Memories of Trees

A photo-walk among the sentinels of Cape Meares, Oregon

Cape Meares anchors the south end of Tillamook Bay, on the Oregon Coast. A basaltic monolith, the cape collects fog like wool hiking socks gather grass seeds. The cape was once part of Oregon’s Three Capes Route, an automobile-accessible loop of road that strung Capes Meares, Lookout, and Kiwanda on a chain. A few years ago, a slow-moving landslide tore the roadway off the northern side of Cape Meares. Buckled asphalt sags off to the west, making the road unsafe for traffic. A funding shortage, coupled with the difficulty of shoring up a mountainside that is moving seaward, forced the State to close the road to automobiles. Steel gates bar the roadway on both ends; grass and moss have begun to grow over the tarmac.

Although closed to cars, the road is still passable for bicyclists and hikers. With camera in hand, I begin the steep climb to the top of the cape. Four blue jays express raucous displeasure as I pass through their domain. Weather-battered stumps, crowned with salal bushes, stand as century-old monuments to the trees that once guarded this path.

Sitka Spruce trees dominate the top of the cape. Fog blows through the gnarled limbs, catching the muffled sunlight slanting between the limbs.

At the end of the cape, where relentless sea savages unyielding stone, stands the decommissioned Cape Meares Lighthouse. For decades this pulsing light warned ships to avoid this reef-strewn point of land. Today it stands silent, wrapped in swirling fog.

The fog is rolling back to the south. As I climb back along the spine of Cape Meares, I spot Short Beach reflecting the strengthening sunlight.

On the way back down the hill, I spot an ancient Western Hemlock stump in the silent woods. Probably cut more than a century ago, the slow-rotting wood still displays the triangular cuts that supported the springboards that supported the Oregon loggers they pulled both ends of their large handsaw.

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