to places like this, to the ends of the earth, to find the spots on the globe where nature still reigned like an infinite deity, forever and aye, world without end, amen.
Such infinitude was a deception, of course, as these second-growth forests attest, bereft as they now are of wolves and cougars and grizzlies and spotted owls. Douglas and Lewis and Clark lived in a Romantic era—the whole notion of exploration is romantic—and Romanticism has more to do with what is going on in our own solipsistic imaginations than it does with what exists on the west coast of North America.
WET SNOW adheres to our windshield as we approach North Bend, halfway down the Oregon Coast. We decide to look for a place to spend the night. A few motels appear on the right, and one of them looks clean and tastefully appointed. The front is well lit, the units seem cheerfully painted, the parking lot isn’t cracked and weedy.
“That one seems nice,” Merilyn says.
We drive on. This is how we choose a motel: we drive until just after it’s too dark to see anything that isn’t lit up; only then do we begin to watch for likely candidates. When we see one that looks good, we slow down and peer at it as we drive by, then continue on down the highway for another ten or twenty minutes looking for something better. Then we give up, turn around and go back. This time, we drive all the way through North Bend to see if there is some kind of quaint inn on the waterfront, but the town’s main drag offers up only factory outlets and drugstores. A sign over one of the shops says Last Chance Liquors, Open 24 Hrs. We turn back.
Merilyn is now the designated motel maven. I wait in the car while she goes into the office to see about a room. A large camper van is parked beside me. A rather well-padded woman sits in the passenger seat with a small dog on her lap, and both the woman and the dog stare at me through the window. Whenever I turn my head toward them the dog begins to yap, a high-pitched, shrill, infuriating sound that penetrates our car like an insane bell captain’s cab whistle. The woman glares at me as though it is my fault the dog has gone berserk.
Merilyn seems to be taking a long time, which I assume to mean that there is a room available and she is negotiating the rate. Maybe there are several rooms and she is getting the keys to all of them and lining up an inspection. I smile at the woman, deliberately baring my teeth, which sends the dog into renewed paroxysms of demented fury. Then Merilyn comes back smiling and dangles a key from a square of masonite.
“What a lovely woman,” she says, meaning the woman in the motel office, with whom I imagine she has been sharing recipes for morning glory muffins. “Our room has a view of the harbour. What’s with the dog?”
MOTELS, by their nature, always seem a bit seedy, perhaps because they slink so close to the ground.
Wayne didn’t like the looks of the one I pointed out as we entered North Bend—too vacant, too old-fashioned, he said—but I am happy when we turn around and go back. I have a good feeling about the place, which intensifies when I notice the 1950s cigarette machine outside the office door. It looks as though it still works.
“Betty,” the woman behind the counter says. She has a broad face with poor skin, the pores large and the colour wanting oxygen. Her sweater is pilled, and the office smells of disinfectant. “They call me Bay Bridge Betty. I’ve owned this place for twenty-two years.” She laughs. “I mean forty-four. See what happens when you get older?”
She takes down the key for number 15—“My best room,” she says— and leads me down the narrow cement walkway, limping a little, as though her feet hurt. In the daylight, she tells me, we’ll be able to see Coos Bay.
“I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s never been so slow,” she says, fitting the key into the lock. Only two other rooms are taken, one by a trucker, the other by an eighty-seven-year-old woman who comes up from California every winter. Her car is parked at an alarming angle outside her door, as if it had been heading over the cliff into the sea and she’d managed to stop it at the last minute.
“The woman’s husband is gone,” Bay Bridge Betty says in a way that makes me wonder if it was his choice or hers. “I promised to see to his wife. She’s hemming some pants for me right now.” I’m afraid she’s going to take me to the room and show me the woman as proof, but she carries on to room number 15, where she flicks on the light switches and tugs at the flowered bedspread. “She makes me blankets, too. I do what I can for her.”
The room is clean, perfectly adequate. Two neat double beds, a decidedly small-screen television, a long credenza, a small table and chair by the window. Standard motel fare. I take it without a quibble. Back in the office, I sign the register and hand her enough bills to cover the price she quotes, which isn’t much. She slides the money into a drawer.
“Thank you,” she says quietly. “We need you tonight.”
FOR REASONS I don’t quite understand—maybe it was the cigarette machine—I’m thinking of my father. He would have loved it here. He was a coffee lover and all through Washington and Oregon I’ve been noticing drive-through espresso bars, pert little sheds set off from the road where drivers pull up to windows to get their caffeine fix, coffee kiosks with names like Good to Go, Jumpin’ Java, and Hail Mary’s Espresso.
If there are drive-through banks, drive-through weddings and divorces, drive-through meals, why not drive-through espresso bars? Motor Moka was apparently the first: it opened in Portland in 1992. Now there’s one every mile, or so it seems. Back home, there are only Starbucks, Second Cup, and Coffee & Company, all catering to the sitdown crowd, and Tim Hortons, where doughnuts are the draw as much as coffee. Canadians aren’t in such a rush, I guess, at least not yet.
Tim Hortons (which used to be Tim Horton’s) offered the original roadside cup of joe. The first outlet opened in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1964, and by 1967 it was a chain. But it was Starbucks that turned coffee into a gold mine. In 1971, three friends in Seattle—an English teacher, a history teacher, and a writer—decided to go into the coffee roasting business, selling the beans retail. The writer, Gordon Bowker, loved the novel Moby-Dick and wanted to call their new enterprise Pequod after the ship in Melville’s story.
“Who would drink a cup of something called Pee-quod?” asks Wayne.
“I guess that’s why in the end they named it after the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck.”
Sixteen years later, the trio sold out to Howard Schultz, who had been struck by the espresso culture during a trip to Italy. He added baristas to the bean sales and started building shops all over the country until today there are more than eleven thousand stores in the United States and another five thousand in forty-four countries, compared with a paltry two thousand for Tim Hortons. Schultz wasn’t interested only in shilling coffee: his whole idea with Starbucks was to create a “third place,” a spot other than home or work where people could relax with friends and a cup of good coffee. For the people of Oregon, that third place seems to be their cars.
“Oregoners sure must drink a lot of coffee.”
“Oregonians, surely,” Wayne suggests. We’ve settled in our motel room overlooking the bay, he with the crossword in the local paper, me with the computer.
“True or false?” I ask. “Coffee consumption is higher than it’s ever been. Americans drink more coffee than Canadians.”
“True,” he says, “on both counts. Now can you unplug the computer, please, and plug in the kettle? I’d like a cup of tea.”
