Escaping to the Southern Oregon Coast
A SUREFIRE WAY to escape the smoke and heat here in the Rogue Valley is to head to the Southern Oregon Coast. Twice now Tony and I have made the 140-mile drive through the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest to Brookings, where the Southern Oregon Coast begins and Coastal California ends. We roll down the windows and breathe the cool air. A few miles later, the unique treasures of this region unfold: a world of rock arches and sea stacks, empty beaches, gentle surf, and forested promontories as far as the eye can see. These are public assets. Sixteen state parks hug the 83 miles of coast on Route 101 from Brookings north to Bandon, where Tony and I will head back inland.
For me, the “coast” has always meant the place where the land meets the ocean, where you hear the water move across the sand and salt hangs in the air. The California Coastline has been my soulmate for as long as I can remember.
When I was a child in Princeton, New Jersey, our family of five drove across the country in our old station wagon and spent August living next to the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, where my father earned a summer salary. We lived two blocks from Venice Beach and, air mattress in hand, I tested my eight-year-old body against waves twice as tall as me. I watched the sun set from the bluffs of Palisades Park. “It’s not over until the sky turns purple,” my mother always said. My brothers and I explored tide pools and hunted for abalone shells on the non-swimming beaches north of Los Angeles. (After Malibu, summer water temperatures along the Pacific coast plummet to the mid-50s, all the way to Canada.)
When our family separated and I moved to Santa Monica with my mother—she had fallen in love with a mathematician at UCLA—my ties to the places where the sand met the ocean melded with who I am. My first summer job involved tending preschoolers at a playground on the beach. Bikinis taught me most of what I thought I needed to know about my teenage body. I discovered the thrill of swimming in the ocean at night, especially when plankton lit up the waves at the end of summer, when the ocean was warmest.
One late afternoon in early September, just after I had moved from Princeton to Santa Monica and my heart broke with homesickness, my mother took me for a swim in the ocean, an ocean she loved as fiercely as I. There was an astronomical high tide and the water was unusually warm and calm, like an immense bath tub. I floated on my back, as buoyant as I’d ever felt, and remembered how lucky I was.
Years later, when I was a senior in high school, my parents left me alone with a friend of theirs and an unusual house guest: the brilliant and schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, made famous by the film The Beautiful Mind. He paced our small house, perhaps debating the voices in his head. Knowing the soothing power of a long walk by the ocean, I told our family friend to get his coat (it was a cold Sunday in January) and we drove to the beach. He and I walked separately in silence all afternoon.
Like the writer in a recent “Modern Love” column in the New York Times, I also fell in love with Big Sur when I was nine and the breathtaking views from the iconic Nepenthe, a family favorite on the drive up Highway 1 to San Francisco. I imagined marrying a rich man and living in a wood and glass house in Big Sur, down a steep dirt road marked only by a mailbox next to the highway. (The interest inventory I took in middle school had other ideas for my future: I’d live in a big city and be an orchestra conductor or a stewardess.)
I’d always heard about the beauty of the Southern Oregon Coast and it added to Ashland’s lure. When the first heat wave of summer descended in mid-June, Tony and I booked a room on the coast that morning and headed out. On the three-hour ride there, I searched my iPhone for not-to-be-missed trails and views and beaches. (Tony chides me about being obsessed with the “best.”) Quickly, it became clear that the best was everywhere.
The most cliff-bound section of this coastline begins just north of Brookings with the Samuel H. Boardman State Scenic Corridor, an 11-mile strip of land between the ocean and US 101. Within the park, the Oregon Coast Traillinks dozens of features, from Arch Rock and Thunder Rock Cove to Secret Beach and Indian Sands, where dunes roll across a bluff high above the ocean.
Annual rainfall here is a hundred inches a year (half that amount this year) and the moss and ferns grow lush. Fog is endemic. On both our trips, the sun and fog jostled for position. On our first trip to the coast, when we reached Cape Blanco Lighthouse, perched on wind-swept bluffs on the western-most point of the continental U.S, it was hidden in fog. An hour later, at the Cape Sebastian State Scenic Corridor, the fog suddenly receded to reveal 50 miles of coastline—a gigantic scroll of deep blue ocean and densely forested slopes giving way to precipitous rock faces and small deep-water bays.
When we woke the next morning at our seaside motel in Bandon, the fog seemed back to stay, not dense but damp.
All along the drive from Brookings to Bandon, we had seen the sea stacks for which the Oregon Coast is so famous. But at Bandon’s Face Rock, the stacks sit like giants half submerged in the ocean, not far from shore. Dark and brooding, they have eluded millions of years of erosion, marking former positions of the coastline, when giant plant-eating dinosaurs roamed the earth and the oceans were full of fish and squid.
For several hours, Tony and I walked in the fog among the ancient sea stacks and across the wet, grey sand in Bandon. We had come to escape the heat and smoke in Ashland and had found a land before time.
Back in the car, the radio buzzed with talk about the decade we almost stopped climate change but how we’re now losing the earth. Maybe when all else is gone, the sea stacks will remain.
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