Shot from behind and above the lighthouse looking south. Florence is about twelve miles south of the other side of those cliffs.
First off I am doing fine. Tested positive and appear to have a mild case. I am not tempting the universe but I have had colds with worse symptoms. Semi stuffy head (comes and goes). Bronchial cough that seems to be breaking up. Trouble is when I get a cough it tends to hang on until spring. LATE spring sometimes.That's just me. The real PITA is a bad case of the sleepies. And I purely hate that. It interferes with the fun stuff like rereading the dragon riders novels, tip toeing through several bios, and researching much more interesting (for me at least) blog entries.
And I'm not alone. Nine others besides me and that's just residents. I don't know how many staff are out.I know of at least two. Thank you all the "Freedumb" folks who have helped keep this little bastard going,and going, and going. A Swing era song titled "The Merry Go Round Goes Round" keeps going on the memory tape right know.
Well, this helped wake me up. I had an old bookmark. A pair eyes looking up from under a manhole cover. "Be a lert. We need all the lerts we can get." I sure as heck could use a couple right now. Silly, I know. Found it in the campus bookstore many moons ago.
To be honest I was surprised to discover that sailing ships of the Iredale's size were still being built in the late nineteenth century. 1890 to be exact. The was 285 feet long and had a cargo capacity of just over 2,000 tons.
And I'm not sure why we call ships she, but there it is. Her final voyage began at Salina Cruz in Southern Mexico on or around September 26, 1906 with a crew of twenty five bound for Portland, Oregon carrying one thousand tons of ballast. No paying cargo.
On the night of October 25 the captain sighted the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse at about 3:20 AM. And over a century later the rest of the story gets a little weird. It's night. There's a heavy mist. The tide is rising. The captain decides to make a run for the entrance of the Columbia. Made it around the south jetty in the shipping channel but a squall with heavy west winds drove the ship ashore on the Clatsop Sandspit at the mouth of the river. The Iredale was grounded, lifeboats took the crew ashore at Hammond, Oregon near Fort Stevens. And the fort is a story for later.
A court of inquiry under the jurisdiction of the British Vice-Consulate was held in early November. The court held the captain and crew blameless for the grounding. Honestly I wish I knew more about how
Plans were made to refloat the ship. Mother Nature had other plans. After weeks of bad weather the Iredale was well and truly embedded in the sands of the Clatsop Spit.
The salvage rights were sold in 1917 but never acted on. She slowly rusted and broke up over the years. A mast and what is left of the bow is all that remains of the Peter Iredale. And what you can see of that bow changes from year to year depending on how many storms we have each winter. Mother Nature brings the sands and Mother Nature takes the sand away. You can get to the wreck through the state park at Fort Stevens. And when you are done checking out the remains of the past you can watch cargo ships head up the Columbia to the Port of Portland.
This is a closer shot of the Cape including the lighthouse on the headland. I believe taken earlier this winter during the so called King Tides combined with a series of strong storms. Looks a lot different doesn't it?
And this is a diagram of the mouth of the Columbia River. The river currents flowing out and mixing with the waters of the the Pacific. On a good day the mixing of the currents can lead to waves about five feet high. That straight line is the Astoria Megler bridge about four miles from the mouth of the river. Between the currents and the sand bars (shaded yellow) Even with modern technology the Columbia bar is still regarded as the most dangerous haror entrance in the world. And for all I know a port that is the farthest from the ocean. It's ninety seven miles from Astoria to downtown Portland. Which is a little futher east from the Port of Portland.
Portland is the only port between San Francisco and Seattle/Tacoma. Come to think of it getting a ship to the port of Seattle involves more than a few miles.
This is a map showing two of the three north south routes in Oregon. The third is state route 97. Goes up the backside of the Cascades. Good road, gets seriously curvy sometimes. Anyway the road I'm interested in is Highwway 101. Goes from Olympia, Washington to Los Angeles, California.
The Astoria Megler bridge as seen from the south end in the city of Astoria, Oregon. The bridge is over four miles long. The deck of the south end of the bridge is two hundred feet above the Columbia River. The construction is a cantilever truss bridge and is the longest bridge of its type in North America. Tall enough to allow most cargo vessels, Coast Guard and some Naval vessels to sail up the Columbia to Portland
The bridge wss a toll bridge until the early nineties and paid off the bridge expenses two years early.
Shot of the bridge from the Washington side. Side note. Since the Port of Portland is on the western side of the city none of those bridges have to allow for cargo or other large ships.
OK this entry is sort of interesting but kind of tedious. But I tend to see the world as a giant puzzle and you have to have all the pieces to make sense of it. I am going to try to stick with 101 for awhile. I haven't driven all of it, but I have driven some of the best of it. In my opinion
I suspect my posts are going to be all over the map for awhile. For this one. I was born into and raised a Methodist. Was sent off to Sunday School. Baptized at seven. They handed me a Bible I didn't know how to read yet. It had some pretty pictures. It didn't survive the purge when we moved. Later I sang in the choir and sat through more boing sermons over the years than I can possibly remember or even care to.
Don't remember much about Sunday School really. Except being bored to tears in the Jr. High class. Going back a little to fifth grade we had a great pair of teachers, a married couple. That year our class sponsored a little boy in Africa. I think we brought an extra dime or quarter a week. I suspect the teachers made up the difference. This was the "church" I knew in fifth grade.
At least until the powers that be in the main office stepped in and announced that we couldn't do that because our congregation hadn't fulfilled the quota for support of the missions so our class couldn't do what we were doing. Looking back that may have been the first chink. There were more. By the time I was a junior I was out of the choir and not sttending regularly. Note: Methodists used to shift their pastors every seven years or so.
Anyway I missed it when the new guy came in. At least I think I missed it. Anyway I did not miss the night our new pastor presided over the Baccalaureate for the senoir class. Sitting on a stool, playing a guitar and coming out against the war in Viet Nam in the spring of 1968. By end of the week he was history. After all this was a logging town in rural Oregon. I don't know who they hired to replace him. We moved back to Springfield right after I graduated.
I do remember the Sunday after he was gone when the service was led by one of the laywomen and the wife of a retired postor. We got a long sermon about tithing. Nobody said anything but it probably didn'tgo over very well in a community where almost no one worked a full year. Especially if you were on the cutting crew. It was either too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry. Or you got hurt every few years. Or finally disabled when dad blew out a knee in '67. I do not say these thngs to complain just to note that the divide between the folks in the pulpit and the folks in the pews seemed pretty wide sometimes.
I guess one of the final boots in the ass came in the mid eighties. You remember the mid eighties. At least some of you. AIDs was in all the papers. The Reagan administration was humming real loud over in the corner, we knew next to nothing about how the disease worked or how it was passed. One fine Sunday morning three different fine upstanding members of our Springfield congregation got up in front of God and everybody and blamed the gays for whatever had recently gone wrong in Sweden, Frisco and a third place that I don't remember.
And nobody, including me or or the pastor, said a damn thing. My excuse? A complete brain fart. I had never witnessed anything like this. Me I could kind of understand but the pastor? Anyway that began the tap dance on the line that has gone on for nearly forty years. Well at least I've walked through the door. We'll see where it leads. Including oddly enough big Douglas firs and the Oregon Coast.
The well was created when the roof of a sea cave collapsed. At high tide the surf breaks over the rocks around the well and then drains in the remains of the cave below. On really great days the surf also blasts up through the mouth of the well and then collapses. Thor's Well is beutiful but dangerous. Get too cloe when the surf is high and you risk being washed off the surrounding rocks and into the well. It may only be twenty feet deep. might as well be a hundred with sea water pouring in every few seconds.
I have never felt in a church, no matter how beutiful, what I feel in the trees, or on our spectacular Oregon coast. I'm outta here. Gotta find a picture of Thor's well.
This isn't exactly a Christmas entry, and yes I'm making up for some lost time this month. Perhaps this does fit under Christmas. Of course there was hired help back in the day. Some of them were slaves. Some were dirt poor. And probably just as ignored. It does fit under all the folks who are worried their fast food might get a little more expensive if the minimum wage is raised.
Some folks can't seem to think past the ends of their noses.
If we could just keep some of the childhood innocence. Some like Lisa were lucky enough to learn the song in school. The rest of us have to be lucky enough to find the right Christmas album.
