22—The Town That Fell Into the Sea

To: Friends and Family

Subject: The Town That Fell into the Sea

From: walden@intermind.net

I just got back from what was once the town of Bayocean, also known around here as the town that fell into the sea. Bayocean was the dream of Thomas Benton Potter who planned to create “the Atlantic City of the West” on a six hundred acre peninsula between Tillamook Bay and the Pacific. By 1914, the forested spit had been stripped of vegetation and six hundred lots sold.

In time, Bayocean became home to two thousand people, offered travelers a three-story hotel, and supported a variety of businesses that included a bakery, dance hall, bowling alley, general store, and a natatorium with a large heated pool and bandstand. The town had four miles of pavement, a narrow gauge railroad, telephone service, and water pumped in by steam. As so frequently happens, the dream of Bayocean fell prey to the very things that had inspired it—Tillamook Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Although, as also has been known to happen, the handmaiden to disaster was human folly.

Because of poor roads, most visitors came to Bayocean by boat from Portland. Crossing the Tillamook Bay bar was not only bumpy but dangerous. The Army Corps of Engineers concluded that the problem could be solved by building jetties on the north and south sides of the mouth of the bay at a cost of $2.2 million, with local residents paying half. Taxpayers pressured authorities to approve a plan for a single jetty on the north side—across from Bayocean. Anyone familiar with the movement of water should have known that a single jetty would divert the current across the bay. Nevertheless, authorities approved the plan for the single jetty, and Army Corps of Engineers acquiesced, completing the project for a cost of $800 thousand. 

While crossing the bar was less harrowing, the Corps’ predictions proved right. In 1932, major storm action swept the natatorium into the sea. By 1949, more than 20 homes were under water. Then in 1952, the sea cut right through the spit. In 1960, the last house fell into the sea. 

Since then, the forest has reclaimed the spit which is now home to deer, raccoons, coyotes, and birds. I encountered them all on my drive across the dike between Lake Meares and Tillamook Bay to the parking lot for hikers, cyclists, and equestrians. I appeared to be alone with the animals on this dank gray day, with the option of walking on an unpaved road along the bay or following a sandy path to the ocean. I took the path of lost dreams to the sea. 

The narrow trail wound through gnarled conifers and across a wild sweep of sand and tangles of grass. As the trail crested toward the melancholy sky, the sea took possession of the air like the sound of a train never quite 

arriving. 

At the top of the dune, the trail disappeared into sand sloping down into a panoramic curve of the coastline. The tide was out, the surf lacy and white. A mist hover under the heavy gray sky weighed upon my senses. I skied down the dune to the beach.

No one knew where I was. Sitting there on a log on the far edge of my country, everything I’d ever been or cared about was behind me. My follies became indistinguishable from my dreams. My misdirections, like my dreams, just paths through wild tangles of grass to the sea. I wandered down the beach to a gigantic tree stump bleached by salt and sun into an abstraction no longer resembling anything within the realms of the arboreal. Wanting nothing but to succumb to an overpowering fatigue, I sat down and leaned back against the abstraction. 

I thought of the Tillamook pharmacist, Mr. Francis Drake Mitchell, who was the biggest proponent of Bayocean and lived there for nearly half a century. In their book about the history of Bayocean, Bert and Margie Webber described Mr. Mitchell as he watched the dream disintegrate right under his feet. “During his last years,” the Webbers wrote, “he looked like a bewildered child who had been punished for some infraction he did not understand.” It was the same feeling I'd experienced after being driven from the teaching profession.

Now, I began to think the greatest folly and cause of human grief may be the human proclivity for confusing fantasy and dream. The truth was that had I been smarter, better, less naive, and more tenacious, the outcome would have been the same. I could not have redirected the currents set in motion by the political expediencies and bureaucratic absurdities  eroding the entire public education system. I forgave myself my fantasies and wondered if the inundation of peace and feeling of complete surrender I experienced was what it's like to die.

Except I wasn’t dead, just alone on a thin strip of sand beyond the world defined by plastic and politics. Before me—nothing but sky and sea, with no one or no thing to give me perspective or point of view. Suddenly, something strange was coming straight at me right out of thin air—something small and black like a barage of flying rocks....

To be continued next time in "Running"