How Things Are Going In Oregon

Hello, loyal readers.

I know, it has been a long time. Never fear, your Steve feels your pain. And he is back, with an all-new blog post, called "How Things Are Going In Oregon."

So.

In Oregon, people are different from the people we know. People keep telling me how Eastern I am. For example, in a grant-writing class I was in last week I made some off-handed comment and the middle-aged housewife next to me giggled and touched my arm and said "Oh, you're so Eastern!" This distresses me. I suspect a deep-rooted Orientalism in this culture, and with Mr. Said dead and gone I do not know what to do.

In Oregon, I have moved into an apartment. I have a roommate who is a very fine fellow, my own bathroom (!!), and I am lobbying to be allowed a cat. Right now my place looks like this:



You cannot tell, but that bed (on which I sit at this very moment!) is insanely large. In Oregon, there are frighteningly kind people who give you things like gargantuan beds when you move to town and are in A Merry Corps (as I am).

Also in Oregon, there is a magnificent seacoast! Today, I went with my roommate and two of his friends on a journey westward. First we drove through a country that looks something like this:



...with countless trees and hills. The trees I think are Douglas fir and I don't even know them very well or their uses.

After many miles of these trees, we arrived in the town of Bandon. Most of my photos of Bandon, tragically, did not turn out. So I deleted them. (Or, you might say, I Bandoned them. Hah. Hahah. Yeah.) But it looks something like this:



....all fishing-village-gone-touristy. It is little and exceedingly cute. And it has signs like this!:




.........and you probably can't tell what that says, but it says "Tsunami Evacuation Route." In Oregon they have freaking tsunamis! They didn't have tsunamis in Pennsylvania. (Did they?)

In Bandon we browsed cute old-hippie-run stores which all only sold beads (except one which was a candy store and sold candy, including beer candy, but the beer candy tasted like Miller lite and I didn't like it), and then finally we we arrived upon this:





...and there were even more pictures than this but none of them turned out terribly well.

There were:

Gigantic rocks which looked aged and wise and totally indifferent;

An archway of rock like a mouth through which big white waves crashed;

Great fat starfish clinging to rocks, alongside barnacles and mussels and things that were balls of green slime living inside gross fleshy cups, and at least one sea anemone who closed his spines and tried to eat us, but we weren't fish and he couldn't;

And of course seagulls, all fat and white and arrogant, perching on rooftops and looking disdainfully down at the town and its inhabitants. How I love seagulls. A difference between the beach here and Maryland: No one told me how much they hate seagulls, and how they're just big rats that live in the air, and how dreadful it is that they eat all the food that careless people leave on the beach so that the whole place isn't a mess.

When we arrived at the beach the first thing I did of course was take off my boots, my socks and my coat and run toward the water. The Pacific is so cold! The kind of cold that steals your breath just touching your feet, that is so cold it doesn't even feel like cold anymore. But there were rocks to climb on, so I went on. Before long my jeans were soaked to my knees. And then I was in front of the giant Mouth of rock and there were waves crashing, so I walked forward one step and fell in up to my chest! I gasped and choked and it was so cold I couldn't think as I groped my way toward land.

So then of course I tore off my shirt (which was soaking anyway) and ran forward into the waves and knelt down in the water and fell forward on my face. The rush was like taking a drug, and when I got back to shore my skin was all on freezing-fire and I was high on cold and ran around the beach like a loon.

Then of course after a half hour of this I couldn't feel my feet anymore, my shirt I had lost somewhere among the rocks and in the end it took me about 3 hours to feel anything like warm again.

But it was so good!

The Pacific, the Pacific here on the Oregon coast in winter-- It's so different from the Atlantic. I've never been afraid of the Atlantic. The Pacific is old and giant and capricious, it would kill you and never notice or care.

And I'm back home now, in my giant bed that is like another room all by itself. I'm out of cigarettes and exhausted, and feeling pretty good. Until next time, Anybody!