A Botanical Framework for an Oregon Journey - May 2007

Roadside Attractions OR Coast Prehistoric Sights California Illinois Valley		A Little About the Oregon Coast On the first day of this trip, our plan was to stop at the Chowder Bowl in Newport for fish and chips for lunch. I do believe theirs are the best fish and chips on the coast and there are some strong contenders. When I was working for the Oregon ports’ association, this is where the harbormaster for Yaquina Bay (the bay here at Newport) always took me for lunch because he thought they were the best and he knew all there was to know about catching ocean critters and eating them. We were not disappointed this time either and only had to wait a little while for a table. They also have great bread pudding here, if you ever have enough room when you’re through with the fish. The Chowder Bowl is in an old part of Newport, on the ocean, not on the bay, called Nye Beach . This is a pretty little section of town, eight or ten square blocks, fun little shops, bookstores, art galleries, public beach access, parking and restrooms and nice places to stay. Our favorite place here is the Sylvia Beach Hotel. Since Sheila had never seen it, we had to make a quick stop. Sylvia Beach, besides being a great name for a hotel at the beach* was also an interesting person, a U.S. ex-pat in Paris in the 20’s, who hobnobbed with all the famous writers of the time. Here’s a short article about Ms. Beach and her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. By the way, this site has a link to a very cool virtual tour of the bookstore as it is today. Each of the 20 or so rooms at the hotel is decorated in the style of an author. My favorites are Tennessee Williams, Agatha Christie and Meridel Le Sueur. Edgar Allen Poe is interesting, but would be a little hard to take, mostly because of the pendulum…. When I traveled the coast as part of my job, I stayed in the Dr. Seuss room usually because, of course, it is a single. (There are drawings of all the rooms at the hotel’s website.) There’s also a dorm for the kiddies. Best of all is the family-style fixed price restaurant called Tables of Content. The food is always excellent and the company usually intelligent and articulate. And sometimes the company includes actual published authors. Once when my son and I were there, we had dinner with the fantasy author Terry Brooks and his wife. You can eat there even if you’re not staying at the hotel, too. Try it if you're ever in Newport. We also picked up a tide table there, because when you‘re on the coast, at the very least you need to know if the tide is going in or going out when you’re on the beach. If you don’t know how tide tables work, here’s quick overview. In Oregon, there’s only one tide table for the entire coast each year. It tells the predicted time of the twice-a-day high tide and the twice-a-day low tide at Newport. Then there is a correction table for about 20 other points on the coast, listing how many minutes before or after the time at Newport to expect the tide and what the ratio to the tide at Newport it will be. So for example, the Saturday of our trip was to be a big minus tide of 2.2 feet at 9:01 am in Newport. Where we actually were was Bandon, about 120 miles south, so the tables told us that low tide would come about 5 minutes earlier and be abut 85% of the Newport tide. The tide tables are compiled by the National Ocean Survey and the Oregon State Marine Science Center and they even correct for daylight saving time, but not this year's weird early start. (The Science Center, by the way, is a great place to visit in Newport, they have an octopus you can pet and an anemone pool and everything; the Aquarium in Newport is even better, but we weren’t doing the central coast this time.) After Newport, the highway runs right along the coast and the scenery is wonderful. We only paused at a few turnouts to admire the ocean, because we were trying to get almost to the California border yet that day and we had two more scheduled stops. Botanical Interlude 2: This stop was at the Darlingtonia Wayside, five miles north of Florence to see the darlingtonia, also known as cobra lillies. These strange carnivorous plants make their nitrogen from insects, not having any farmers to plant them a clover crop. The best the state can do is protect them in the coastal fens where they grown. We were very lucky to be there at exactly the right time of year to see the blooms, which don’t last very long. They really don’t look like they belong to the same plant. To me the blooms look desert-like while the leaf structure is clearly from the swamps. It also smells quite skunky, but not as bad as skunk cabbage. Nothing much grows with the Darlingtonia except a few ferns, but in the woods nearby are lots of wild rhododendron in bloom, always pink in the wild, though the domesticated ones are many shades of red, pink, purple, white and yellow. There’s a variety of evergreens, too--spruce, pine and cedar. In this part of the state there are also wild iris along the roadside, vetch and the beginnings of myrtlewood. After the wayside, we drove through Florence which was chockful of bikers, a veritable swarm of Harleys. It was the weekend of the Rhododendron Festival there, and apparently they like flowers. We didn’t stop but went on to Coo Bay for the next flora experience. Botanical Interlude 3: Through Coos Bay and Charlston, out on Cape Arago is Shore Acres State Park. This beautiful site was originally the private summer home of one of Oregon’s early timber barons and ship-builders, Louis J. Simpson. The mansion is gone, but the five-acre formal gardens, the Japanese garden and the 100 foot lily pond remain. Although the state bought the property (and probably collects the parking lot fees), the gardens are all maintained by volunteers. This week-end was a bit of a lull in garden blooms. The thousand s of bulbs are done, the rhododendrons and azaleas are just a tiny bit past their peak and the roses are not yet blooming; it’s a lovely place none-the-less. Although it was “misting” rather heavily, we had a good time wandering through the gardens. And what was in its prime was the mud-puppy population in the lily pond. Actually, when I looked these up on the Internet, I pretty much decided they were not mud puppies. Well, they were some kind of salamander (maybe a Northwestern salamander: Ambystoma gracile) and they were in the water. They had four legs and a nice tail (NOT a pollywog) and tiny little mouths, suitable only for eating tiny little insects. We didn’t bother them very much except to try to entice them into eating our finger skin and to take pictures. We also got an explanation on an issue that has been nagging away at the back of my mind almost since I moved to Oregon over 30 years ago. What’s the difference between a rhody and an azalea? Well, domesticated azaleas have smaller leaves, but sometimes the difference isn’t very much. The Shore Acres brochure says that and that they have smaller flowers in smaller clusters and that they have (here’s a new one on me) 5-lobed flowers with one stamen per lobe whereas a “standard” rhododendron will have two stamens per lobe. Aha! The description ends with this sentence. “This plus a number of technical points best left to scientists with microscopes.” So there you have it. After visiting the estate grounds, it is mandatory, in my opinion, to drive on up to Cape Arago State Park, mostly because it’s always a good site for observing seals and sea lions, which you can hear from the gardens. (Or you can walk to part of it, but you can see better from the road and some of the animals can be extremely dangerous.) This trip we hit the jackpot! The combination of a minus tide (we were only a couple of hours early for the evening low tide) and season, got us a spectacular variety of pinnipeds AND babies, too. This place is a rookery, where California sea lions, steller sea lions, Pacific harbor seals and northern elephant seals all co-exist. There were no elephant seals in that day, but a grand representation of the others. And close to the shoreline (although we were up on a cliff), a mother and baby harbor seal! These are the cute ones, comparatively small (300 pounds as adults) and spotted, often light in color and furry-looking, instead of the standard glossy dark seal brown. A thoroughly satisfying experience. Sorry, we couldn't get a photo. One more event for this day. We decided to drive on to Bandon to spend the night, so we would be closer to the redwoods the next morning. In Bandon we found a reasonable place to stay, the Shooting Star Motel . The host told us about a new restaurant, Bandon Bill’s Grill at the Best Western and gave us a coupon for an appetizer so we decided to go there for dinner. It's on the ocean, just across from Face Rock . and the town isn't really very big, but we still had trouble finding it. (If you don't see the face, it's a profile rising from the ocean with the nose and mouth looking up and a little away from shore on the right side.) Once there, we had a very nice meal and then were trying to figure out how to get back to the motel. Jeffi decided to ask a young fellow sitting at the bar. He didn’t know because he was visiting from Portland to help the chef at this place get his recipe books together, etc. As it turns out this was Steven who will be the executive chef in a new restaurant opening just 5 blocks from our house. The restaurant is “Mark Lindsay’s Rock and Roll Café” Yes, it’s Mark Lindsay from Portland's own Paul Revere and the Raiders. They claim they will be duplicating the menu from the old Yaw’s Drive-In the neighborhood. Double-broiled burgers, fries with gravy, Green Rivers and all (we hope there's food for those with slightly older metabolisms, too). It was supposed to open in March, but now they say mid-summer. Everything looks done and we know they have a chef, so who knows what the hold-up is. Next, the Prehistoric Gardens and some anecdotes. *Goody Cable, the Portland entrepreneur who owns The Sylvia Beach Hotel, is pretty good at clever names. In Portland, she has a coffee shop called Rimsky-Korsakoffee House. And at one point she ran a delightful soup-and restaurant. I can’t remember the name. For the best pies in the world, however, she had to hire my friend Elisabeth. When I go to visit her the next time, maybe I’ll get us a pie recipe. Next