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DAY 20 – Friday, April 2
START: Tillamook, OR
END: Kirkland, WA
MILEAGE: 313 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: More Lighthouses, Astoria Column, Goonies House, Espresso Lady, Rebekah’s House

The lighthouse builders of Oregon just never seemed to get their act together.  There was Cape Arago, which had to be rebuilt not once but twice; Yaquina Head, which was built in entirely the wrong place; and then there was Cape Meares, where we were headed now, which was, well… built in entirely the wrong place.  Apparently one of the government employees working for the United States Coastal Survey accidentally switched Cape Meares and Cape Lookout on the official sea chart and the lighthouse designated for Cape Lookout was instead constructed five miles to the north at Cape Meares.  Rather than incur the cost of rebuilding, which would render yet another lighthouse useless, the Lighthouse Service just said, “To hell with it,” and left everything the way it was. 

Not for nothing, but they couldn’t have picked a more scenic spot for the site of their screw up.  The Cape Meares Light only stands a squat thirty-eight feet tall for good reason.  It’s perched at the top of a cliff that drops two hundred feet straight down to the ocean.  As short as it is, it’s still higher above sea level than most any other lighthouse out there and mariners rarely had trouble spotting its beacon from sea.  Walking the half-mile path to the light at just after ten o’clock in the morning, Lauren and I gawked and stared and made the same breathless exclamations we’d been making for the past several days.  We were going on nearly a week now traveling up the Pacific Coast, but its rocky cliffs, turbulent waves, and unobstructed views still couldn’t manage to bore us.

We’d stayed in Tillamook overnight, shortchanging our mileage for the day and putting up with crappy motel service, all for the opportunity to come see this lighthouse.  And yet when we came to the end of the path, we snapped a couple of pictures, and five minutes later (since the lighthouse itself wasn’t open) headed back to the car.  It didn’t matter.  We had officially bagged all the lights in Oregon.  Well, sort of.  Technically there was also a lightship in Astoria where we were headed next, but please, a lighthouse on a boat?  That’s just silly.  Besides there were other things that would keep us busy in Astoria before going back in pursuit of even more (real) lighthouses.

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Astoria is a city steeped in history.  While Native American Indians had lived in the area for well over ten thousand years before the white man came, Astoria became an important outpost in ol’ Whitey’s race to claim the continent for himself.  One of Lewis and Clark’s key points of interest on their famous journey was to see if the Columbia River, which empties into the Pacific Ocean in Astoria, could somehow provide a direct water route across the country.  It didn’t, and Lewis and Clark ended up spending a particularly harsh winter (in which it “rained all but twelve days”) in Astoria, which at the time was called Fort Clatsop.  A New York financier named John Astor arrived here five years later and brought with him a fur trading empire as well as the namesake for the eventual incorporated city.   Astoria soon became an important hub in America’s “Manifest Destiny” of settling the western frontier.  For migrants traveling the Oregon Trail, Astoria was often quite literally the end of the line.  The booming town was the first western city to have a post office, and it somehow managed to stand the test of time even as it became eclipsed by Portland and other inland cities.  Still it stands today, the oldest American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains.

But to be honest, Lauren and I weren’t here for history.  We weren’t here for lighthouse boats.  We weren’t here for museums, riverwalks, restaurants, or nightlife.  We were here for one reason and one reason only.  Astoria is where they filmed The Goonies.  I knew from talking to a couple of well-informed friends that if you found the right map, it would lead you to several locations used in what I consider to be the funnest, hippest and purest kids movie to survive my childhood. 

But before we went off gallivanting in search of movie locations like a bunch of kids hunting for buried treasure, we made a stop at the Astoria Column.  This was a recommendation from the manager at the Montara Point Hostel and an easy place to find.  Perched on top of a hill, the tallest one in the city in fact, the column is impossible to miss even from ten miles away.  But just in case you did miss it, there are signs every quarter-mile or so leading you through the main business district, inexorably toward the city’s main focal point. 

Downtown Astoria has a very cool, very old, very blue-collar look to it.  It appears to be simultaneously a thriving port town and yet a town that is just this side of crumbling from within.  All the storefronts on the main drag were open for business, no boarded up buildings, and yet most of them seemed rather rundown.  Though perhaps “rundown” is the wrong word.  “Lived in” is probably more accurate.  The beaten and windblown facades didn’t appear to be the result of neglect.  They simply took on the character of a chiseled, war-wise old man who has worked hard to survive his entire life.  It wasn’t always pretty, and it was never easy, and he didn’t win any popularity contests along the way, but in the end he somehow made it work by the scrapes on his knuckles and the chips on his paint job.  Uh… sorry, I seem to have mixed up my analogies.  Just off the main drag, still on our way to the Column, the backdrop changed almost instantly from working class to more or less suburban, with little just-so houses on nicely mowed postage-stamp lawns, and plenty of trees providing ample shade.  It’s obvious that, unlike other cities, the people of Astoria actually live where they work and work where they live.  And while work might mean a long hard day on the docks, home is still just a five-minute drive away.  Astoria is definitely a place that, given another chance at life, I would like to have lived in for a year or so.

Following the diligently-(almost-anally)-placed signs, and navigating numerous blind curves on our way up the hill, we came at last to the Astoria Column.  Erected in 1926, and modeled after the historic Trajan’s Column in Rome, Astoria’s version is essentially a modern-day totem pole telling the history of the area, from the days of the Indians to the arrival of the railroad, via a mural of artwork that spirals its way scroll-like up the column.  I tried to follow the storyline.  I really did.  I began at the bottom and walked around and around the column, working my way up.  There are fourteen levels to the scroll and I think made it to about six before I got a crick in my neck and had to stop.  At a hundred and twenty-five feet tall, I imagine the Astoria Column is a bit like a Tootsie Pop.  It takes a really dedicated person to complete all fourteen circles of the scroll before giving in and biting through the hard candy shell.  Um… yeah, the analogy thing again.

Taller than any lighthouse we’d seen so far, the Astoria Column had an interior stairwell that went up to an observation deck.  And bless Lauren’s heart, she climbed all hundred and sixty-four steps of it.  The view from the top was of course amazing.  The only way to get a better birds eye view of Astoria, one would actually have to be a bird.  It was a bright sunny day and we had a clear view of the town, the ocean, the wide mouth of the Columbia River and the Astoria-Megler Bridge, which takes you across into Washington State.  Admission to the column was free, but donations were gladly being accepted.  We made our own contribution by patronizing the gift shop outside, picking up the usual postcards, Christmas ornaments and shotglass.  But I was also looking for something more specific.  And tucked in amongst a rotating rack full of bumper stickers, I found it.  A simple, non-flashy, black and white pamphlet entitled: “Shot in Astoria – Your Tour of Movie Locations Filmed in Astoria!”

Inside was a movie buff’s treasure trove full of maps, directions and travel tips to locations from movies like Short Circuit, Point Break, Free Willy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.  Okay, maybe pretentious movie buffs wouldn’t consider this to be much of a treasure, and honestly I ignored most of the information contained in the pamphlet too, flipping straight to the pages dealing with the most awesome Sean Astin movie ever.  That’s right, I said it.  You can keep your goofy little hobbits with their silly little rings.  Mr. Astin will always and forever be Mikey Walsh in my book. 

Following the pamphlet’s directions, we headed back down the hill and over to Duane Street where we parked the car and walked up a private drive to a house that would go unnoticed by anybody who couldn’t picture it with an intricate gate-opening device involving a bowling ball, a chicken and a sprinkler.  This was the Walsh house.  The place where the adventure began.  Where the rugrats from the Goon Docks found One-Eyed Willy’s treasure map and went off in search of “the rich stuff.”  It’s also, of course, the place where the amiable little fatty named Chunk performed his famous dance known round the world as “The Truffle Shuffle.”  I did my duty as a loyal Goonies fan and performed my own rendition of the silly dance, thankful that it was early afternoon on a workday and nobody on the entire street appeared to be home.

There were a few other minor and out-of-the-way Goonies locations we could have checked out.  But by now we’d been in Astoria for over two hours and had to get a move on.  So we got back in the car and crossed over the Columbia River into Washington State, turning almost immediately into Fort Canby State Park for the last two lighthouses we would see on this trip: North Head and Cape Disappointment. 

Whoa, whoa, wait a second there Brian, you’re probably thinking.  Two lighthouses in the same park?  Is this the result of yet another Yaquina Bay / Yaquina Head boondoggle?  In fact, no.  The Columbia River has a similar state of affairs to the Coquille River in that the freshwater of the river mixing with the salt water of the ocean has worked to create a dangerous sandbar.  The one major difference between the two is that the Columbia’s mouth is much, much, much wider than the Coquille’s, making the sandbar equally more immense, and earning this area the daunting title: “Graveyard of the Pacific.”  The Cape Disappointment Light was erected in 1856 to both guide mariners into the river and to warn them against the shipwrecking sandbar.  The inherent problem with its location however was that the light could only be seen by ships traveling from the south.  A jutting mountain obstructed the view from the north.  So in 1898 the North Head Light was built to give an equal heads up to ships coming from both directions.  As time went on, even two lighthouses weren’t enough to ease the minds of ship captains.  These days, buoys, three jetties and constant dredging are necessary to keep entrance to the river a more or less safe endeavor.

We headed to the North Head Light first, for no better reason than it was the one closest to the parking lot, and for a scant one-dollar donation we were able to climb to the top.  The lady volunteer working the base gave Lauren yet another one of those looks we’d been getting in any attraction that involved stairs.  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay climbing this?” she asked, “It’s sixty-four steps up.” 

“Oh that’s nothing,” Lauren laughed.  “I did the Astoria Column this morning.”

With a look and tone of voice that said okay, if you say so, the lady motioned us toward the stairs and we started up.  It may have been only one-third the height of the Astoria Column, but Lauren still felt every step.  But she was rewarded at the top with a very educational discussion with yet another lighthouse volunteer who told us all about the history of not just the lighthouse but the state park on which it resides.  Fort Canby was once an actual operational military base, armed with canons in 1862 to protect the mouth of the river from invading armadas and remained in active operation until 1947.  From the light room, we could see some of the old concrete canon platforms still in place.  Fort Canby was the only place on the mainland United States to receive hostile fire during World War II.  One night in 1942, a Japanese submarine fired seventeen shells at the fort, but only succeeded in destroying a baseball backstop. 

Our volunteer also told us that North Head is apparently the windiest lighthouse area on the west coast, and the third windiest place in the entire country.  Back in 1932, the lens actually got damaged when a duck was blown through the window…  I’m sorry, I have to say that again because it’s just too damn funny.  The wind was blowing, and A DUCK was redirected with enough force to not only break the window, but then chip a first order Fresnel lens – which, if you’ve ever seen these lenses, you know just how thick they are.  Just imagine that visual in your head for a second and ask yourself this:  If you were the keeper on duty that night, would you have cursed and sworn over your broken lens, or laughed your ass off at the duck’s expense over what must have been – let’s face it – an incredibly slapsticky demise?  Ironically, it was a rather balmy day during our visit to North Head, and after our experiences at Point Reyes and Yaquina Head, we told our volunteer that we’d just have to take his word for it that this place was one of the windiest in the country. 

After about twenty minutes, we thanked the volunteer and climbed back down the steps to begin our hike to Cape Disappointment.  And it was a hike too.  Three quarters of a mile through the woods and up and down several rather steep hills, knowing we’d have to cover the same terrain on the way back.  Under normal circumstances that, of course, would have been nothing, but I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of Lauren’s special condition.  The last eighth of a mile was the worst, walking up a partially paved road with the same steepness as a San Francisco hill.  Lauren held onto my arm as I all but pulled her up the incline, stopping every fifty steps or so to let her catch her breath.  We actually ended up putting the hike to good use, using the strenuous activity to practice breathing exercises for labor.  Lauren, having recently completed her graduate degree in midwifery, coached me on how I should breathe with her, match her intonation and try to slow her down if her respirations got too fast.  Of course, everything we practiced ended up going straight out the window less than an hour into hard labor, but that’s beside the point. 

The view at the top was nice, though in retrospect, probably not worth Lauren’s effort and hyperventilation.  The short conical lighthouse, with its black and white stripe design, was operated by the Coast Guard, so the interior was closed to the public.  While we did have a nice birds-eye view of the river and its three jetties below, the real postcard shot of Cape Disappointment required a bit of distance.  So on the way back to the car, we took a side trail that brought us to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, which was situated near the edge of a cliff that looked out over the cape.  From there we could see the lighthouse in context, sitting atop its evergreen-covered cliff with the ocean and the mountains in the background.  Absolutely stunning. 

Lauren, of course, made use of the bathroom inside the interpretive center several times before we headed back to the car.  It was already four o’clock and we were utterly whooped from a full day, but knew we still had a long stretch of driving ahead of us.  Our plan was to make it to Lauren’s friend Rebekah’s house near Seattle where we would spend the night.

We ended up at a little roadside place in South Bend called Boondocks Restaurant, which was more than just a mere drive-through hut and actually had a full-fledged store with counter service, room to walk around, and other stuff on sale.  In fact it appeared that seafood, not espresso, was their actual specialty.  But with the all-important word emblazoned on their exterior, we walked in and ordered ourselves a couple of iced mocha lattes from a red-haired woman behind the counter.  While she went to work at the espresso machine we poked around the store checking out the other merchandise, ranging from local pastry baskets to ceramic tea sets.  There was a stack of books on one of the little tables and the title of one caught my eye: “It’s Hard to Look Cool When Your Car’s Full of Sheep – Tales from The Back Forty”.  It was a collection of humor columns written by a man named Roger Pond.  Actively trying to develop my own humor column at the time, I was intrigued and snagged a copy along with our lattes.  The woman behind the counter rang us up and commented on how hilarious the book was.  Having had time since to read it for myself, I’ve decided that Mr. Pond’s humor is something of an acquired taste.  One which I have yet to acquire.  As the title indicates, most of his stories center around livestock, tractors, animal feed and cattle castration.  I imagine his writing is probably incredibly hilarious to people who have actually lived and worked on a farm their entire life.  But as the son of a truck driver, I had trouble relating. 

I took a sip of my iced mocha and was utterly surprised at how freakin’ good it tasted.  “Wow, I was honestly expecting not to like this,” I said to Lauren.  “Every latte I’ve ever gotten from Starbucks tastes sugary at best, but usually just tastes like burnt coffee.”  Lauren agreed wholeheartedly as she took another slug from her own cup.

“It all starts with bad beans,” the lady behind the counter chimed in, and then launched into a ten-minute dissertation about the significance of coffee to the people of the Pacific Northwest and the importance of making it properly.  According to her, no self-respecting resident of Washington State would ever set foot inside a Starbucks.  It’s not just that the global beverage empire, whose name has become synonymous with “coffee”, traditionally uses beans that have long passed their optimum freshness, but the company also doesn’t educate its employees as to the proper way to actually make a latte.  Apparently you’re supposed to get everything else ready first – the ice, the milk, the syrup – and then, and only then, do you hit the button on the espresso machine to start the forced drip. 

“No more than ten seconds should go by between the water passing through the espresso and when it hits your glass,” she instructed us.  “But at Starbucks, they make the espresso first, and then do all the milk and ice and everything else.  Meanwhile your espresso is just sitting there going rotten.”

Of course the proper technique is useless if you’re not using good fresh coffee beans to begin with.  Our newfound coffee guru told us rather proudly that no coffee served in her shop would ever be more than a week old.  In fact, her provider won’t sell coffee to any establishment unless they order that frequently.  If a store orders a bulk shipment of coffee and then doesn’t order again for another month, the provider will actually refuse to sell to them any longer. 

“They want to make sure their coffee tastes the way it’s meant to,” she said.

All this information was hurtled at us at ten times the speed of sound, because, as the old adage goes, this woman wasn’t just the president of the espresso bar, she was also a customer.  She regaled us with a warp speed story about a trip she’d taken to Mexico where the only coffee they’d had was a stale jar of Folgers freeze-dried crystals, which I imagine is a lot like eating NASA-issued ice-cream packets after a lifetime of Ben & Jerry’s.

“I went eight days straight without a single espresso and I was just dying by the time I got back,” she all but yelled, arms flailing wildly for effect.  Lauren and I gave each other a knowing smirk, which said maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.  Not the dying part of course, just the detox period.  Because I swear to you, with her telltale hyperactive speech, arms waving in wide abrupt gestures, eyes that were constantly wide open and bulging out as though someone had just delivered some particularly shocking news, and short red hair that was standing on end from constantly running her fingers anxiously through it, you could not have drawn a better caricature of a caffeine addict.  It was really quite funny, and yet by now, I couldn’t blame her in the least.  I had sucked down my iced mocha in less than five minutes and was already starting to feel the pleasant and twitchy side effects.  Lauren and I agreed that if they sold espresso that tasted like this back East, we would be that animated and passionate about it too.   

We stood around talking for perhaps another ten minutes, Lauren and I once again trying to get a word in here and there between the rapid speech pattern of an espresso-drinking Pacific-Northwesterner.  I was tempted to buy another latte before we left, but I was already quite alert and didn’t want to be so keyed up that I ended up crashing the car.  We thanked our new friend, who we privately dubbed “The Espresso Lady”, and got back on the road. 

Although we were traveling at the same speed we’d been doing for the past several days, it seemed to take forever to get to the interstate.  And even with my added espresso boost, I was in dire need of something else to keep me going.  So we popped in another of the CD’s I’d burned in preparation for the road trip, this one labeled, “Catharsis”, which was full of fast, loud and angry songs that I could yell along with in the hopes of naturally boosting my adrenaline.  Beastie Boys, Rob Zombie, Courtney Love.  They were all on there.   Finally getting onto I-5, and hollering, “No… Sleep… ‘til Brooklyn!” at the top of my lungs, I pointed the car north and wound it up to seventy for the first time in nearly a week.

Rebekah lived in a Seattle suburb called Kirkland, and as we got close, Lauren called ahead to make sure she was ready for us and to inquire about a good, cheap and quick place to get some dinner.  It was past eight o’clock by now and the last food we’d had were our lattes three hours earlier.  Rebekah directed us to a place called Taco Del Mar, claiming they had the best burritos.  The reigning title for best burritos in my world will always be The Green Cactus, a small privately owned place in Burbank, California.  Since leaving L.A. almost four years earlier, I’d had yet to find a place that made anything even approaching the greatness of The Green Cactus’s namesake burrito.  So I was, of course, skeptical of Rebekah’s appraisal of this chain of taco restaurants.  But in all honesty, I’d say it lived up to about ninety percent of the hype.  We had a couple of chicken and beef burritos, stuffed with rice, beans and cheese and topped off with a mighty decent green taco sauce.  And while it was no Green Cactus, it was a worthy substitute for those of us who weren’t able to make it as far south as Burbank on this road trip.  Now if only they’d open up a few locations farther east. 

We arrived at the apartment Rebekah shared with her boyfriend Skeet and their daughter Laili a few minutes later.  Rebekah had graduated from midwifery school with Lauren and was also several months pregnant.  We came in, gave hugs, compared bellies (Lauren’s and Rebekah’s anyway), and dropped our stuff in the guest bedroom they’d set up for us.  Despite being exhausted from a long day, long week, hell long month of traveling, we all stayed up until well past midnight talking about everything from school to jobs to babies and everything in between.  It was like being home again – and by home, of course, I mean at Laura’s house – and only reluctantly did we all finally retire to our respective beds. 

ONTO DAY 21