Ch-changes...Part IV

    The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks, wrote Oliver Burkeman, and we had now used up one of those weeks.  Our rental car was still purring and we were growing used to the relaxed pace, the grand meals of clam chowder with smoked salmon and the baskets of fish and calamari that arrived in front of us for lunch.  Their freshness was accompanied by the diverse history and character of the places we were visiting.  At the Drift In, Lester Blair was an amateur boxer who would encourage his customers to "work out their differences" in a boxing ring upstairs, said their storied history on the menus; it was a place that had: ...people from every walk of life.  Hippies, rednecks, suits, rich and poor.  It was rich, tantalizing cob webby, simple, with textures of lives that belied the surroundings.  It  was a place that left no one untouched who dared go in.  It was magical, an amazing display and acceptance of humanity...It was an interesting melting pot of ideals, and experiences.  Lester became the father that many boys lost, forgot, or never had.  He was a hard-drinking, hard-working, tough SOB who provided a community living room for young boys to grow into men.  He stood up for them, expected them to stand up for themselves, to honor women and forgive them their frailties.  And the time period for all of this?  Lester Blair bought and brought all of this in the 1960s (he lasted almost 40 years before grudgingly having a few strokes and passing away; the place now has a new owner and an equally-interesting history).

     This seemed to be much of the history of the coast itself, many of the Native American tribes were recorded as refusing to sign early treaties by explorers who "deeded" the land to whatever country they were from.  To the many original inhabitants, the idea of somebody or some country "owning" this land was beyond comprehension since the Earth belonged to everyone; the end result was often a forced takeover with the loss of many lives (even in the days of Lewis & Clark, the Native Americans often only had arrows which were no match against the bullets of the invading newcomers).  Of course, the ocean had no such boundaries, despite the names so commonly given because of what was discovered there...Gold Beach and Cannon Beach (a cannon washed up on shore, a relic spit up from the ocean from an earlier battle in its realm).  But placed against the basalt shores we had just left, the futility of trying to "conquer" anything seemed evident wherever we looked, even as bridges and highways were built.  The beaches and lands tempted far too many until one touched the chilly waters or entered the dense forests, obstacles that left only the strong and sometimes eccentric individuals who decided to settle and to try and make a go of it.

     We were progressing much further north at this point, soon to near the Washington state border and begin to see the imprint of modern machinery, the buzz cut lands of harvested forests now replanted and the resulting acres and acres of uniformly-sized logs, trees stripped of their branches and bark and now stacked into piles the size of buildings, waiting to be loaded onto freighters destined for who knows where.  It was our demand for wood of all sorts, our urge for new material to house our ever-growing population and fill our wood-pellet grills and stoves.  It was the end result of something sustainable, even if it pained us to see such devastation (for the most past, such corporate logging is sustainably replanted with new-growth "forests" visible throughout our drive; while the biodiversity is gone, the trees are grown as a crop which theoretically spares future forests from being cut down).

     The beaches were now leaving their darker and rougher cousins behind, the waves calming down as shores became elongated and smoother, exposing the rip tides above and unsettled land hidden below.  Large and softened rocks protruded offshore like ancient scouts keeping a careful watch on the humans far inland.  Beaches as we know them now showed a few surfers and further north, families making the best of the cold and windy weather.  We were entering fall, a signal marked by the equinox that split the Earth with light.  Said National Geographic: Our planet normally orbits the sun on an axis that’s tilted 23.5 degrees, meaning that the hemispheres trade off getting more warmth from the sun. Two times a year, Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt combine so that the sun sits right above Earth’s Equator, casting the dividing line between the light and dark parts of the planet—the so-called terminator, or twilight zone—through the North and South Poles. 

Our Oregon trip was indeed terminating, our days of travel now reaching the halfway point, a sign marked by the large Astoria-Wegler bridge that connected the two states just up ahead in Astoria, 4-miles long and still the second longest three-span, through-truss bridge in the world.  As Wikipedia explained the truss design: ...trusses are assumed to be pin jointed where the straight components meet, meaning that taken alone, every joint on the structure is functionally considered to be a flexible joint as opposed to a rigid joint with strength to maintain its own shape, and the resulting shape and strength of the structure is only maintained by the interlocking of the components.  This assumption means that members of the truss (chords, verticals and diagonals) will act only in tension or compression.  The bridge was a fitting reminder of our transition since this design was among the most used when wood was the primary building material (think of early covered bridges), long before iron and steel entered the picture.  Its give and take design seemed to echo both the forests and our own somewhat aching bodies, bending and arching and ready for a rest.  We would soon be crossing into another state, at least in our current mindset of geographic borders.  For the ocean and its coast, there was little change other than being ready to expose us to the glacier-carved Puget Sound where exposed rocks would become islands and humans would again make their mark.  To our right would stand the jagged Cascades, a reminder that our planet was still evolving, still forming, still patiently growing and adjusting.  And once again, while my wife and I felt so fortunate to be able to witness this briefest of peeks, we knew that the ocean was still in agreement with the Native Americans, that this planet belonged to everyone...and to no one.