Beyond the Rickety Stairs

Before I get into this week’s travels, I have a bit of housekeeping for Wanderlusting. Since early February, I have been attempting to chronicle our travels with this blog. I started by sharing how we found our way to the road and have shared many of our adventures. This blog, itself, is a journey, and I am learning a great deal through it, as well. Marlene does a great job by sharing daily updates on what we are doing and seeing with her FB posts that she shares on my page. If you read her posts, you will have a pretty good idea of what we have been up to. I sometimes do the check-ins, but Marlene is better able to get the pictures and updates out much quicker than I am.

 

Therefore, I will refocus Wanderlusting from being a chronicle of our adventures into a place where I will share pictures and stories you might be interested in seeing and reading. I want to respect your time and only share new pics and insights, so I will not repeat things we posted on FB. Each Sunday, I will review my week's pics and pick out a few for comment. I hope you find this new format more entertaining and enjoyable. Keep following us on FB. It is your seat for our journey. But each week, I hope to give you a little extra as we sit down and talk about our week together.

 

Enough of this tedious housekeeping, time to get on with the travels.

 

We started our week at Bandon / Port Orford KOA in Langlois, OR. This was a beautiful campground. It is an older campground, but the manager and staff are working very hard to make it an even better place to explore the Southern Oregon Coast. It sits between two very old fishing and shipping villages on striking headlands, Cape Blanco on the South and Coquille River Headlands on the North. Toward the end of our week, we moved on to Winchester Bay RV Resort in Winchester Bay, OR. This is a fishing, oystering, ATVing, and tourism village at the mouth of the Umpqua River. Here are a few of the things I found interesting along the way.

I found this tidal pool sitting about 10 feet above low tide at the foot of the Coquille Lighthouse. When I first saw it, I thought it was filled with tadpoles. They were darting and hiding in the small pool of seawater. But I had never heard of ocean frogs, so I thought I would look closer. It turns out that they were not tadpoles at all. They were baby fish stranded high above the surf by a low tide. After returning to Koko, a quick Google search said they were young Salmon. They were trapped in a tidal pool on their way to the Pacific. These tiny creatures have already run the gauntlet of freshwater streams in the mountains. And just as they were at the edge of freedom in the Pacific, a wave dropped them on this reef. They must now wait for another wave to come along and liberate them for the new life in the open ocean. They will return in a few years, but until then, this little pond may be the last time they see another Salmon and until their childhood home to spawn and die in these same waters. Life is quite fragile on these rocky shores. But its fragility increases my respect for it and the creative ways that it finds to survive and thrive in a world filled with giant waves and small tidal pools of experience.

 

As we walked through several museums this week, we heard many stories of shipwrecks and the brave crews that went out to rescue the passengers and crews of those unfortunate vessels. The Southern Oregon Coast is a dangerous place for shipping. One of the reasons is the number of rocks like these that lay just off the headlands of Port Orford. These are close to the shore, but many extend far out from the coast. They line the Northern California and Southern Oregon Coast. These rock formations result from the Cascadia subduction zone that stretches the entire length of the Oregon and Washington Coasts. The Juan de Fuca Plate under the Pacific slides beneath the North American plate. This movement causes the signature earthquakes and volcanos of the area. However, the subduction also causes the softer soil of the inland that overlays the volcanic rocks beneath to march into the ocean at roughly one inch per year. Waves and other tidal forces erode the softer rock, leaving huge seas stacks of basalt rising up out of the water or, more menacingly, sitting just beneath the surface. In addition, the sand that washes off these coastal rocks becomes sand shoals that shift around and are impossible to chart. Ships, if they wander off the sea lanes, can end up stranded on rocks or sand. The frequent fog and howling winds drive these ships into dangerous waters, and lives are lost. The Coast Guard and their predecessors at Life Boat Stations along the coast are the last chance for these men and women to survive the dangers of sea travel in this area. Life is fragile, and sometimes all we can do is rescue those whose lives have been stranded on the rocks and shoals of life.

 

 

Bandon Beach sits just below Coquille River headland and is home to many amazing creatures. One of the most entertaining is the Harbor Seals that lay on the rocks, protected from the wind and surf. These seals have body fat to protect them from the cold waters of the Pacific, but they still need to get out and warm up after several hours at sea, feeding in the depths off the coast. They travel in family groups, and when everyone is well-fed, they find rocks such as these to lay around and sleep, scratch, fuss, and bark for hours on end. These two were unimpressed with the bull Sea Lions battling it out for a bit of nearby rock. But they did keep an eye on all the people on the shore across the tidal pools. Their girth would lead me to believe they were slow and clumsy on the rocks. But if they need to, they could move quickly and be gone instantly. Their most endearing quality is their faces, which simultaneously seem actively attentive and acutely disinterested. My camera lens kept returning to these two the whole time we stood on the edge of that tidal pool. Unlike the salmon fry, they are not stranded on these rocks; they have made them home.

 

In Bandon, the cliffs above the beach are lined with houses, some of which are weekend rentals and second homes. I saw stairs such as these for beach access. They climbed the sand dunes and had to weather the storms of life on the coast. We came down one such set at the headland visitor parking area. I'm not too fond of heights, and stairs such as these scare the bejabbers out of me. My 69-year-old knees do not work as well as they used to, making my walking stick a necessity. But these stairs are a necessary evil, a choice that must be made occasionally. They lead to wondrous places where sea stars and other oddities live in small tidal pools for a brief portion of the day. Sea Lions and Harbor Seal serenade one another, with the occasional Elephant Seal sounding the bass notes of the symphony. Towering sea stacks with romantic names like Wizard’s Hat, Face Rock, and Elephant Rock surround us as waves pummel the rocks and raise soaking mists. The sea fog sometimes creeps in from the ocean and cloaks everything in mystery. Yep, I would never consider a trip down those stairs were it not for the unknown wonders that await a walk in the sand. Wonders abound, and sometimes I have to overcome my fears and let my wonder come out and play on the beach. Traveling these rocky shores is dangerous business. But an open spirit and a mind brimming with curiosity will make the danger a small part of the decision to seek out and be enfolded in this magic.

 

While walking on Bandon Beach, a local man called me over and asked if I had a telephoto lens on my camera. I said I did. With great excitement, he led us to a place just a few yards away. He had been coming to this beach almost weekly for 35 years and had never seen anything like what he was about to show us. We stopped, gathered around, and he pointed down and said, “Can you believe it?” I looked down and must have had a “What-the-H&*#-are-you-talking-about” look on my face. Then he said, “The ladybugs! The ladybugs!”  I looked down, and sure enough, there were Ladybugs on the sand. We had noticed them before but did not see anything interesting about them. But our new friend went on, saying that this was very strange. You never see these or the other bugs scattered around on that beach. He believed we saw a significant part of natural history unfolding at our feet. He wondered if they resulted from the enormous winds caused by the climate change storms pounding the shoreline for the last week. He thought they might have been blown out to sea, died, and washed up on the beach. "Imagine how many pollinators must have died this week?" He then suggested that wines and flowers, fruits and vegetables might suffer because of the catastrophic die-off of the essential pollinators of the Oregon and California Coasts. I documented the bugs we saw, and there were quite a few. He wandered off, muttering to himself about the significance of this discovery. It was not until I had time to think about it and began to wonder, "How much more dangerous have we made this world because we disregard the needs of the least among us.?" We only saw bugs that may have been stranded by the recent storms and washed ashore after perishing in the sea. Perhaps I am just not bright enough to see the real significance of this event. I wonder?

 

As we were walking the beach, we kept reading references to Face Rock in the signage. One man, who, like us, was new to the beach, stopped and asked us which rock was Face Rock. After looking around looking for a face in the rocks, we had to shrug our shoulders and say we did not know. Later, the man, fascinated by the bugs, pointed us in the right direction to the face in the rock. At his suggestion, we could finally see it. We had been looking at it all along and never saw the face. All it took for the mystery to be revealed was the word of someone who we believed was a credible guide. From a particular point of view, the Face Rock appears to be a human head rising out of the water. Did it exist before the bug man pointed us in the right direction? Yes. Then why didn’t we see it? How did the first person looking at this rock see a face? This is the way of magical, mysterious places. Most of us require a guide to help us to even know that they are there. We depend upon those special people who can see them all on their own. We came to see Face Rock because one man asked us about it, and another pointed us in the right direction. But they are tiny links in the chain of the human awakening that leads back to one solitary soul who opened their eyes and said with astonishment, "Look, there is a face in that rock!" We all need more people around us who ask these  questions and point us toward wonders. This is especially true for those prone to look down on these magical places from our comfortable abodes above those rickety stairs.

 

This is a Song Sparrow. They are a very common North American Song Bird. But something about this own did not fit our expectations. The color and the patterns were not right. We knew Song Sparrows. We have seen them in Texas. But this one’s differences haunted us. Marlene, being the bird expert of the family, finally determined that her best guess is that it is the Aleutian sub-species of the Song Sparrow. I sometimes overlook the wonder and mystery of life because I have seen it before. I disregarded the bird until I noticed the differences. By paying attention to that nagging feeling that something does not fit, we may realize that the world is far more complex than we previously believed. Mystery and wonder await any inquisitive mind that encounters things it is willing to admit that it does not understand. Such questions will lead us down the dangerous stairs and onto the rocky shores of new experiences and learning.

 

But, as much as I enjoyed the bottom of those stairs, I must admit that there were great moments to be embraced on the cliffs that rose from the beach. This bench was one of those places. It sat on the cliff's edge that overlooked the sea stacks north of Bandon Beach. The surf was a faint rhythm that supported the wind's gentle melody. From this bench, I could see the horizon's edge, a thin place where the real and the imagined seem to hold on to one another. I could have sat there for hours, enthralled by a reality that became all too real. But I didn't. I walked on, looking for another picture. What magic did I miss by walking on by and refusing to yield to the invitation to sit and stay awhile? 

 

The next day we made our way to Cape Blanco. As we were walking to the lighthouse on the headland, I saw a storyboard that pointed out that we had just walked over two cracks in the earth's surface, fault lines that were part of the complex of cracks and fissures that made up the Cascade subduction zone. The earth is in constant motion in these places, albeit very slowly. We all count on the ground staying where it is. But these faults are proof that our trust is ill-founded. The ground beneath us is on the move, and there is nothing we can do to stop or control it. This picture shows that these faults are only noticed by lay people like me once they move. The Cape Blanco Headland is a bit of basalt that juts out from the mainland and is surrounded by seas stacks. It is cut off from the mainland by two faults that look like drainage ditches in the soil. But they were not caused by erosion from above. Instead, they are caused by the earth's crust breaking beneath our feet and opening a growing void between the lighthouse and the mainland. Popular wisdom says that this is the westernmost part of the US Mainland. But nothing lasts forever, and in some distant future, that crack will open up, and that bit of land that holds a lighthouse will become another sea stack off the coast of North America. Such insight is only possible when we can rise above our day-to-day life and it from a much broader perspective, geologic time.

 

One final tidbit from our week takes me to the Lighthouse Museum in Winchester Bay. Among the artifacts of the Coast Guard Lifeboat station is this small item that was recovered from one of the wrecks. It is called a Tea Brick. This highly compressed brick of English Tea was used to satisfy the needs of English Men and Women as they sailed around their global empire. Tea was a necessity for English Culture to thrive in far-off lands. The creation of the tea brick allowed the Brits to adapt to change while ensuring that the important things did not change, like tea time. Life in the realm of mystery and wonder can be very dangerous. It threatens the things we believe are vital to self-understanding. We can do our best to adapt, like making tea bricks. But given the broader view from the top of the cliff, we know that change will overtake us. We need to remember those tiny Salmon in that little tidal pool. Life finds a way to survive, even when, in the depths of geologic time, everything we believe is permanent will be changed. Life finds a way. That is our ultimate hope!

 

We will be here in Winchester Bay for another few days before we move on to our next stop at Premier RV Resort in Lincoln City, OR for six nights. What does tomorrow hold? I can’t say, but I look forward to seeing where our road takes us. Adventures await us. Mysteries abound. There are even some rickety stairs out there inviting us to travel to those magical places. I hope these stairs do not quell the curiosity and questions that bubble up from the depths of each new day.

 

Welcome to the adventure,

Bob.