Between Pacific City on the Oregon coast and the Cape Meares lighthouse to the north is a narrow two lane blacktop road that serves both the locals and the tourists—the dairymen and the fishermen, the hiker and the bicyclist—by providing access to land and sea. At the same time, the road serves by giving definition to the land, a physical definition through its function as a line that takes the measure of the terrain as the lines on a contour map do, now rising, now falling, here looping, there straightening; and a transcendental definition through its function as a poetical metaphor that takes the measure of this geography as a poem takes the measure of an idea or theme.
The poem uses the collision of words, the separation of phrases, to express itself. The road finds its expression in the brown cows ruminating cud, in the rusted jetsam that once was truck, in the solitary chimney standing sentinel over the blackened rubble that once was house, in the red barn, the sand dunes and mats of salal, the towns of ramshackle and renovated that punctuate the road, in the estates of chime and glass, cottages with frayed lace curtains and unkempt lawns, the bright green rectangle of new laid turf, the stumps and deadfall littering clear-cut hillsides, the mongrel yapping at the end of its chain, a rock slide, a bent and twisted guardrail, the missing sign, the rock and sand, and, finally, in the lighthouse, barely visible through the evergreens, a revolving blip of light out on some final point of land that measures the waves steady thump and rumble.
There is something elusive about this stretch of pavement, an ambiguity, a question hovering like the fog that is so ever-present hereabouts. There is meaning beyond the sum of its parts, beyond form and meter, beyond linguistics, beyond theme. So, too, do the many parts of the road scene, all the constituents along this strip, seem to speak more eloquently when conjoined than when examined individually. And, just as a poem only finds its voice after assembly, so it is along the road. There comes a grace to the man slopping his sow against the backdrop of the distant headland, a heroism to the lone chimney lost in the expanse of field and dune, a tender emotion, a moving presence, to that archetypal American family—mother, father, brother, sister—in matching shirts and shorts with their station wagon and dog down for a day at the beach.
Meaning is often incommunicable, beneath the surface, defying elucidation. Words hint at meaning; but often meaning can only be experienced. Abstraction is elusive; substance is not. The traveler suspects some hidden meaning lurking beneath the surface value of asphalt, house, widow, business, land form, grocer, seascape, and lighthouse, feels a need for explication. But unless he pauses in his travels, suspends his journey and noses about turning stones, that suspicion will rise on a sea breeze and be gone, the traveler none the poorer, but none the wiser either.
Pause, suspension, waiting, sitting quietly are keys to scanning this road. Everyone hereabouts lives in three-quarter time, and this waltz tempo helps define the area. By contrast, Highway 101, running a few miles inland, is an upbeat four-four proposition. Travelers propelled along by destination, by assignation, would not likely choose the coast road for their journey. The hard traffic stays on the 101. It is the quick link between Lincoln City and Tillamook. Cape Meares, Oceanside, Netarts, Cape Lookout, Sand City, Tierra del Mar, Kiwanda, and Pacific City are out-of-the-way places. Log trucks will vie for space on the 101; large, loud, and aggressive, they are no bargain. The odd truck plying the coast road gives some ground, like as not, perhaps a wave of the hand, not smiling, not friendly mind you, but not contentious either.
Businessmen on the 101 push their machines with abandon. The retiree in his motor home, seeking some refuge for the refuge he is driving, seeking some glimpse of the Pacific, some sound of the gulls, will be found pulled off in a turnout, nose to map, perplexed, dismayed. He is on the 101, after all, with little quarter given.
The coast road is the other road the retiree seeks where stopping on a whim becomes the attractive alternative, and experience finds opportunity to wander from the objective to the subjective, from destination to journey, from denotation to connotation, from white line of highway to white line of breakers.
Along this coast road the traveler is rarely far from the pounding surf. It is not a place to be in a rush; there is time here, but not seconds and minutes nor even hours. There is morning, afternoon, evening, and night. There are weeks and months and years. See it in the ramshackle building, some collection of homespun architecture nailed together over decades, the pumps still out front marking it as a gas station of a by-gone era. Out back are the odds and ends of automobiles, disarrayed like children’s toys after a morning’s play, hoods askew, wheels and doors gone, windshields shattered.
Attached to the building’s flank, a rusted metal stack pokes above the roof line and smoke curls gently up and away. The door dings open, the traveler waiting at the pumps. Out ambles a boy with a ball cap pushed back on his head, dungarees oil stained, the suit short-legged, hand-me-downs, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. Has he just wakened?
The traveler asks for gas and for the distance yet to Pacific City. The boy, imitating the father who is from Kansas, says, “Three mile.” He spits, like the father, then turns slowly away to the sound of an old dump truck rapping in deceleration down the hill, hauling gravel.
Boy and driver exchange nods, pumps gas absently. The tank full, the boy milks the pump, adding pennies, then done. “Eight dollar fifty cent,” says the boy to the traveler. The look might be called vacant, but his youth keeps it just this side of blank, an imitation again of the father whose eyes are long absent, doing the same thing over and over again, eking out a living here on the coast road, a fair life, the father says, quiet like, can’t complain none, wife’d like the city some, spitting, pumping gas, telling the tourists time and again, three mile, knowing that soon enough those city people on their fancy bicycles will start coming through, never buying nothing, bottle of water maybe, or them Powerbars he’d been stocking, just wanting to use the can, telling them, nope, broke, which it ain’t but he just don’t cotton to giving things away.
This is the rhythm, the pace of life, on the coast road. If there is a rush, a hurry, best turn right at the junction and head her over to the 101.
All the varied entities that the traveler meets along the way—the beach cottages, the dilapidated sheds, a pair of horses standing head to tail, a grain elevator, hay ricks, sties, skunk cabbage, creek, the gathering wave—constitute the words and phrases of the road. The bay collides with the headland and a gentle mist rises. The rhymes here are less aural than visual: The martin winging against the pale dawn sky gives flight to black and white cows scratching at fence posts; an old man profiled at the end of the jetty fishing is mirrored by the snag hanging leafless over a swift creek.
Equally varied are the themes, the motifs, of the coast road. Central to the road, both physically and metaphorically, are the sand dunes that lie between the Kiwanda headland and Cape Lookout. All along the road through these dunes are signs warning of the soil stabilization project, prohibiting motor vehicles. The loops and swirls, the tread marks across the flats and through gullies give testimony to the effectiveness of the deterrent.
The traveler feels a tension here. This is the arena where the road’s two protagonists, man and nature, do battle. A State Park ranger, who officiates at the fray, occupies the foreground as the traveler approaches. The ranger nods curtly, then turns away from the traveler to continue his note taking, keeping score.
The sand, covering many square miles, is a most fragile environment. Though only the two lanes of blacktop cut it, the advantage in the short-term seems clearly with man. Thinly treed, matted with salal and grass, the dunes provide habitat and forage for rabbit and frog and snake, hoppers and sliders. Here man plods across the soft ground, trips in the tangled weed, starts at the sudden leap of gray-green, black-eyed frog. Overhead a red-tail hawk circles, hunting. A moth the color of weathered cedar ignores the curse of the man and floats and dips and flutters.
Resentful at his immobility, man brings his machines, though clearly this is no place for motor and wheels. This is a wild land, as-it-was land, save for the signs and the two lane blacktop bisecting. Man comes with his machines, becomes the ultimate predator, preying on the land itself. The ensuing destruction is rapid and all encompassing; but here, unlike the hillside on which the devastating effect of clear-cutting is readily apparent, it is difficult to see man’s impact.
“It’s just sand for Christ sake,” says the ATV enthusiast.
Only the geologist, the biologist, the botanist, the entomologist can truly take its measure. And then post signs. All the same, a frog meeting with an all-terrain vehicle faces the same odds as does the bicyclist who strays into the path of a log truck out on the 101.
At the end of this particular stretch of pavement comes, finally, the lighthouse. This seafarer’s beacon warns of the treachery of rock and tide, illuminating darkness, piercing fog. It was not supposed to be on this point of land; it was supposed to have been built on Cape Lookout, some miles to the south. All the building material, however, got delivered to the Cape Meares site; and, with no coast road here in 1890, with access so difficult, so dangerous, the lighthouse rose where the materials dictated, the harsh terrain having the final say.
That seems fitting, thinks the traveler, watching the light go round. Man proposes; the earth disposes. Not in the short-term, of course; for in time even this lighthouse will be gone. For the moment, the beacon seems an appropriate response to the question raised by the coast road. Here is the best of 19th century engineering wedded to the land, functional, beautiful. This marriage of science and humanity provides the elusive quality that rises like the fog all along this stretch of pavement, this sinuous man-made track through nature’s glories. Like an alchemist’s dream, there is a balance, a blending of the ingredients that defies addition. Here the metaphor of the coast road manifests itself.
The traveler trains his eye on the far horizon: The endless sea. The light goes round. Seagulls cry. Chilled by the stiff breeze, the traveler steps through the door at the base of the lighthouse and begins his upward spiral.
majikwoid 