roads in my ivory-white ‘66 T-Bird, fit the bill to a “T.”

Many see it from Astoria every day, though only a few know what they’re looking at, northeast across nine miles of the Columbia. An inspiring remnant of one of many fishing villages that once lined the lower river, only a scattering of Altoona homes now survive where a couple hundred people once lived during the season, canning salmon and eventually tuna.

I think it is one of the most incredible places in the Northwest, with a river-infused light that hums into your consciousness like some barely audible Gregorian chant, with sweet air freshly birthed by river and ocean.

The only reason thousands don’t live and vacation there is that it not only feels miles from nowhere — it is. You drive about four and half miles down a twisty lane from Rosburg Store, before coming out into the open at Grays Bay. The road then mostly hugs the water for another eight miles or so before dead-ending in another forgotten place, Pillar Rock, from where Lewis and Clark first spotted the breakers on Clatsop Spit, and knew their long journey was over.

I ended up buying a house on Grays Bay, a mile before Altoona proper, and though the drive eventually got to me and brought me back to the metropolis of Ilwaco, that watery Brigadoon will always be a part of me and I still own property out there.

In between me and Altoona was Cottardi, the old Columbia River Packers fish buying station. Though darn-near windy as the gorge, in other respects it was comfortable as a snug little nest, several tidy whitewashed buildings with dirt paths lined by flower beds, like a compact stone village from the Italian Alps reproduced in straight-grain Douglas fir.

For decades it was home to Wilmer and Stella Johnson, and it’s impossible to imagine a more perfect couple to occupy such a gem-like setting. Wilmer and Stella lived there so long — drank so much water from its crystalline spring-fed creek, caught so many big salmon from the river and ate so much venison from the hills — they actually became the place. They were old growth, pure and solid right down to the heartwood.

Wilmer was an elfish man weighing maybe 95 pounds when I met him in his 80s, who still could have picked me up and thrown me across the room. He was every bit as bright as he was strong, and might have been able to give a night-by-night account of the 1939 gillnet season, but was far too polite to actually do so.

They were married so long that a conversation with them was a tandem event, with Stella’s clear voice piping in with a woman’s details, a safe-hearth accompaniment to Wilmer’s tales of bitter storms, narrow rescues and endless misty mornings on the great river. Her dignity and strength were an inspiration to anyone who ever met her, as was her long, brave battle with cancer that finally ended with Wilmer alone after all.

At about the same time, the forest was logged right up to Cottardi’s houses. It was as if a beautiful enchantment was over, and the world moved on to a newer, tattered age. The land heals. It’ll soon soften and green up, but it won’t be the same without Wilmer and Stella.

I was reminded of Wilmer and Stella the other day, along with a lot of other tough old gillnetters, by last week’s showing of “Work Is Our Joy: The Story of the Columbia River Gillnetter” at the Clatsop Community College Performing Arts Center. This well-produced local film is shown not and then, and I commend it to your attention the next time it comes along. It gives a richer appreciation for the place we live and all those who knitted our communities’ nets back in the real honest-to-God fishing days.

One story that stands out for me is that of a solo violinist playing a nostalgic old song for the other fishermen as all lolled in their boats waiting for the tide along a dark shore. It might bring a tear to your eye, while explaining better than anything else ever could just why we have to stick up for our river, past and future.

DOUGLAS OF THE FIR

It’s remarkable to consider how much the Lower Columbia region has been transformed in the relatively few decades since European settlers began arriving. A week doesn’t pass without my seeing some familiar landmark and comparing it to a mental image of how the same place may have looked before we came.

There is a great chasm between this time and that in every sense. Predating photography, we have few realistic images of our homeland prior to its transformation from virgin wilderness into what we know today. Just a few painters and map makers happened through to show us their interpretation of what they witnessed.

The most factual of these early images are those left by early scientific and surveying missions, of which the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-42 is perhaps the most well known. Less than 10 years later, another set of explorers associated with the U.S. Coast Survey also set a standard for clear-eyed reporting on this rugged — and then disease-infested — network of channels, shoals, swamps and forests.

Engravings from these expeditions show the layout of the Columbia’s entrance, a vital gateway into the unknown riches of the Northwest. Designed to assist navigators in recognizing the mouth of Columbia once they arrived here after months at sea, these images show heavily forested hills slanting downward into the ocean and river, the only naked patches consisting of cliffs and a few clearings maintained by Indians.

I know I romanticize the tall timber of those times. Early pioneers certainly were more intimidated by it than entranced with its primal glories. But I’ll never stop wishing we still possessed more examples of what once was.

One man who wasn’t frightened of the primeval forest — who indeed dived into it and became famous for his botanical discoveries — was David Douglas. It’s astounding how few people living here today have any idea who Douglas was. Until recently, I certainly didn’t.

I think perhaps the first time I saw him mentioned in print was in an article a few months ago by Seattle columnist Joel Connelly, who referred to him discovering his namesake, the Douglas fir, here on the Peninsula.

This sparked my interest for a couple reasons. First, I try with our newspaper to make area history accessible to readers, and for the this signature tree in regional forestry to have been “discovered” here seemed like a story of great interest. And second, I suspected Douglas might have left interesting written descriptions of what he found here in 1825.

It turned out that Douglas did leave many pages of journals detailing his observations and experiences at Cape Disappointment, Baker Bay and Astoria/Fort George, recollections that give a palpable sense of life in the far-West outpost when there were fewer than 500 whites in this quarter of North America.

“Douglas of the Fir” by Athelstan G. Harvey, published by Harvard University press in 1947, boils the Douglas journals down into their most salient parts.

This modest Scot did indeed “discover” many important tree species. He was the first to collect seeds from the fir later named for him, measuring one fallen one to be 227 feet long and 48 feet in circumference three feet above the ground. He called the species “one of the most striking and truly graceful objects in Nature.”

He also was the first botanist to describe hundreds of other species he found here, sending many specimens back to England. Stepping off the William and Ann on April 8, 1825, after a voyage of more than 250 days, Douglas reported that a Cape Disappointment salal bush was “the first plant I took in my hands. So pleased was I that I could scarcely see anything but it.”

Douglas also was a comparatively unprejudiced observer of local Chinook and Clatsop Indians, and an undaunted adventurer who was assisted by Chinook guides in some amazing forays through the area, for example carrying a canoe over the hills from Baker Bay to Willapa Bay and thence up to what is now called Grays Harbor.

Guided by Tha-a-muxi, the sober brother of Chinook Chief Comcomly, on Oct. 25, 1825 Douglas wrote “I found it very laborious dragging my canoe through the wood, over rocks, stumps, and gullies. On reaching the [Willapa] bay I proceeded along the coast a few miles; two hours before dusk a thick fog with a drizzly rain obliged me to encamp for the night...”

Obviously, Pacific County weather hasn’t changed much in the intervening 177 years.

Douglas explored the Northwest until 1827 before departing for England for a time. He returned here to the Columbia in 1830. Sadly, the journals from this second expedition were lost in an accident in 1833.

The following year, at age 35, Douglas was killed under mysterious circumstances in Hawaii — probably gored to death by a bull, but perhaps murdered.

In any event, David Douglas is overdue for serious recognition here where his footprints are so large.