Fort Clatsop National Memorial, and on the waterfront, a “beautifully refurbished” 1913 trolley car runs between the port and the East Mooring Basin. But it’s winter, and the town seems moribund. We drive through the business section without stopping and soon come to a huge, steel-girdered bridge that soars upward and off over the Columbia River, somewhere to our right. Almost directly under it, jutting out into the river, is the Cannery Pier Hotel.
The building was built as a fish cannery back when salmon runs in the Columbia River were the biggest on the coast and Astoria was the second-largest city in Oregon, after Portland. Most of the fish plants shut down in the 1940s. Although this building has been fully restored and turned into a boutique hotel, the area around it still looks fairly desolate in the dark. To get to the parking lot, we have to ease the Echo over a dilapidated dock that must still be on the town’s to-be-improved list.
The hotel looks like a Mississippi riverboat moored to the dock, flags flying, lights ablaze, ready to cast off and float off down the Columbia. Merilyn goes in to negotiate a room while I sit in the car, twirling the radio dial to find a baseball game. Instead I get Miles Davis, so I turn off the wipers and let his smooth, muted trumpet ease the rivulets of rainwater down the windshield. When he was on the road, Davis used to send his wife, who was white, into hotels to secure them a room, figuring she wouldn’t be turned away and might even get them a deal. I’m doing the same thing. The Cannery Pier looks expensive, and after our small flurry of spending in Seattle, Merilyn and I have decided on a limit of $100 a night for accommodation and another $100 a day for meals, gas, and various other necessities, such as books and wine. It’s an arbitrary figure, but this is our first night and we think we should be setting ourselves a good example.
Merilyn comes back to the car smiling. “The woman at the desk was reading a book,” she says.
I take that as a good sign. “What was the book?” I ask.
“I couldn’t see the cover,” she says. “She told me the rooms were $160. I told her we didn’t want to pay more than $120, and she said, ‘I can do that.’”
A hundred and twenty is more than a hundred, but maybe we can skip a meal tomorrow, or a quarter of a meal over the next four days. Instead of steak, fries, salad, and a glass of wine, I’ll just have the steak, fries, and wine. A budget is a budget.
The foyer is a marvel of modern architecture, all plate glass and weirdly angled Douglas-fir beams bolted to gleaming hardwood floors.
I admire the view over the river, with the bridge sweeping overhead like an inspired brush stroke. Classical music plays softly from speakers hidden behind fabric wall hangings. The night clerk has gone back to reading in a soft leather chair by the window. A thick paperback with a glossy cover, but at least it’s a book. She gets up and pours us each a glass of wine, “complimentary to our guests,” she says. Merilyn doesn’t drink, so I take hers, too, as we climb the carpeted stairs to our room.
It is spacious, with, as advertised, a fireplace, a narrow balcony overlooking the river, a claw-footed tub with a view, and, yes, Terry Robes hanging in the closet.
“It’s gorgeous,” Merilyn says, running the bath. I find a corkscrew on the side table and agree.
In the morning, we go downstairs for our free continental breakfast and carry it up on a tray to our room. We’re not being anti-social; there are no other guests in the hotel. From our balcony, we watch a huge grey freighter slip upriver past the hotel, inches, it seems, from our wrought-iron railing, so close we can see sailors through the portholes having their bacon and eggs and hash browns. American coots and western grebes paddle about in the ship’s wake. On an adjacent, equally dilapidated pier, a lone fir grows improbably from a pile of rotting boards. It looks like a Christmas tree. We note with approval that no one has crawled out onto the pier to festoon the tree with coloured lights and tinsel or heap fake Christmas presents around its base. Maybe I could like it here, after all.
MY first impression of Oregon is that we have entered a no-nonsense state. Gone are Washington’s chatty road signs: Watch for Falling Rocks, Slippery When Wet. The yellow diamonds now bark single words. Rocks. Slides. Ice.
I’m inclined to pay attention. Not much more than a week ago, safe in my Vancouver room, I anxiously followed the fate of the Kim family. James and Kati Kim and their two young daughters, Penelope, four, and Sabine, seven months, had spent Thanksgiving in Seattle, then continued on the I-5 to visit friends in Portland. On their way home, they decided to cross the coastal mountains near Grant’s Pass in the southwestern corner of Oregon and spend the night at Gold Beach, before continuing south the next day to San Francisco.
When they turned their silver Saab station wagon off the I-5 onto what looked like a decent highway, early snows had already softened the landscape and whitened the road, so they were well lost by the time they realized they must have taken a wrong turn onto one of the myriad logging trails that meander through those rugged hills. They hadn’t noticed the sign in the corner of the map: Not All Roads Advisable. Check Weather Conditions.
No one knew their itinerary. Days went by before friends and coworkers reported them missing. A full week after they’d run their gas tank dry to keep warm, the search began for the family. It wasn’t long before a local pilot found Kati waving an umbrella as she ran up and down a road beside a giant SOS stamped in the snow. The mother and daughters were hungry and cold but otherwise fine. On Saturday morning, James Kim had struck off on his own to find help. The Kims had no GPS, but they calculated from their map that they were only four miles from the nearest settlement. He left at daybreak, promising to turn back before sunset if he found nothing. He hiked down the road a bit, then decided to take a shortcut down the drainage bed of Big Windy Creek, past old-growth trees towering two hundred feet and more, over boulders and fallen logs, through virgin wilderness it’s relatively safe to say no human had ever walked before.
Despite the freezing temperatures, he gradually stripped off his light jacket, a grey sweatshirt, a red T-shirt, a wool sock, leaving them as markers for anyone who might follow. The searchers tracking him found the clothes and indentations in the snow where he might have slept. On Tuesday, they figured he was still alive. On Wednesday, December 6, eleven days after the family had been stranded in the snow, James’s body was found in the icy waters of Big Windy Creek. He had died of hypothermia after walking more than sixteen miles. The map was wrong. The nearest town was thirty-three miles away.
Wayne and I are sitting in the car, munching on a late breakfast of smoked chinook we bought at a fish shop in Astoria, trying to decide where to go next.
We have turned south onto Route 101, the most westerly highway on the continental USA, and are in a little park overlooking the Pacific, our first glimpse of ocean. We pore over the map. A budding oenophile, Wayne is keen to visit the Willamette Valley. We’d both like to see Portland, which, though it is a city (a category we’ve renounced for this trip), claims the distinction of being the greenest in the United States.
“We could take 26 up to Portland,” he says, “go through the Willamette, then back on the I-5 and cross over to the coast south of Eugene.” His finger is tracing circles around Redwood National Park.
The weather is lowering and there are breakers on the beach.
“Do you ever think about what we’d do if we got lost?” I ask. “Would we both stay with the car or would one of us try to find a way out?” It’s like that lifeboat question: who do you throw overboard first?
Wayne sidesteps neatly. “We’re not going to get lost,” he
