Those are the things that defined this day. I ended up giving Ecola State Park a miss and camping at an RV park in Cannon Beach, mainly because the latter has showers. A shower wasn't important at the beginning of the day; at the end of the day, it was. I had my first climb today - modest, up to about 400 feet and then back down. There will be many more of those in the days to come.

I also spent about an hour and half on the beach at Seaside, deploying the solar panels to charge my cell phone and put a bit of juice back in the laptop. It'll be interesting to see whether I can actually make the whole solar-powered thing work...I really didn't get much of a chance to in Virginia and Kentucky, mainly because I was near an electrical outlet more often than not. I've almost depleted the smaller of my two laptop batteries, so I'll need to put some sun juice into it soon.

Cannon Beach is dominated to the south by Haystack Rock, and less dominated by the numerous small sand replcias of Haystack Rock I kept coming across. I have no idea how far the Rock is from where I started, but after a fine meal of skillet cornbread, rib-eye, mashed potato, veggies, and a local ale, I walked nearly all the way to it, and back again. Earlier in the day, at Seaside, I had a brief flare of "What will I do with my day?" anxiety when I realized I'd get to the campsite early...but then there were more miles than I expected and, once I got here, the obvious thing to do was to go to the beach and do beach-style things. This involved the wetting of the feet, the walking of the sands, and the watching of the sunset.

Once again, I am content, and thinking mellow thoughts about how the interaction of all the particles of sand with each other in the tumult of the thin sheets of incoming tide produces an assortment of intricate patterns once the water recedes. The various types of patterns are not identical, but they're similar - I've seen the same ones at three beaches now. So, there must be some commonality to the sand-water interaction, some principle that's the same wherever sand and water meet.

The last time I ended up by myself on a beach was in 1994, at Zipolite on the Pacific coast of Mexico. It was another Pivotal Moment in my life, in vaguely similar circumstances. Back then, there were great piles of locally grown pot and mushrooms. Not so much, now, which is a good thing, because I can look at the waves and the sand with unstoned eyes and contemplate the similarities between the interactions of sand and water and the interactions of people. In my life, of course, the commonality, the "principle that's the same," is me. And so it is that once again I end up by myself on a beach watching the waves and thinking about whatever it is that might come next in my life. Although, I must admit: I'm much happier on this 2006 beach than I was on that 1994 beach. Which is good, because I have many more weeks of beaches ahead of me.

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This is footage of me triking through the tunnel between Arch Cape and Cape Falcon. I would've gotten more (and steadier) video from inside the tunnel, but it quickly became apparent that I needed to focus more on steering and less on videography, so as to avoid death.

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Nehalem Bay State Park is on a narrow spit of land with - as one might imagine - bay on one side and ocean on the other. My first view of it was near the top of the first truly significant climb of the past three days which, although long, was nowhere near as bad as what I repeatedly hauled my sorry ass up and over in Kentucky. The soaring views helped, as did the moderate temperature and the near-constant wind at my back. I did arrive at camp in somewhat of a funk, which turned out to be blood sugar-related. I misjudged what I needed to eat for the climb, but remedied the situation with a roast beef sandwich, a mess of pasta salad, a mess of fruit salad, a quart of Powerade, and a Sprite. Thus fortified, I hit the beach.

A constant wind flows down from the north, around Cape Falcon, and sweeps all of the sand on the beach into a flat, rippled surface that shimmers with a scrim of fine particles in motion. Nothing is constant: footprints began to soften and turn into vague shapes as soon as they're made, and all objects, from gull feathers to driftwood logs, are surrounded by wind-carved depressions that conform to their shapes.

It's an environment that lends itself to thoughts of impermanence and of legacies. Any attempt to make a mark upon this landscape fails, as the forces that sweep across it instantly set about erasing it. At one point, I picked the label from a bottle of water out of the sand and released it, watching as it scurried downwind from me like a thing alive, making little paper footprints that vanished within a few seconds. I traced its bright white course for fifty yards or more, as the wind pushed it down into gullies behind driftwood and around hillocks of dune grass. Each time I thought it was done with its travels, the scrap of refuse would reappear, heading pell-mell for the high dunes, until it finally fetched up against the grasses there and fluttered at me, as though wanting me to come set it on its way again. The course of the scrap followed the contours sculpted by the wind, but it gave the illusion of self-direction.

The rest of the metaphor is left as an exercise for the reader.

There are eight other people here at the campsite - two young fellows from England, fresh from college, a couple fron San Francisco, headed north, a couple I haven't met yet, and another couple who are the first hikers I've seen so far. Today was the first day I've ridden with the solar panels deployed, to charge the laptop battery. Between shady road shoulders, things coming unplugged, and switches in the wrong position, I was expecting to see 20% battery capacity. I told myself, when I fired up the computer, that if it was 40% or better, I'd share the sun's bounty and let the hikers use my EVDO connection to send e-mail if they needed to. It was at 99%, and Davis and Anna were most grateful. Looks like this solar doohickey might actually do the job.

This is all so different from the travails of the South. People complain about the traffic on Route 101, but I've ridden worse roads, with no shoulders. The climbs, so far, do not equal those of the Appalachians. The weather is perfect for riding, the scenery is astounding, and the lack of pressure to put in the big miles has made this into what I had hoped my journey would be. Tonight, I will sleep with the soothing white noise of surf filling my tent.

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This morning, I woke up, looked out the tent flap, and didn't feel like going anywhere. So I didn't. I stayed in camp and drank too much chamomile tea (yes, it is possible). I spent most of the day bumming around camp, reading, and harvesting solar energy. Then cloud cover arrived, along with more hiker/biker types.

Tomorrow, supposedly, I'm going to pedal 38 miles to Cape Lookout State Park, but we'll see how I feel about that then. I may pedal fewer miles to some intermediate point, and then land at Cape Lookout the day after.

Who knows?

Not me.

LATER:

I've learned a very important lesson today: never let the day go by without getting near the ocean. It's just a bad idea.

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Back in the time before Mohammed, tales were told of the tribes of the Arabian desert who worshipped rocks. This was a misinterpretation. Each evening when they had set up camp, the nomads would find three stones and carefully set them atop one another. This represented their desert gods, and, thus, they could build a temple wherever they could find three stones

I rode the full forty miles today, without too much trouble. I was tired towards the end, of course, but that vanished as soon as I saw where I'd be setting up camp: in a towering forest of pines, the thick, persistent and gnarled sort of pines that, when knocked down, will thrust another tree forth from the ruins of the old, creating the impression of a calloused wooden fist clutching the earth with massive mossy fingers. From my chosen spot, I could see the waves crashing against the hidden shore. When I laid down on the ground on top of my tent's ground sheet - I always test the sleepability of a spot before pitching the tent - I stared up into a fractal chaos of tree trunks, out-thrust branches, needles, and sky.

The rides themselves are quickly becoming the least parts of my days...it's about getting to the next place, now, and being with the sea, and watching the sun set as often as possible. Route 101 is sometimes unremarkable as it winds down the coast...today, for example, I spent a lot of time with traffic, and when I was near mountains they were often piebald, with regular square patches of gray clear-cut areas, leaving their forested profiles uneven and disheveled.

When I finally cruised back down to sea level after a modest three hundred foot climb, things improved: salt flats along the bay, flat riding, and, finally, the stony beaches of Cape Lookout. This is a beach that vanishes at high tide, as the ocean rushes in to continue its work of turning boulders into stones and stones into sand. Mist shrouded the bluffs towards the south, and the beach to the north eventually vanished into an impenetrable cloud.

It's very hot inland this weekend, so the park is full of campers in cars and RVs who have fled to the coast. A large crowd gathered for the sunset, something I always enjoy. There's an ancient sense of community there: a bunch of humans, gathered together to watch the sun do its thing. On an impulse, I stopped by the registration station and got myself a bundle of firewood.

So, this is where I am writing to you from, right now. In the middle of an evening forest, by a campfire, listening to the waves crash against a beach made from a hundred million potential temples.

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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!

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Today was a longish day, relatively - 30 miles with a climb of 700 feet or so. But the climb was fairly gentle, and took me inland through part of the Siuslaw National Forest. There, I pedaled up surrounded by silent towers of moss-draped pine. Even my flat tire, the first on-road flat I've had, wasn't a big deal. Folks in a Jeep Wagoneer passed by, then turned around and came back to take my picture, offer me cold drinks, cherries, and fizzy vitamin-things. When I reached Lincoln City, I filled myself with protein from the sea, had to skip my usual sunset watch because the wind was so strong and cold, and bought a kite.

I'm very excited about that last thing. All my many kites are in storage, and I've been missing them while I've been on so many lovely windy beaches. I bought an small HQ Symphony 1.2, the little brother of a larger parafoil I own, and a steal at $35. I will fly it tomorrow when I reach Beverly Beach which, I am assured by the cycling coupling in the next tent over, is the equal of Cape Lookout.

I am, however, quite tired right now, so I'm going to keep this short.

More, of course, tomorrow.

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