Astoria, Oregon: the hotel at the mouth of the river
Astoria, Oregon: the hotel at the mouth of the river
While I have lived in the other three corners of this country and in the middle, this was only my second brief visit to the Pacific Northwest, so I wasn’t prepared for the Columbia River, which is three nautical miles wide at its mouth. The bridge above is 21,274’ long and extends well beyond the limits of the photo, which was taken from the balcony of our room at The Cannery Pier Hotel and is not a telephoto shot. The ship was that close.
The hotel has its own website www.cannerypierhotel.com and I am not going to repeat what it says there. It was a most serendipitous find, the equal to our experience in the upper city of Salvador, Brazil, on Christmas Day 2001, which I described in RETURN TO THE SEA.
As we drove east to catch our flight back to Chicago from Portland, Carol said, “I think that is the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in.” I agree.
Monday, the day we arrived in Seattle and drove to Astoria, was sunny. Probably I should say one of the rare sunny days. If they were more common I’d be tempted to move. Hell, I’m tempted anyway. I like the West--the mountains, the deserts, the coast. All of it.
Tuesday had returned to normal overcast, and we drove down to Tillamook for lunch. Through rain and mist you could see enough to sense that the coast was dramatically beautiful, but not enough to really enjoy that beauty.
Oregon is as green as New Zealand, and in places the countryside and rocky seascapes reminded me of New Zealand, but the species of trees and plants differ, as do the shades of green; and in New Zealand, at least in the far north where I spend my time, rain and sun come and go and come and go; whereas I am told that in Oregon the rain mostly comes and stays and the sun mostly goes. Still I liked the place immensely.
Astoria bills itself as the oldest settlement west of the Rockies. I had some difficulty with this, until I decided that they consider the California missions from San Diego to San Francisco as being south of the Rockies not west. The mouth of the Columbia River was an obvious location for a fur trading post and the town is named after John Jacob Aster.
I don’t suppose there is any fur trading going on now, but there is still a local fishing fleet and a new small marina near the hotel. We saw a few boats sailing each afternoon. There is certainly room on the river, but no where much to go out in the ocean. The Pacific Coast has amazingly few good natural harbors, and a lot of wrecked vessels to prove it.
That we were in salmon country was obvious. As well as coffee country, though the cause of this is less clear. I know that Starbucks started in Seattle, but not why the region cares so much about coffee.
The hotel provided free salmon and cheese and wine at 5:00 p.m. We ate dinner one evening at the Silver Salmon restaurant. Smoked salmon is sold from countless roadside shops beneath countless roadside signs.
Clouds covered the country from Astoria all the way to Chicago and we landed in continued grayness.
I like our condo and the quality of life in Evanston and bicycling along the lake front, but as I looked around on the taxi ride home from O'Hare, I said to Carol, “That is beautiful country, and this isn’t.”
Wednesday, April 25, 2007