Meador Manor

TRIP DATE: July 9, 2016 | SLIDESHOW | PHOTO ALBUM | Other Honeymoon Posts

Little did we know, snug in our honeymoon suite at the Cannery Pier Hotel in Astoria, that four miles away, across the mouth of the mighty Columbia, lurked Dismal Nitch. That little cove on the Washington State side of river was so named by Captain William Clark when the Corps of Discovery was forced off the river on November 10, 1805 and spent six stormy days pinned to what Clark described as “that dismal little nitch.” Fierce wind and high waves at the rocky shoreline had Clark concerned for their safety:  “A feeling person would be distressed by our situation,” he wrote in wet misery as they endured the cold wind, rain, thunder, lightning, and hail.

Finally the storm broke and the Corps pressed on to reach the Pacific Ocean. They moved to Station Camp on the west side of Point Ellice just beyond Dismal Nitch, and camped at that location for 10 days, taking the famous vote by which they decided to move to the south shore of the Columbia River and spend the winter there before beginning their long journey home.

Wendy and I had stayed three nights on the Columbia’s south shore. On our last morning in Astoria, I watched ships passing by our room before we drove downtown for breakfast at the Blue Scorcher Bakery & Cafe.

Wendy called that worker-owned cooperative a “hipster bakery” and was unimpressed by their locally farmed, certified organic berries, which were too sour for her French toast. They crafted their own soda, too, which we’d encountered before in Austin, TX. You had to clean up your own mess, but at least their single-user restrooms were large and gender-neutral, which was nice.

We drove the 4.1 miles across the Astoria-Megler Bridge so we could cross into Washington State for a scenic forest drive towards Mount St. Helens. We stopped at Dismal Nitch, where we could see Astoria across the river, including the Astoria Column via the superzoom camera. I was amused by a sign asking us to limit our stay at Dismal Nitch to eight hours, as with that name we weren’t tempted to stay longer than eight minutes despite the view and the pretty gulls. Wendy must have thought I was quite the romantic, taking her to Dismal Nitch, which lies just east of Cape Disappointment and what Clark termed Point Distress.

The highway could not follow the rocky north shore of the Columbia, so it wound its way eastward along river valleys through the mountains. We made a short side trip to the Grays River Covered Bridge, the last of its kind still in use in Washington State. After the highway ducked back south to return to a friendlier portion of the river shore, we stopped and shopped at a pharmacy in little Cathlamet before heading eastward to Longview.  There we stopped in at a Fred Meyers and had lunch at the Guadalajara Grill and Cantina. I had been missing Mexican food, but Wendy claims Mexican food isn’t particularly good north of Texas and New Mexico, with some occasional exceptions like Enrique’s at Ponca City.

Mount St. Helens

The Mount St. Helens stratovolcano erupted in 1980. Eighteen years later I visited the mountain with fellow science teacher Wendy Robinson and her mother and uncle. I recalled being impressed by the quality of the displays at the Visitor Center, built in 1993 in a state park 30 miles from the mountain. Well, that center has not been updated, so its displays 18 years later looked faded and worn. But I still enjoyed the big topographic model of the volcano area and a display of items melted in the eruption. Wendy bought a jacket, something she’d need on the cold and windy heights of Johnston Ridge near the crater.

My strongest impression of visiting Mt. St. Helens 18 years after its latest big eruption was how quickly nature was reclaiming the ravaged landscape. Now the time of recovery had doubled to 36 years. It made me feel old to know it had been so long since the eruption, yet I was buoyed to be revisiting the mountain on my honeymoon and find nature busily renewing the landscape, much as my new bride had renewed the prospect of my life.

At 8:32 Sunday Morning, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens Erupted

Shaken by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, the north face of this tall symmetrical mountain collapsed in a massive rock debris avalanche. In a few moments this slab of rock and ice slammed into Spirit Lake, crossed a ridge 1,300 feet high, and roared 14 miles down the Toutle River.

The avalanche rapidly released pressurized gases within the volcano. A tremendous lateral explosion ripped through the avalanche and developed into a turbulent, stone-filled wind that swept over ridges and toppled trees. Nearly 150 square miles of forest was blown over or left dead and standing.

At the same time a mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. Wet, cement-like slurries of rock and mud scoured all sides of the volcano. Searing flows of pumice poured from the crater. The eruption lasted nine hours, but Mount St. Helens and the surrounding landscape were dramatically changed within moments.

Wendy and I drove along the Spirit Lake Highway toward the volcano, making a pit stop at the Forest Learning Center and stopping at the Elk Rock viewpoint, ten miles northwest of the crater. From there we could see how the Toutle River Valley had changed since my previous visit, with greenery amidst the immense ash flow.

It grew colder as we ascended for more spectacular views, and we were surprised by the cold and relentless ferocity of the wind near the end of the highway on Johnston Ridge at Loowit Viewpoint. Beautiful flowers contrasted with the brutality of the volcano, its crater shrouded in clouds.

After a pit stop at the Johnston Ridge Observatory we needed to head to Packwood for our overnight stay. It was only 40 miles northeast of the volcano, but in that isolated mountainous terrain that meant a two-hour 120 mile drive. Along the way we stopped at the Lake Mayfield Resort & Marina for dinner.

The Crest Trail Lodge near Packwood was uninspiring after our stay at the Cannery Pier Hotel & Spa, but we were glad to rest after a long driving day. My hopes that we would get to visit Mt. Rainier the following day were dashed by rain, but we saved the day by visiting Tacoma’s Museum of Glass.

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Honeymoon Day 9: Tacoma Glass >

< Honeymoon Day 7: The Flavels of Astoria

TRIP DATE: July 8, 2016 | SLIDESHOW | PHOTO ALBUM | Other Honeymoon Posts

On our last full day in Astoria we had lunch at T. Paul’s Urban Cafe, having been impressed by the Supper Club the night before. Our sandwiches were fine, which is better than it might sound, as I don’t often choose to eat sandwiches at restaurants. Since I effectively get less than 30 minutes for lunch on a workday, I usually just fix a boring turkey sandwich that won’t have me gaining weight. That habit leaves me unwilling to pay for most restaurant sandwiches, although on occasion Wendy talks me into enjoying a superior turkey sandwich at Subway.

Wendy and I enjoy touring old mansions, so we headed toward the Flavel House Museum. Along the way, we passed by the old city jail. It is a now a film museum and was featured in The Goonies, a 1985 Spielberg film. I’ve never seen that flick, which reportedly also featured the Flavel House Museum and other Astoria landmarks. Quite a few other movies have reportedly been shot in this little town: Short Circuit, The Black Stallion, Kindergarten Cop, Free Willy, Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, Benji the Hunted, The Ring Two, Into the Wild, The Guardian and Cthulhu. Of all of those, I’ve only seen Short Circuit and wish I hadn’t.

The Flavel House is a Queen Anne mansion built around 1885 as a retirement home for Captain George Flavel, a river bar pilot and real estate investor. The Columbia Bar is the shallow passage where a local pilot is taken aboard to deal with the treacherous tides, currents, and winds at the meeting of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean. The Columbia has no delta, instead spraying “like a fire hose” into the ocean. This area has claimed about 2,000 large vessels since 1792. These days about 16 bar pilots guide ships, often boarding vessels by helicopter. They are well compensated, earning about $180,000 per year.

Captain Flavel earned his money in similar fashion, sans helicopter, back in the 1800s. He and his wife, Mary Christina Boelling, lived in their retirement home with their two grown daughters, Nellie and Katie. The four of them had plenty of room in the 11,600 square foot home, which featured beautiful interior woodwork that was Eastlake-influenced in design. The Douglas Fir doors and windows were wood grained by a master craftsman to look like mahogany and burl rosewood. The wood likely came from a mill in Portland or San Francisco and was shipped to Astoria by steamer.

The home has 14-foot high ceilings on the first floor and 12-foot high ones on the bedroom level. So even though it had central heating, quite a luxury for the late 1800s, it also has a half dozen fireplaces. They had indoor plumbing, which was also quite unusual for that time and place.

The Captain’s son, George Conrad Flavel, never lived in the home since he was already married when it was built. Also a river pilot, the younger Flavel built for himself another grand home which is now being fixed up after years of abandonment. There is an interesting history on why the house sat empty for so long. I’ve also found online video of that old neglected home. It needed a lot of cleanup, as its last occupants of the Flavel clan were hoarders.

We enjoyed our self-guided tour of the original mansion; I found an online video of a guided tour you can indulge in if you like. We admired the interesting and beautiful plants outside.

After that we made our way to an art store downtown, where Wendy purchased some alcohol inks. Then we headed to the riverfront to visit the Columbia River Maritime Museum.

I’d visited the museum a decade earlier, and it hasn’t changed much, which is fine. The Columbia Lightship and the S.S. Legacy riverboat of Seattle were at the dock as well as a Coast Guard Cutter, the USCGC Steadfast.

The Coast Guard has long protected lives and policed the waterways of the treacherous Columbia Bar. The roadway side  of the museum features a display of a Coast Guard ship in heavy seas, demonstrating the violence of the ocean. That makes it all the more impressive how the guard’s standard rescue craft for 80 years was a relatively small 36-foot motor lifeboat. In all of that time, only one of those was lost in the line of duty. In January 1961 most of the crew of the Triumph perished in a severe storm in an operation that rescued the crew of the fishing vessel Mermaid on Peacock Spit.

The Cape Disappointment lifeboat on display was named after a headland on the north side of the Columbia Bar. The nomenclature harkens back to the suffering of this area’s explorers.

I didn’t return to the Astoria Column during this visit, but from the riverfront I could use my superzoom camera to find folks out on its viewing platform. Whenever we return I look forward to taking Wendy to see its restored grandeur, and I hope we get to see a show in the Liberty Theatre, having admired its exterior façade.

Our last night in Astoria had us walking over for breakfast for dinner at the Pig ‘n Pancake near the hotel. We had enjoyed our stay in this maritime world, but it was time to cross the Columbia and climb our way to the windy crater of Mount St. Helens.

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Honeymoon Day 8: Mount St. Helens >

< Honeymoon Day 6: Astoria’s Riverfront | Other Honeymoon Posts

TRIP DATE: July 7, 2016 | SLIDESHOW | PHOTO ALBUM | Other Honeymoon Posts

We relaxed for two days in Astoria at the mouth of the mighty Columbia. This little Oregon town of less than 10,000 has a picturesque setting, perched on the southern slopes above the river across from the State of Washington. Fort Astoria was established in 1811 as the first American-owned settlement on the Pacific coast, on land where the Clatsop Indians had lived for thousands of years.

Seven months earlier I had been riveted by Peter Stark’s Astoria: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire, which told of the harrowing seven-month journey westward of the Overland Astorians from St. Louis to what would become Astoria. Stark recounted how they suffered mightily going down and along the treacherous Snake River.

Amazingly, most of them made it to what would become Astoria, but the War of 1812 brought their enterprise to an end. On the return journey eastward they established the South Pass route which would become a key component of the Oregon Trail. About 200 years later Wendy and I jetted in first class comfort from Oklahoma to Oregon in only a few hours on our honeymoon; what a contrast.

The town thrived back when lumber and fish seemed limitless. Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian gill-netters worked the river by boat. Calvin Trillin noted in a 1993 New Yorker article, “Astoria’s waterfront was lined with canneries, where the salmon was processed by a contract-labor force so uniformly Chinese that when an automatic fish-skinner was finally invented it was known as an Iron Chink.” The New Yorker has a reputation for meticulous fact-checking, so yes, that is actually what the inventor called it.

The town eventually boasted 22 canneries for chinook, coho, and sockeye salmon as well as steelhead trout. Over time, several Astoria canneries consolidated into what became the world headquarters of Bumble Bee Seafoods. In the 1960s Bumble Bee was the largest salmon-canning company in the world.

The town’s population peaked at 25,000 during World War II. After that, improved dredging of the Columbia shifted a lot of port business upriver towards Portland. The fish declined as well; locals noted drops in the fish runs as early as the 1870s, and years of upstream pollution, loss of spawning habitat, heavy fishing, and migration-blocking dams further reduced the salmon runs. Bumble Bee closed shop and moved to California in 1980, soon to be engulfed in buyouts, sales, and bankruptcy.

Commercial fishing, logging, and shipping still contribute to the Astoria economy but nowhere near the historic levels. The town has a variety of historic homes and has become a tourist destination with many museums and shops.

Wendy and I had planned for a couple of rhyming laundry stops along the trip: Astoria and Victoria. So we made use of a washer and dryer at the Cannery Pier Hotel the night we arrived in Astoria. We remained at the hotel the next morning. The occasional rumble of a passing ship and the sounds of sea birds reminded us we were far from the cross timbers and prairies of home. I watched the commercial fishing vessel Katrina go by while a blue heron fished the shallows near our room.

We finally roused ourselves to walk a half mile along the riverside trolley tracks for a late lunch at The Ship Inn. I enjoyed my fish and chips despite the restaurant smelling damp and briny. Rocks piled along the shore had been dumped years before by old sailing ships as they entered the Columbia, picking up sealed and canned salmon. A boiler on a concrete piling and a short forest of worn wood pilings were all that remained of a nearby shoreline cannery.

We saw the San Pablo trolling boat pass by and then the much larger Macaru Arrow cargo ship. The Coral Opal and Bulk Bolivia cargo ships were anchored out in the river.

As we walked back along the trolley line, its 1913 trolley car rolled by. The trolley uses former freight railroad tracks and has been operating since 1999. Wendy and I enjoyed the signage on a trolley bridge warning bicyclists they could take a tumble if they weren’t careful.

The day was chilly and gray as we stopped to view the many plaques at the Maritime Memorial Park by the river. The memorial is for those who lived and/or died in relation to the water, and the plaques are fascinating.

Mary Boyle “caught the big ones”, and we learned they called Gene Miner “Do-Do”. Scott Arnold was a “commercial fisherman died helping another”, Nancy McClain was “lost at sea” when she was about 21, and as for Big John Viuhkola, “The sea he loved claimed him.”

A long inscription wrote of the allure and danger of the sea:

Weep not for me that I go to sea.
I shan’t be lonely, though vastness surround me.
The brotherhood of the sea shall be my family.
The kinship of the deep my company.

Weep not for me, nor worry over harm.
My heart stays with you, still and warm.
In sunrise and starlight my hearth and home
I carry you with me wherever I roam.

Weep not for me, whether bad luck or good.
Tossed about in a shell of steel and wood.
An ancient salt sea sails within my blood –
I but follow its tide through ebb and flood.

Weep not for me that I go to sea:
in the limitless ocean I am free.

During our stay Wendy came to love looking up passing vessels on marinetraffic.com to learn where they were from, where they were bound, and what they carried. It was relaxing to watch the huge cargo ships slowly hum their way downriver past our balcony. I shot some video of the Aries Leader, a ship carrying automobiles in its hold, as it rumbled past.

For dinner we drove over to T. Paul’s Supper Club, where Wendy delighted in the tender and flavorful salmon and vegetables, commenting that “they really know how to season.” We ended our day with a trip across Youngs Bay for supplies at the local Fred Meyer, an immense one-stop shop. Fred opened his first store in Portland in 1922, and his stores now average 150,000 square feet and carry more than 225,000 items.

We had another full day in Astoria ahead of us, time enough to delve into local history by visiting a nearby mansion and the maritime museum.

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Honeymoon Day 7: Flavels and Travels in Astoria >

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