Cannon Beach Treasures

My family and I like to go to Cannon Beach. We have been going there for generations. Here is a photograph taken in July 1928 of my dad, Freddie, and his cousin Winnie on that beach. My dad is hoping nothing terrible happens from having to hold hands with his girl cousin. His expression seems to say, Mother, are you sure she doesn’t have cooties?

We take the Sunset Highway out of Portland and head west, turning south at the T intersection on the Coast Highway, heading down around Tillamook Head, which divides Seaside on the north from Cannon Beach on the south. Usually we stay in the southern part of the town of Cannon Beach, in one of the older motels built in the 1930s and 1940s. But one time we stayed on the north end in a lodge on Ecola Creek. My dad says his mother and aunt used to stay in that area every year for a week. They would wade across Ecola Creek on the sand, walking the two miles down to Haystack Rock every day.

My husband tells me that when he used to come with his brother and sister-in-law, her parents owned a cabin on the north end of Cannon Beach that had been built in the 1920s. It’s gone now, and a large, trendy modern-style Thing on Stilts sits in its place. The south end doesn’t have such pretentious looking places and I think retains a lovely old character.

The town is full of tourist shops, which every year become trendier and more expensive. The old town is disappearing, sadly. There are more art galleries and designer things; not bad in themselves, but they bring people who look down their noses at people like us.

What I like is to walk on the sand in the very early mornings. The sand high up on the beach feels cool on the feet and moves softly underfoot as we trudge toward the water. Then we cross the high water mark and the sand is firmer, easier to walk on. We continue to the damp sand, firmer still, and finally to where the waves still reach as the tide continues to go out until an hour or so after sunrise. The sand is hard and the water cold, but it’s summer and we haven’t seen the ocean for a year or two and we don’t care how cold our feet are. They get used to it.

Often the beach is really foggy in the morning, and the rising sun slowly burns the fog away.

We head for the tide pools surrounding Haystack Rock, the monolith rising 235 feet from the sand, partly in the water. Four other rocks rise around it, called the Needles. When we were there one autumn, the tides never allowed us to reach the Rock, but in the summer, the tides recede to its far side and let us explore all the places that are full of treasures.
We look for sea stars, purple and orange; anemones of green and pink and white; limpets with their conical-shaped shells; mussels of deep blue; hermit crabs in their shells and sometimes scuttling to find a new one; jellyfish that we were careful not to step on; sea urchins, purple and spiky; snails of all kinds; barnacles; sand dollars, always empty of their old inhabitants; little fish darting this way and that, finding themselves trapped in shrinking pools; crabs that the seagulls were intent upon finding; sometimes a squid; sometimes a little octopus! And everywhere the sea flora: kelp and seaweed, slimy and slippery to walk on, so you don’t.

You stay on the sand where possible, and on the bare rocks otherwise. Stepping on the shells of the living organisms is not only hazardous to their health, it’s painful! You can easily end up with a cut foot that stings like mad.

We poke around and vie with the sea gulls who are looking for their next meals. Lots of people feed the gulls, and they have become intrepid beggars, which is too bad. People food shortens their lives and they are a nuisance when they lose their fear of humans. But they are fun to watch when they are properly wild. Sometimes they come in huge flocks of several hundred, wheeling and darting over the waves and settling on the rocks out at sea.

Out at sea you can catch glimpses of sea lions and seals once in awhile. Up off the cliffs of Ecola State Park on the north end of Cannon Beach, you often see these wonderful animals sleeping or basking in the sun on the rocks, or diving into the waves.

A mile off shore Tillamook Rock rises out of the ocean with its now-defunct lighthouse built over the top. It was built in the 1880s and suffered through many violent northern Pacific Coast storms that damaged it over and over, sometimes very seriously, which is how it got its nickname of Terrible Tilly. In the late 1950s the light was turned off for good and the Rock sold to private investors; for some time the old lighthouse was used as a repository for funerary urns, but that license was revoked in the 1990s and now even the Rock’s owners are not allowed to land their helicopter there during the nesting season for certain kinds of shore birds.

When you are finished walking up and down the beach, you can find all sorts of foods at the Cannon Beach restaurants. My favorite lunch spot has been a deli tucked behind the shops in the center of the town. But always we have to visit Mo’s on the south end (actually in the unincorporated town of Tolovana Park), because the clam chowder demands that we make it a meal at least once or twice during our stay in Cannon Beach. To be perfectly honest, I found a better clam chowder in one little tiny place on the Pacific Coast in the California community of Morro Bay. I want my chowder to be clam-filled, and I don’t want any added garnish to overwhelm the taste of the clams. Mo’s sometimes has too much bacon. But it’s the best along the Oregon coast.

High tide is a fun time to get back out on the beach. I like racing with the waves and feeling their power as they surge up the sand. The wind usually has picked up in the afternoon, and you sit among the dunes with your book, holding the pages flat and reading to the sound of pounding surf and crying gulls. Then at sunset, it is lovely to be out on the beach as the tide again is going out, and the sand and the sea is turned red and gold.

A Great Book

I just read Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, published in September 2017. I am reading it again, because it was such fun for me the first time, and it is rich enough that it easily bears a second, immediate reading. It’s based on the author’s 81-year-old father sitting in on a seminar the author taught on the Odyssey by Homer and their subsequent Mediterranean cruise with the same theme. The story combines literary criticism with memoir, and features classic-style digressions into philology (with wonderful examples of etymology), philosophy, family history, flashbacks and flash forwards so that the book mirrors the epic on which it’s all based.

I love to know the end from the beginning, and that is what you get here. Before you read twenty pages you already know that Dan’s father takes Dan’s Odyssey seminar and that afterwards they go on a theme cruise based on the wanderings of Odysseus. You know how the epic begins and how it relates to the Iliad. You know its story and ending. You know about Dan’s three brothers and one sister and their families, about his “parenting partner” Lily and their two sons. You know that Dan’s father falls at the next Thanksgiving, and he has a stroke just a year after the start of that seminar. You review the story of Agamemmon, of Achilles, and of Troy. You learn what a proem is and how it functions in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and how the proem in the Aeneid looks back at both the earlier epics and their archetypes. You know about Dan’s paternal grandfather, his wife and children, and his death. You know about some of the journeys of Dan and his father and his family.

And then you learn about circles. In a completely wonderful sequence, you get a philological lesson in “moving through geographical space from one point to another” (p 20). Here are two paragraphs that made me know that this book was written for me:

“Voyage,” for instance, derives from the Old French voiage, a word that comes into English (as so many do) from Latin, in this case the word viaticum, “provisions for a journey.” Lurking within viaticum itself is the feminine noun via, “road.” So you might say that “voyage” is saturated in the material: what you bring along when you move through space (“provisions for a journey”), and indeed what you tread upon as you do so: the road.

“Journey,” on the other hand—another word for the same activity—is rooted in the temporal, derived as it is from the Old French jornée, a word that traces its ancestry to the Latin diurnum, “the portion for a day,” which stems ultimately from dies, “day.” It is not hard to imagine how “the portion for the day” became the word for “trip”: long ago, when a journey might take months and even years—say, from Troy, now a crumbling ruin in Turkey, to Ithaca, a rocky island in the Ionian Sea, a place undistinguished by any significant remains—long ago it was safer and more comfortable to speak not of the “voyage,” the viaticum, what you needed to survive your movement through space, but of a single day’s progress. Over time, the part came to stand for the whole, one day’s movement for however long it takes to get where you’re going—which could be a week, a month, a year, even (as we know) ten years. What is touching about the word “journey” is the thought that in those olden days, when the word was newborn, just one day’s worth of movement was a significant enough activity, an arduous enough enterprise, to warrant a name of its own: journey. (pp 20–21)

From this marvelous treatise, which continues beyond what I’ve quoted, the author introduces the concept of ring composition, a classical way of structuring a tale to include explanations, digressions, flashbacks and flash forwards that all come back to the main thread of the tale, enriching and enlightening its hearers or readers about the main theme. The Odyssey is structured this way, and so is this book. Every chapter includes its parts of the whole: the Odyssey, Dan’s father’s impact on that seminar and subsequent cruise, Dan’s relationships, his father’s relationships, all linked back to the main themes of the epic itself and telling the tale of fathers and sons, of husbands and wives.

I love that he gives us not only the subjects covered in the seminar, but the things the students say and what he says, and what he had planned to present on the days he didn’t get to cover everything he wanted to. It gives the reader the pleasures of the seminar too.

I love that the cruise is described not so much in terms of a travelogue, but of Dan’s observations of his father’s experience of the cruise.

I love that Dan analyzes his family minutely. I’m always fascinated by what makes up family relationships, and since that is one of his main themes, he spends considerable time on it. This is such an interesting family, too!

The parallels between Dan’s family and the story of Odysseus are interestingly developed, and so carefully crafted as to minimize the obvious disconnect—there is no warrior journeying home in Dan’s family—but there is the need of a son to come to know his father, and of a father to come to know his son, and of the son to come to recognize that the father knew him all along.

Like I said, I am reading this again along with the Odyssey itself. Maybe someday I will figure out my parents and my children. Until then, I journey through books such as this.

Grammy and that Pig

In 1942 when Lillie and Lloyd Read lived in Portland, Oregon, near Mt. Scott Park, their son Carl and his wife, Dorothy, were given a pig that Dorothy and Carl decided to raise as a pet. It was a cute little pig, and then a couple of years passed and it became a big pig that couldn't live in the city anymore. They gave the pig to Carl’s mother to take care of. 

Here are Lloyd, second from left, and Lillie,
right front, in 1942. Margie is fourth from right 
in the back, sitting on the car.

Lloyd had moved his family a lot in the past few years. Up until 1940, they had been living on the McMinnville farm that they’d bought from Lillie’s daddy. Then Lloyd traded the farm for a house with a couple of old-fashioned gasoline pumps out front and four or five tourist cabins out back, on the highway near Canby, Oregon. Lillie was very sorry to lose the little farm, but Lloyd had thought it was too much work for her. Why he thought a commercial gasoline station and tourist cabins were less work for her was always a mystery to everybody. Lloyd was away from home most of every week, as he was a railway mail clerk. The Canby place lasted a very short time. Then they moved back into Portland, to a tall, narrow house on SE Ellis, near the corner of 74th where the park was. Then when the war heated up, Lloyd became nervous about the port of Portland as a possible target for Japanese bombs, and he moved the family out to a 20-acre lot near Stafford, where they had two houses on the lower level land, and most of the rest of the twenty acres was a steep wooded hillside.

The pig got there and they had to make a pen for it by the house. But pretty soon the pig got out of its pen and was wandering around the front yard. Lloyd was home and Carl and Dorothy were visiting, and he hollered for Carl to come help him round up the pig. Dorothy and her sister-in-law Margie, who was 14, began watching from the front porch. The men had sticks that they tried to swat the pig with to get it to head back into the pen. Every time they did that, the pig would turn around and charge one or the other of them and they had to dive out of the way. Dorothy and Margie started to laugh at the spectacle. The pig decided to run around the outside of the pen. The more the men chased the pig, the more fun the pig had dodging this way and that, leading them all around the yard and up the hillside, and oh, just everywhere. Dorothy and Margie were soon laughing so hard they were gasping for air.

Lillie, hearing the commotion from inside, came out on the porch and asked what was going on. The two girls couldn’t speak, they could only point toward the hill as the tears ran down their cheeks. Lillie frowned. She put her hands on her hips, drew herself up to her full height (4 feet 10 inches) and said in the most exasperated tone she had, which was a considerable level of exasperation, “Oh! for heaven’s sakes!” Dorothy and Margie were completely overcome.

Lillie marched right out to the pig, grasped it firmly by the ear, and led it straight back into its pen with no trouble whatsoever. She shut and wired the gate with a Look that made Lloyd and Carl, who were both more than a foot taller than she was, appear to shrink several inches. Then she marched back to the house and across the porch, tossing over her shoulder, “Come girls, we have dinner to get on.” Dorothy and Margie followed, still gasping.

Photo credit: Richard Lutwyche

For further stories about my grandmother and her adventures, see the lists on my Munro and Read genealogy pages.

How Mrs Worsley Went to Oregon

The family story was that in the spring of 1863 Barbara Worsley and her five children and some workers engaged to work for her husband in the mill he was founding in Brownsville, Oregon, sailed from New York to Panama, crossed the Isthmus by mule, and sailed up the Pacific Coast to Oregon. But I was reading a David McCullough book, Brave Companions, in which one chapter treats the Panama Railroad, a subject that I definitely read about in his great book The Path Between the Seas, and only just now did the penny drop; I realized that because the railroad was finished in 1855, of course Barbara and her party did not ride mules across the Isthmus after all.

So I started researching online records and found some facts upon which to hang my suppositions.

Barbara Worsley left Trenton, New Jersey, in June 1863 with her children, 13-year-old William, 11-year-old Benjamin, 6-year-old Sarah, 4-year-old Joseph, and 6-month-old Laura. On June 13th they embarked on the SS America, a steamship on The People’s Line, under Captain Jeff Maury. The ship’s passenger list shows “Mrs. Worsley and two children,” which probably meant that she paid the passage for herself, for Sarah, and for Joseph, and baby Laura went free because she had to be carried. Either the two older boys went with their father overland the summer before this, or they were among the 300 “other passengers” not named.

In 1863 the Panama Railroad had been operating for eight years, so Barbara and the children must have ridden the train from Colon to Panama City. The fare was exorbitant, $25 per person for first class, $10 per person for second class, with personal baggage costing 5 cents per pound. I don’t find that there were children’s rates or special fares, but there could have been something to mitigate the cost. Perhaps she had the money for the first class fares; I don’t know the Worsley family’s financial state in those years. The train ride took only four to five hours to cross the Isthmus rather than the four to eight days that the mule trains used to take (mules were used only for the final 20 miles of the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific; the first part of the journey was in native dugout canoes navigating up the dangerous Chagres River). The railway, initially completed with nearly two hundred wooden bridges, had immediately been in the process of being upgraded so that all those bridges were rebuilt with iron. All the wooden trestles and all the pine ties had to be replaced with more permanent materials as well to withstand the tropical rains and heat. Passengers would have looked out on amazing jungle vistas in some places and in other places would have felt that they were traveling through tight green tunnels, so closely did the workers cut the vegetation so that the train cars barely fit. The noise, heat, clouds of mosquitoes and other insects, coal smoke, and intense humidity would have made their time in the tropics uncomfortable under the best conditions.

In Panama City they connected with the SS Moses Taylor, and in this ship they steamed up the Pacific coast, arriving in San Francisco on July 12, 1863. Despite their relatively short time down in Panama, Barbara was bitten by an infected mosquito and was incubating malaria. The disease can take from a week to a month before symptoms appear, depending on the health of the infected person and on the type of malaria it is. The CDC website says, “The shorter periods are observed most frequently with P. falciparum and the longer ones with P. malariae.” The malaria parasite infects blood cells and causes the production of substances that produce the fevers and chills that are the most common symptoms of the disease. Sometimes the infected cells no longer circulate freely but collect against walls of veins and cause other problems.

By the time they arrived in San Francisco, Barbara may have been suffering the first wave of the disease’s attack, with chills and fever, headaches and possible vomiting. These attacks classically recur every two to three days. She might have thought she had caught the flu and tried to wait until she was better. Otherwise, she might have still been symptom-free and could have immediately set sail for Oregon. As soon as she became ill, it must have become a nightmarish journey for her, trying to look after a growing baby and two small children. She would have had to rely on her six-year-old daughter Sarah to help as much as the little girl could.

She and her children arrived at the port of Marshfield in July or August 1863. Looking at the possibilities, I see that the Brother Jonathan was arriving in San Francisco from the northern ports every couple of weeks, which means it was regularly traveling back and forth; that could well be the steamer that let Mrs. Worsley and her children off at old Coos Bay. The mail would have allowed her to inform her husband of exactly when they were arriving, so he could well have met her at the city of Marshfield on the shores of Coos Bay. I hope he did meet her when they came off the boat!

(A sad note about the Brother Jonathan, in 1865 against her captain’s advice, by order of her owners she was overloaded at the port in San Francisco, and enroute to Portland, she struck a reef at Crescent City and sank with all 166 on board.)

To reach their new home in Brownsville, just north of Eugene, the Worsleys would have traveled by horse-drawn wagon. Today the drive is 142 miles; back then, it may have been about the same distance depending on which way the roads went, but of course what roads there were would have been quite primitive. Surely by the time they were in the wagon traveling to Brownsville, Mrs. Worsley was getting seriously sick.

Malaria had few treatments at that time and place. Quinine was known, but it was probably hard to come by in that area, if they even correctly diagnosed what was wrong with Barbara. The rigors of the journey surely sapped her strength, and without being able to rest and get better, she may have suffered from one of the common complications such as pneumonia or sepsis, or perhaps she had the more virulent form of malaria that attacks the brain and causes seizures, coma, and death. She suffered for several weeks at least, and probably for a little more than a month. By the end of the first week of September in Brownsville, she was dead, and the family was devastated.