Surf's Up
It's a bit after 10 PM, and I'm in the county park at Pacific City. It's an undistinguished, windy camp, but it has the virtue of showers (coin-op, always worth the quarters) and a nearby laundromat. So I and my clothes have been washed. I fed myself with a seafood pasta thing at the pub on the beach, watched the waves roll in with surfers on them at sunset, and now I'm typing in my tent.
Yesterday was a pleasant enough Not Moving day at Camp Lookout, but as often happens when I stay in one place, a case of the mopes threatened to spoil things. I remedied it with a prodigious application of beach, and later on I had dinner in Netarts with Bobby and Ted, two folks I met at Nehalem State Park the day before yesterday, along with Pete. Pete and Ted are cruising down the coast southways, like me, and Bob started out with them but quit biking due to back problems, so now he's tooling around the coast in his van, meeting up with Pete and Ted now and again as they travel. There was some fine local beer involved, enough to make me finally forswear the stuff entirely. I didn't get drunk, really, but I'm pretty convinced that my brain's chemistry associates any influx of alcohol with a certain state of mind, which is not the drunkenness itself, but rather the low spirits that usually preceded drunkenness back when I was a drinking man. So this morning, I awoke in low spirits, not hung over, but simply suffering the consequences of a habituated neural network which easily sets itself into a certain way of transmitting electricity from neuron V to neuron Q, a way which makes your humble narrator bummed out and listless.
This was cured by a short 15-mile ride to where I am now, which began by going up what was described by Pete as the "legendary" hill out of Cape Lookout.
All due respect to the hill, and to Pete (who's been doing this route for a decade): Clinch Mountain eats a big bowl full of hills like this for breakfast. So I made short work of it. I also made a phone call, while climbing it. Bobby passed by in his van near the top, and following my 40 mile-per-hour descent pulled off and gave me some roast chicken breast he had picked up on the way out of town. Protein!
That's how things have been, really. I lost my MSR pack towel at Nehalem Bay (very tragic), and decided to see about ordering another one and having it sent to me at Cape Lookout. But it turned out that it wasn't Monday, as I thought, but was in fact Saturday, which meant an extended stay if I were to carry out my plan. One of the rangers there offered to bring me a towel, very kind. When I checked back at the registration booth the next day, the ranger on duty called her on the radio, asking about the towel...she had forgotten to bring it! No worries, really, I'd deal. Later that night, I came upon a neatly rolled towel on a tree stump by the hiker/bike camp's water supply, along with a note held down by several small pebbles: hey!! this towel is for the gentleman biker who lost his...from the ranger who forgot to bring it when she said she would. hope you get it -mary I took the towel and the note, and, by adding a few extra, rearranged the pebbles into a smiley face on the tree stump.
I've been running on the same stove fuel that I bought back in Damascus, Virginia, and it's running out. This afternoon the route turned inland a bit, and I passed by a gas station and general store in Sand Lake. There was an older bearded fellow in overalls working on an ATV in front of the garage there, and I asked if he had any white gas. He said they had it at the general store, and when I told him I only needed 18 ounces or so, he went back into the garage and let me fill up from a little bit he had in a can back there. He wouldn't name a price, so I gave him three bucks which was worth it to me and fine by him.
When I went in to do my laundry after setting up camp, I saw that there was no place to buy those handy little boxes of single-use detergent. There was a woman there doing laundry, and she offered me a cup of her detergent so that I wouldn't have to buy a big bottle of the stuff at the store up the street.
This just keeps happening. It started with Bernie Kash and Ben, back in Kentucky, so it's not something that's necessarily unique to Oregon. Every day, I'm meeting good people, who do good things.
In the campsite across from me is a Korean named Hun (say Hoon) who's on a German-made folding bike. He started in Anchorage, skipped ahead by bus to Vancouver, and is probably going to end up in LA. In the site next to me is Kevin, who's here because Cape Kiwanda beach has an enormous dune at its south end, from which people jump while affixed to artificial wings. He's going to spend a week here improving his novice's hang gliding skills. It's so very different here from back east...everywhere I go, people are sailboarding, kiteboarding, biking, hang gliding, surfing. As I watched the sun set into the mountains of clouds over the western sea horizon, four surfers headed out into the breakers, while their ice blue-eyed dog kept me company on the sand. When I headed back to my campsite, she followed me a quarter mile up the beach until one of her people finally came ashore: as soon as she saw the distant silhouette of the wet-suited figure carrying the surfboard, she tore back down the beach. It was as though she was shadowing me just in case something Bad happened, and needed me to go in after her people.
But they were safe! See you buh-bye!
