Loving The Beach

After that last post I'm obligated to brag.

My parents lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for a while. When visiting at home they didn't care as much about any one thing except spending at least one afternoon on the beach. They used to say that there was something unsettling about living in the middle of the desert, and it wasn't the dry heat or the horizon noticeably absent of mountains. They missed the water.

Our family routine was to go, sit, watch the surf and eat, then walk it. I'm an adult now so I can be a tad more adventurous. There are plenty of things to do, and I like them all. Stuff to see and do:

At the beach in Lincoln City we always visit "Road's End." Cool grandma-voice narrates while I am nodding along:


I've lost many articles of clothing in the creeping tide here. I prefer to believe it's how Japan keeps up with PacNW trend.

Depending on which beach you visit, you can collect or see different things. In my years I've collected all kinds of seashells and sand dollars, clams, agates, and crab shells, and I've seen plenty of washed-up jellyfishes, kelp (30 ft. long), seaweed, starfishes, small whales, seals and other large fish. At one beach there's even a washed up pirate ship (or so my imagination informs me). I remember walking the beach alone with my dog at sunrise in Seaside discovering that there was a small number of people also out to probe the sand as I for what the ocean brought during the night. I watched the people with their buckets and nets "hunt" down the crab that had been trapped in the tidepools of sand.



Probably my favorite beach is Seal Rock, featured below, a 45 minute drive south of Road's End. There are secrets to this beach which I treasure. In the winter when the tide is high there is this long cavern of ocean that gets trapped between two low jagged peaks. Every thirty seconds as the tide rushes in, thunder rolls as the water crashes up toward you and along the walls, spraying everywhere and blowing out the ears. Cool. Those low-lying rocks, inland from where the seals bathe, were formed 35 million years ago. Just about the time primates descended from mammals. Awesome.



What else am I forgetting to mention about the beach? How about how it's only an hour's drive away from home? Who can resist.... Even when temperatures aren't nearly balmy yet, we all seem to think it's great.


Beach, Spring 2008

Sandboarding

This is in the coastal town of Florence, Oregon. A place of nostalgia for me, my dad's favorite beach. I love to go here because the dunes are amazing, the sun is intense and there are plenty of amazing shells and agates to collect on a stretch of empty beach.

Once we thought we would cross a large dune on foot to the ocean. Big mistake; we climbed to the top and discovered a miniature mountain range between us and water, covered with buggies everywhere that would dip down and suddenly reappear flying in leaps.

Keizer Rapids Park

My single most favorite class in college was reconstructing historical landscapes. I had one project of my choosing that consumed 80% of my grade. I chose the length of Lancaster Drive in Salem, Oregon as the area which I would research.

I wrote ten pages and scanned in old aerial photographs through the entire twentieth century, researched Portland-area history of home architecture and applied that information to estimate the age of certain neighborhoods, even used the research done by professionals to give it a prehistoric and preColumbian background. What fun that was.

Ever since I cannot see my hometown in the same way. The time spent in subsequent investigation has been nonexistant since I got married and had children, so now the mysteries I see all around me have become permanent fixtures in my mind. Time to clear them out!

A couple years ago I had read that the City of Keizer was in planning stages to create its own waterfront park. I had never gone though I had occasionally tried to gain access. My husband went and investigated it out and as a surprise took me there for the first time last weekend. It was fantastic.


A whole field of river cobbles like these awaited me; it's a very large floodplain which is covered in water in the rainy months.


I know they are mostly plain basalts, but Ben was able to find something that I could tell was petrified wood. How fun.

There are much more beautiful spots than that:


This is a place I could spend a lot more time at given the chance....