To the Beach

My daughter Ruth is visiting for a few days, glad to be in the northwest instead of Philadelphia where, as in the rest of the northeast, the weather is at best cold and sloppy. Yesterday, we drove to Cannon Beach, a town on the ocean whose main attraction is Haystack Rock, which juts out of the surf like a bishop's mitre. Several of these startling behemoths guard the Oregon shore. They are lava formations (our major mountains--Hood, Adams, St. Helens, and Ranier--are volcanoes, one not as dormant as the others). The temperature was in the mid-forties and, despite forecasts, the sun was shining or at least visible through a light cloud cover while we were in Cannon Beach.

Light rain was falling as we left Portland, and it stayed with us for about fifty miles. When we got to the ocean side of the coastal range, we encountered the first signs of wreckage left by the fierce storms of two weeks ago. At first there were just some downed trees, not unusual in the forest of mostly spruce and cedar that covers the range. Stands of birch among the conifers surprised us, ghostly gatherings in the shadows. Another variety of tree--and I admit here to my ignorance of what grows in the northest--was leafless and covered with a reddish fuzzy moss. Ruth asked me what was covering the trees--it looked like an affliction--and I said it was the tree Elvis Presley was referring to in "I'm All Shook Up," when he sings, "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree."

Then the number of downed trees increased dramatically, chaotic piles of debris that had undoubtedly once blocked the road. Huge root systems yanked out of the ground, stacks of tangled trunks. Bent birches (not because, as Robert Frost wrote of New England birches, "some boy's been swinging on them") and others broken at the ground disrupted the upright certainty of clustered white stalks. I saw as we rounded a curve the denuded hump of a hill to the south which, as we got closer to it, was covered with trunks that had been topped by the vicious winds that blasted through at a hundred miles an hour. After that first hill, there were others also savaged, the snapped-off tops of trees littering the landscape among the headless trunks, like an army ambushed. We saw only two houses on which fallen trunks still lay.

During lunch we heard a waitress talking about the storm. "You could hear the trees exploding," she said, and it was almost more frightening than the ninety-mile-an-hour winds along the coast that continued for hours. "We thought they would never stop, the winds, and then there was this calm and it was sixty-five degrees and sunny, and we thought, uh-oh, it's going to start again."

Outside the restaurant window, we could see Haystack Rock and a roiling surf that began a few hundred yards out and broke and tumbled chaotically to the flat sand where only a few were walking. And then where we were walking. Peace had settled over the shore. Last summer, Haystack Rock was harried by the multiple varieties of seabirds that nest there. Yesterday, we could see one solitary gull against the rock's dark face. "He's thinking about last summer," I said, "remembering the good times with all the other gulls."

Ruth was snapping shots of the rock with my cellphone camera. A phalanx of walking gulls looked like gangsters with their hunched shoulders. I picked up a small dead fish and tossed it into the air. A gull was on it the moment it landed, tilted back his head, swallowed it whole.

Driving back, I was transfixed by the disaster that had befallen the trees, trying to imagine what it must have been like to fear the wind spraying treetrunks across the hills, the few people who live among them huddled in the dark.

A friend who dropped by to see us after we returned home said, when I talked about the damage caused by the storm, "Yeah, in the coastal range, that happens every year."

After dinner we exchanged gifts and played "Trivial Pursuit."