Happy Campers Basking In The Agate

Ahhhhh...nothing like a refreshing, trance-inducing weekend on the Oregon shore to re-charge that Vitamin D lickety-split. I just got back from Happy Camp Hideaway in Netarts Bay this morning and though my tan-lines aren’t as pronounced as, say, that of the stripes on a zebra cake, LOL, I still got sand in my Birkenstocks even sitting here at KBOO, and there was even a strand of seaweed tangled between my toes on my daily 25 minute commute by foot down to Burnside Avenue from the Irvington district! :)



Happy Camp Hideaway

Anyhow, I was quite a happy camper indeed, staying with my family and my sister Noelle’s boyfriend Mike at the Skipper’s Loft conveniently located at 860 Happy Camp Road in the heart of Netarts, Oregon, part of a beach house residential area known as Happy Camp Hideaway only 88 minutes from the City of Roses. It is run by endorphin engineers known as Teresa and Bruce Lovelin, where Happy Camp Hideaway was originally built in 1902 as a beachfront inn, and now has expanded into sixteen separate homes and cabins that can accommodate as many as 75 guests between Netarts and Oceanside all along Netarts Bay, complete with that unobstructed scenic view, gourmet kitchens, CD players, cable TV, laundry service, crab cleaning areas, picnic tables, barbecues and community fire pits. Other homes went by names including “Camp Happy”, “Pelican’s Nest”, “O’Hearn’s Heron”, “Garner’s Getaway” and “The Lookout”.



The Netarts-Tillamook area truly has a wide and captivating history behind it, which can date back as far as the 1400’s, when Tillamook, or (Killamook) Native Americans inhabited a large area between Nehalem and the Salmon River and from the crest of the Coast Range to the Pacific Ocean, with their main village near the mouth of the Kilchis River. In fact, the word "Tillamook" translates as "Land of Many Waters." And many of the earliest Tillamook inhabitants in the Netarts area also settled around 1400, where Netarts originally extended from Cape Lookout to Cape Meares, and according to the language of the local Killamooks, "Ne ta at", meant "near the water." Which was later modernized to the name as it is now. The native tribes are well-known to have occupied the area on the spit and at most creek outlets around the bay, mainly at Wilson Beach. Even the "Octopus" tree on Cape Meares, known to be a Ripley's "Believe it or Not," display! :)



By 1579, Sir Francis Drake first sailed along the Oregon coast, and charted on his maps the words "Portus Nove Albionis," which is agreed by historians to be Nehalem Bay in Tillamook County. By 1765, the first use of the word “Oregon” is thought to have been discovered in a petition by Major Robert Rogers to the Kingdom of Great Britain, referring to the territory known as “Ouragon” and asking for money to prepare a journey in the search for the Northwest Passage. Yet some say the indigenous people of the Northwest referred to the Columbia River as “the great Ouragon” and was later anglicized to its current spelling, while yet more believe it originates from the French word “ouragan”, meaning “hurricane”, and that the Columbia River got that name because of its tumultuous currents like that of a hurricane. And (believe it or not YET again, it’s argued in the 2001 Oregon Historical Quarterly by archaeologists Scott Byram and David G. Lewis that the name came from the word oolighan, referring to grease made from fish, which the Native Americans of the region traded in. And (I promise this is the last one, LOL) yet again, three years later in the same quarterly publication, Professor Thomas Love and Smithsonian linguist Ives Goddard professed that maybe, just maybe, Rogers used the word because he had visited Algonquian tribes and found inspiration through their words “wauregan” and “olighin”, both meaning “good and beautiful” respectively. (I like that last theory the most!)



Whatever the heck the Beaver State’s name comes from, I’m proud either way to be an Oregonian, as I often like to think of this great state as the unpretentious, shy and affable little sister between a sometimes patronizing California to the south, which sometimes tends to make Oregon feel left behind in the mix with its haut monde Hollywood hullabaloo and sunnier beaches, and the gilt-edged guises and cognoscenti cream of society that polka-dots parts of Washington to the north, from the Hercule Poirot-esque Starbucks moustaches to private beaches where the proprietors can do doughnuts on the beach sands if they wanted to any day. Oregon often gets pushed around in coastal competitive spirit for kind of being like the plain old Sandy Olsson of the Pacific coast, where we’re just far more underdeveloped than both our bigger brothers to the north and south, but that’s exactly what I love about this state; it’s a state that can prove itself without anything to prove, and nowhere else in the Lower 48 will you find an entire state oceanfront with all public access, nowhere west of the Mississippi will you enjoy that marionberry parfet without paying the sales tax, and all in all Oregon is a state that just is, naturally.



Anyhow, I spent the whole weekend entrenched and baptized in the “land of many waters” alright, nestled warmly the rest of each day in the Skipper’s Loft. Each of the individual beach houses in Happy Camp Hideaway had everything; beach blankets, cable TV, central heating, bunk beds, Queen Sofas…..even a panoramic balcony with a wide scenic view which you can stare from for hours through your binoculars. Every afternoon I stared off into a sandbar barely in the distance, where hordes of sea lions gathered for happy hour. There must have been at least 75 of them there on that single stretch of sand, probably as many as 200 altogether. (sits in shock with mouth agape) Anyway, I took two walks each day there, one north and one south, and then much the rest of the day my family and I just gathered around the flat-screen TV, watching DVDS as wide as “Beverly Hills Ninja” and “The Weather Man”, enjoying roasted vegetables on skewers, sweet corn on the cob and Tofurky vegetarian Italian sausages for supper, and couldn’t resist watching Cesar Millan work his animal therapy deftness on The National Geographic Channel’s “Dog Whisperer” and show owners how they can keep their pets mentally stable by setting “rules, boundaries, and limitations.” (my favorite episode I saw was “Demon Chihuahua”, where an owner named Tina Madden had a chihuahua named Nunu who would yelp and frighten anyone besides Tina, and Sir Cesar brought his dominance philosophy forth to tame the lil’ gremlin into an obedient, courteous pup.)



My most epic mystical journey came Saturday afternoon at 5:00, when I traveled approximately two miles north along the Oregon Coast on the sands where the water would just kiss my feet every few seconds like the lips of a Pisces, looking to the south and pretending that I was in Bali. I was talking like a pirate to myself throughout most of the adventure, trekking all the way to Oceanside where Three Arch Rock is located, two miles south of Cape Meares, which is home to three large rocks (Finley Rock, Shag Rock, Mid Rock) and six smaller rocks totaling fifteen acres, which four of them serve as seabird feeding colonies, with Finley Rock having the most vegetation at about 300 feet above sea level. Twelve species of seabirds breed there, combining to as many as nearly a quarter million birds, including the largest murre colony south of Alaska with 22,000 murres (or 30%) breeding in Oregon. It also harbors 60% of the Tufted Puffin breeding population in Oregon, as well as 800 endangered Brown Pelicans and up to 13 Bald Eagles.



So I walked all the way up alongside the Three Arch Rocks in Oceanside, and then eyed this block-long tunnel cave forged straight through the rock on the northern edge of the Oceanside coast, which apparently was cut by the founders of Oceanside, J.H. and H.H. Rosenberg in 1926, and was designed simply to give visitors access to the beach of Maxwell Point north of Oceanside and south of Cape Meares. Actually, I learned a landslide closed the tunnel in 1979, and it wasn’t until 1999 when a great storm sluiced the tunnel wide open again, with a tiny stretch of concrete on the south side of the tunnel erected to ensure future maintenance. Simply walking through it toward Maxwell Point was purely piratical, especially on the half closest to Maxwell’s Point with all the sharp stones and occasional ducking, and especially with the wind getting stronger the deeper you lurk into it, the air getting thicker and the darker it gets, it was more than enough for me to shanty, “Sink me, we’re fine, young and handsome brethen of the coast this ere day, yar har har!”



So I came right out the other end handsomely and walked as far as I could along Maxwell’s Point, until I was surrounded by echelons of sedimentary sentinels and could no longer proceed without heading inland. And, avast, it was there I spun that bowsprit 180 and stared my spyglass back towards the Skipper’s Loft, yarrrr har har! Yar, and more over upon my arrival at 7:30 .M, after having spent two-and-a-half hours lost at beach, my family had supper prepared that feeds all salmagundi to the fish; vegetable skewers and grilled tofu over charcoal briquettes, and washing it all down with a pint of marionberry soda.



It’s a shame I couldn’t stay here a whole week, as there is just so much to do in this area with so little time; you could drive six miles south of Tillamook on U.S 101 and visit Munson Falls, a relic of a waterfall crowned with red cedar and Sitka spruce that stands 319 feet tall. You could drive down all along the 35-mile Three Capes Scenic Route from Cape Meares to Cape Kiwanda, and stop in Pacific City to the south and brave the 45-degree climb up one of Oregon’s largest sand dunes on the northern end of Cape Kiwanda, where from there you can get perfect views of the Oregon Coast from either side of the cape and then make like a grommet back down the gargantuan sand palace on a boogie board. You could head over to the lighthouse on Cape Meares. Yo ho ho, you can steer to Pirate’s Cove in Garibaldi for the finest oyster dinner. Heck, you can even play Bingo every Saturday night at 7:00 P.M at the Netarts Fire Hall. But by God, whatever you do, be sure you hide that watch, and howl at the moon like you mean it, owwww woooooooooooo! In any case, the dopamine in me is drooling to come back soon, and with a name as mirthful as Happy Camp Hideaway, how could I resist, yay! :)



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Yarrrrr, while we’re on the subject of pirates, here’s a story that’ll jump-start the roaring forties with a vengenace and shout, “You’ve got to be Kiddin’ me!” Yar, that’s right, calls have been made by Scots, history buffs and descendants of Captain Kidd for an American writer named Richard Zacks to be keel-hauled and sentenced to painting the lion after claiming in a newly-published biography of Captain Kidd titled “The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd,” that this most famous son of Greenock's most famous sons is…..well…..not actually from Greenock, but rather from Dundee. But nar, nar, that’s not all…….he also dares to argue that Captain Kidd wasn’t even a proper pirate like Blackbeard, claiming, "The mistake about Kidd has snowballed through history to the point where Blackbeard and Kidd are the two most famous pirates who ever lived. Blackbeard deserves it, but Kidd doesn't at all. At most he made a couple of questionable captures, but there's no way he should go down as the most bloodthirsty pirate."



Yarrrrr, how Zacks will wish he never dared to cross swords even with our loblolly’s boy, yar har har, har har! Yo ho ho, he’ll be high and dry as Fanny Adams once the lips of every Scot and pirate enthusiast speak into his wet ears, yar har! I mean c’mon now, he was a walking, breathing floating academy with Dutchman’s breeches, and now Zacks has even broke the hearts of those like 82-year old William Peterson of Greenock who believes he is descended from the bloodline of Captain Kidd and believes, "Reading the stories I have, you would say that he was not a bad pirate and was definitely from Greenock." and Neil Bristow, spokesman for local heritage group Magic Torch, who believes, "We totally, totally refute that. We have had a look at original trial documents that show Greenock as his place of origin. We defend Greenock's right to have a folk hero."



Yarrrrrr, I have no care what this supposed mess deck lawyer thinks, a $135 million weekend for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” and me hearties should be testament enough that we are all gentlemen o’ fortune on the account, yo ho ho! Yar har, even Michelle Branch admitted to Maxi magazine once, “This is going to sound stupid, but I have a pirate fetish. It started when someone in my band hurt their eye and had to wear an eye patch. I realized that I always thought pirates were sexy."



Ahoy, let’s all get loaded to the gunwales, me hearties……on marionberry soda that is, yo ho ho! Yarrrrrr, who’s in for Jack O’ Staves Backgammon at the Ol’ Crack Jenny’s Tea Cup? Nar nar, it’s all isolated now………how about bingo at the Netarts Fire Hall? Yar har har, those wild numbers shall serve me well, aye!

XOXO,
Noah Eaton
(Mistletoe Angel)
(Emmanuel Endorphin)