Greetings from Depoe Bay

To my retroactive dismay, I believe I’ve had a nihilistic summer. With what felt like endless time spent languishing in my own solitude, spinning out over the impossible quagmires of love, career, and selfhood, I managed to whittle my beliefs to a single point. The Answer, if you will. The intangible nature of my desire to find purpose wasn’t useful, it no longer could be. I no longer wanted an airy harmony of mind, body, and spirit. I wanted my ducks in a row. I wanted to not be home.

 

Genies don’t exist, though, and home I was. Deep in the Oregon suburbs of my childhood, I spent the summer giving up on tossing pennies into fountains, and putting that change towards the cold zinc of reason. Reason that leaves no room for longing and love. Reason that pads grit with sand and tells you to chew. Miserable? Maybe. But boy does it get results.

 

Then I visited the Oregon Coast, and what I thought was my new frontier of hard-shelled, pragmatic living warped itself once more.

 

For the most part, the Oregon Coast isn’t wholly unique. Most of the time it’s gray, and its perpetual fog hides any view worth catching. Driving down the US 101 highway into Depoe Bay is no different. To my right sits a cliff which drops into a hazy nothing, to my left countless evergreens, fast departing out the scope of a car window. Back home, a week of 30° days fooled me into believing this coastal trip would follow in a warm and tropical fashion; there exists no precedent to serve as evidence for as much. I make this mistake nearly every time I visit the coast.

 

Depoe Bay is a fishing tourism town, and boasts a hefty sprinkling of steel fillet tables throughout its jurisdiction. It’s also the whale watching capital of Oregon. The main strip consists of four to five different gift shops, each one covered in driftwood shingles, each selling the same local salt, soap, and leather goods. The first night we get takeout from a local Korean restaurant. There is no one inside when we go to order. We bring it home and eat in our Airbnb where there isn’t enough cutlery. It is good.

 

We are staying just off the highway; a thin line of trees and a small service road is all that separates us and the steady march of loggers, vacationers, and commuters making their way down the 101. Just north of our house sits the titular bay. It, like everything else here, is covered in a haze. There are more docked fishing boats than there is visible water. Opposite the ocean, seated atop the wooded incline, lies the town cistern and more expensive houses of the region. Still, it’s not much. Seeing it all as we pull in makes my chest clench, I am nearly brought to tears.

 

The next day we visit a beach and for the first time in recent memory it’s sunny. The weather couldn’t be more than 20° and there’s a brisk wind, that part doesn’t matter. My brother and I climb some rocks. I try to read, then I try to watch for whales though I don’t end up doing much of either. I run into the 4° water and the cold is shocking and unpleasant. I swim around some and am proud of this. After about three hours heavy clouds reclaim their place in the sky, threatening to rain down on us.

 

The rest of the trip is rainy and uneventful. My family and I go to some outlets to try and do some shopping. We are unsuccessful in most everything except becoming increasingly annoyed with one another. When we get breakfast from a local cafe I encourage a walk back to our AirBnb, which means I lead the way through overgrown blackberry bushes as we cling to the shoulder of the highway. All this is enough for me. I have already been moved.

 

Years ago, I first read the essay ‘Dreamthorp’ by Alexander Smith. It’s a meandering, gratifying, beautiful work dedicated to the English countryside. Amidst the romance of Smith’s writing the sun is golden and the distance lush, Dreamthorp is holy. If I were a more generous person I think I could write about Depoe Bay in this way. As if each second offers some newer, smaller majesty of the landscape and its people. Instead I let it remain gray, and the people kind but curt. There are no whales to be seen.

 

Though I may try to cut it out of myself, though I have concluded tens of times over that I am weak for my grace, for my love, I cannot outrun it. I feel it falling out of me, tumbling and spilling when I am brought back to somewhere I’ve forgotten. I cannot accept that all that is good in life must be won in battle. I cannot accept that the cosmic puzzle is solvable. This love, here on the Oregon Coast, takes more than that.

Words by Kalie Minor. Images courtesy of Kalie Minor.