10/2/12 -- Ocean Park, Nearly Home

After our odessey going south on Hwy 101, all the way down the WA coast, we arrived at the absolute southwest corner of the state.  At the mouth of the Columbia River, Cape Disappointment holds the lighthouse on the north.  Fort Stevens holds sway on the south side of the river in OR.

We went to the State Park at Cape Disappointment but they didn't have any openings with electricity.  It's cold enough now that we are using our ceramic cube furnace as the flower pot furnace isn't able to keep up.  If it gets too cold, we'll use both.

They call this area the Long Beach Peninsula.  It is the Longest Beach in the world, 30+ miles long without a stone or bluff to break its progress.  For many years, it has been our playland, individually and together.  It is a resort area, something we usually avoid, but somehow, this one is different.

Several towns march up the peninsula in close succession, towns like Ilwaco, Long Beach, Klipson Beach, Ocean Park, Oysterville.  Each community has more houses now that when we were here last, but there is still some wild forest lands too.

The Long Beach Peninsula

The town of Long Beach was a little crazy, as it often is on weekends.  RV parks there tend to be a little too polished for our taste, so we continued up the peninsula to Ocean Park.

This is an area where we both have history.  There is a United Methodist Church Camp just north of the community of Ocean Park.  Adina went to Church Camp there as a child.  Her family often came to this area for vacations.  Many years later, when I was a pastor in the Methodist Church system, I served as dean for camps here a couple of years.  One was a high school camp.  That's always a delightful challenge!

RV camps line the road all up the peninsula.  We found a place near Ocean Park in an RV park, fairly rustic but with electric hookups -- perfect for our needs.  Our little camp nestles among fir and pines.  We've had sun every day.  When the Sun hits our camp, it is fairly warm and we have enjoyed camping here.



Our Ocean Park campsite

We aren't really in a rain forest but this area does get a lot of rain.  Instead of deep moss clumps or moss than hangs down like hair, on the Long Beach Peninsula trees share their lives with lichen.  Nearly every evergreen and many bushes have lichen on their branches.  


Fir branches loaded with lichen and cones (and likin' it?)

Our RV park is close to the beach, but a wide strip of forest separates us from the dunes.  Three deer have graced our camp each evening and a couple of mornings, a doe, a buck and a fawn.  These deer are smaller than WI deer, a bit above waist-high on Adina.  These two posed for pictures this morning. 


step softly my friend
deer stand watching you watch them
gently sharing space

The Long Beach peninsula beach is lined by dunes, protected from the builder's hammer.  Beach grass holds the sand in place.  However, the sand keeps blowing anyway.  The dunes are much larger and wider than what we remember from our days around here.

People who once bought beach front property now find themselves with neighbors blocking their view, not that the dunes allow much view.  The dunes are well over two stories high. 


a lone gull flies over the top of this dune

Wild grasses keep the dunes from escaping into the twiddling fingers of the wind.  Once, natives gathered the wheat from the grasses to make flour.  The seeds on the grasses are much smaller than on the wheat and oats that today's farmer sows.  Someday, I'd like to try gathering some and grinding the seeds into flour to see what it tastes like.  It would be a time-consuming process, though. 


Wild wheat grass by a path to the beach

Other beaches we have visited have been loaded with driftwood, huge trees, roots and logs.  People have built shelters from them, leaned against them for picnics and used smaller pieces for beach fires.  Most of the driftwood stays on the beaches, protected by the DNR, the State Park, National Park systems and the tribes.  It's illegal to take the driftwood away.   


Endless piles of driftwood at La Push

Long Beach is different.  Although it is regulated by the State Park system, there are no restrictions against taking driftwood.  We remember when Long Beach looked like the other beaches, with driftwood piled high, tossed there by the hand of the wind like a giant's toys.

That has all changed now.  The driftwood is gone, nearly all of it.  We saw a few pieces that measured in inches instead of tons.  An occasional 6' log lies submerged in the sand.  Otherwise, it's gone.  All of it.  Kind of sad, really.  

One of the first nights we were here, we celebrated Adina's birthday, her 65th.  That's a big milestone!  She had wanted to be camping on her birthday, and we did that.  We also took a walk on the beach. 

That evening, we went out to dinner in Ocean Park at a little restaurant just off the main drag, called the Berry Patch.  It had to be a good place because there were tons of cars parked around it. 



The Berry Patch

We had fish and chips, the fish battered with a Japanese preparation that was delicious.  And, yes, they had my aged gourmet malt vinegar.  We topped off the evening by splitting a piece of warm blueberry pie.  When the waitress brought it, she had put a lit birthday candle in it.  I sang "Happy Birthday!" to Adina right there in the restaurant.  A perfect day!

The Long Beach Peninsula has a lot of quaint shops, book sellers and the inevitable tourist traps.  But it also contains real working stores, the kind you need in every neighborhood.  A Thriftway sells the usual groceries.  There are several restaurants and a gas station.  Small churches are available for the 5% of WA's population that attend.   

For just about everything else, there's Jack's Country Store.  The store covers a whole block. 


Jack's Country Store -- a true modern general store

We enjoyed wandering through the aisles, just gawking.  This is a true general store in the old sense of the word.  They had everything, absolutely everything -- groceries, hardware and tools, kitchen goods, hunting and fishing supplies, camping gear, school supplies, kerosene lamps, electric lamps and lampshades, work clothes and rain gear, automotive and RV supplies, knives and clocks and jewelry and more besides.     

The aisles are narrow and packed to the ceiling with goods and supplies.  Department stores, Costco and Walmart just can't compete with an experience like this!  If Jack's doesn't have it, you probably didn't really need it anyway.

A little bookstore called to us and we stopped to see it.  It was closed and the owner was working on the deck.  She welcomed us and opened up the store, letting us browse for a while.  Adina found an Andrew Weil Cookbook she couldn't live without.  Everybody needs another cookbook.

I haven't talked much about the beach.  Each WA beach has some unique quality and the beaches of the Long Beach Peninsula are no exception.  I'll blog again tomorrow and tell you about our beach experiences.