dairy cows and barns greet us. Julian says he enjoys the rich fragrance of cow shit. When he was younger, he worked on a farm in Germany. Before we drive into that great teenage resort town, Seaside, where boys and girls drag the gut in their parent’s cars, I show him the coastline. Every time I go to the Coast it terrifies me at some level. I like it. But the roar of the ocean is so sad. Washing shells, and rocks, and bones, grinding everything into sand. The tall white bleached Douglas fir snags stick up nobly above the second-growth alder and vine maple. Because of heavy winter rainfall, the underbrush is thick like jungle. Neahkahnie Mountain juts into the ocean, with engineered roadside viewpoints. It knifes the weather in two—cloudy to the north, clearer to the south. Descending toward Short Sands beach, and Cape Falcon further on, I have Julian park the car, and we hike through manzanita, salmonberry and salal to high cliffs. This is one of the most spectacular views on the coast, named after a prominent Tillamook chief, Point Higa. It’s also called Elk Point, and their spoor litters the ground. Have you ever heard an elk piercingly trumpet? The sound is as gorgeous as whale song. It’s a lovers’ leap. It's a meditative suicide perch. Wind-tortured pine trees are on the left and a smooth high place on the right were you could fall and die. You body’d plunge into the carved out punchbowl of the ocean below. Seagulls screech and ocean caverns boom, black cormorants dive and nest. The rocks are sculpted, the wind’s strong blowing. Your senses become possessed by the magic of the place. Bemused in natural awe. We meet my friend Margaret Moore, and her sons in Seaside. While the boys cavort, we go to a tavern and talk. She Is starved for conversation with an adult. In a short while, we buy bright red Dungeness crab, and several quarts of beer, and drive to a rented house, near Ecola beach. "Ecola" means whale in Chinook. In 1806, a whale washed ashore and Lewis and Clark got some of the blubber for supplies. Margaret wants to see for herself breath-taking Point Higa. Wire, her oldest son, comes with us. The manzanita is wet, but Margaret—sensitive, intelligent composer and teacher of music—loves the view. She sits rapt and quiet. Her son, as any nervous suburban male, picks up a rock and tosses it into the ocean. Males have to project their force into the womb of the void! I warn him about how fragile the ecology of this point is. I discover in the grass, near the cliff, a small lovely snail. Alive inside a fine, greenish bronze shell. The fragile jelly of his soft body, and two protruding antenna eyes, retract nervously and then cautiously project outward, to the vibrations of my fingers. I set him in a safer place where he won't be stepped on. L The Tillamook Burn EST we forget. Driving back home, with the noisy valves and weak compression, we soar easily over the cool green forested mountains, past Saddle Mountain, Elsie and Timber. Only vaguely do we comprehend that the largest forest fire of the century occurred here. The 1933 Tillamook Burn. Those white bone-like snags on the Nehalem are reminders. It started near Glenwood, in low-humidity August, possibly by two logs rubbing together and spread along the Wilson River. Fanned by the east wind, on August 24th, it exploded like an H-bomb, spreading through Scoggins Valley, from Tillamook to Forest Grove, north to Mist, a distance of 70 to 100 miles. All in all, 300,000 acres were blackened, half the area of Rhode Island. Twelve billion board feet of virgin old-growth timber—Doug fir, cedar, spruce—was consumed. Probably more so than the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Tillamook Burn is the greatest natural disaster in Pacific Northwest history. Ellis Lucia writes in The Big Woods: "In 20 incredible hours the fire rampaged...across the nation’s best forest land, burning trees at a rate of 600,000 board feet an hour. Along a horrifying 15-mile front the fire became an awesome wall of orange flame, exploding again and again in the towering tops of 400-year-old firs, creating an inferno unlike anything since Northwest volcanic peaks erupted. "Three thousand fire fighters were helpless as the awesome smoke cloud mushroomed 40,000 feet into the atmosphere.... Darkness came at noon for towns surrounding the cauldron. Chickens went to roost at midday. Ashes rained down on the small towns and upon Portland. Black debris piled two feet deep on the beautiful sandy beaches of the northern Oregon coast, and fell upon ships five hundred miles at sea.” Listening to rock and roll in the car, we don't realize this. We are intent upon returning to Portland and our petty tasks. The weather clears as we cross the mountains, near the cut-off to Vernonia. It’s hot inland, away from the fogginess of the beach. Yet hours later, days later, that clammy, mysterious landscape haunts me, with its effluvia of the past. The grey weather of the Oregon Coast makes me seasick, even when I’m not on a boat. No wonder the North Coast Indians were cannibalistic. The Northern Pacific winter Is a bleak, damp disaster. You might as well call Raven, Killer Whale, Bear your blood brother while hallucinating in a smoky hovel, as the waves batter and slam against the shoreline, in the foggy darkness. Affordable Unique Holiday Gifts & Fashions ‘‘Have you been studying Astrologyfor years and can’tget it together? Then Come See Us!!! Tami & Russ Ward ARCANE BOOK STORE Classes, Horoscopes, Books Tarot Cards, Workshops & More!!! Counseling & Questions Answered. 511 N.W. 21st Avenue 228-0095 CELEBRATION! 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