Beach Break

Jer and I took a midweek break and headed to Newport for a couple of days. We stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Nye Beach, which I'd heard of and wanted to visit even before we moved to Oregon. "You'll either love it or hate it," folks said; we loved it, as I knew we would. It's a rickety four-storey structure built in the early 1900s, perched on a bluff, and geared toward book lovers. (The original Sylvia Beach operated the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris during the Hemingway-James Joyce-D.H. Lawrence-golden expat years.) No phones, no TV, no Internet. But there is a library on the top floor, with funky yet comfortable chairs facing the ocean, where I spent about six hours one foggy afternoon.

Each room is named after a writer. We stayed in Emily Dickinson. The in-room reading material included several biographies and volumes of her poetry, plus a couple of creepy portraits. Stell-a is, of course, the Tennessee Williams room. The F. Scott Fitzgerald room is reputedly furnished with several bottles of gin. Two cats have the run of the establishment; the orange guy, whose name I didn't catch, beats on Shelly, the tabby; then she chases him, and so on ad infinitum.

Breakfast is included in the room rate. Dinner, served family-style, is available for a reasonable fee. We ate at the hotel the first night. When the hostess announced that a round of Two Truths and a Lie was a dinnertime tradition at the Sylvia Beach, my stomach turned over; I am so averse to "icebreakers" and get-acquainted games of any kind. But we were seated with half a dozen accomplished and entertaining liars and, fortified with a couple of glasses of wine, actually had a great time trying to figure out which of each person's three autobiographical statements was, in fact, not true. Despite my inability to remember the title of my supposed doctoral thesis, most people thought I was lying about being tattooed. I guess I just don't look the type. My husband is sociopathically adept at keeping a straight face while describing his totally bogus career as a travel writer.

At breakfast the next morning we sat with two of our tablemates from the night before, about whom we knew a great deal, of course, already, plus another couple from Portland. The conversation ranged from spirituality and religion to global warming to family dynamics -- definitely not small talk. One of the side effects of staying at a hotel that caters to readers, the proprietors have obviously figured out, is informed and quick-witted discussion. The restaurant is called Tables of Content, which sounds a bit twee but which turns out to be a brilliantly appropriate name. The next evening's dinner we'd booked at April's, across the street. Our meal was very good, but not nearly as much fun as the night before.

We really enjoyed Nye Beach itself. The coastline is beautiful and the community seems artsy and laid-back. Benches seem to be a local form of self-expression. That, and signs of various kinds. I'll put up a few examples on flickr

Lawn time comin'

Work got underway this week on transforming our scrabbly front lawn into some kind of horticultural paradise, or at least an attractive garden with interesting and sustainable plants. Here's how it looked at the end of the day yesterday. The new path defines the route that most people already take to and from our house. It'll be flagstone, and the pavement in front of the stairs has been stained a subtle terra cotta to go with the warm colors of the stone. The project will probably still be in high gear when we leave for Kauai this weekend; our friend who's house-sitting will have a front-row seat as the landscaping drama continues to unfold. All going well, Jer and I will return from the Garden Isle to a new garden of our own.

Speaking of tropical flora, a particularly weird and gangly rescue cactus I took off a friend's hands at Sea Ranch has bloomed spectacularly, proof that the sun does shine in Portland.

And speaking of vacations in Paradise, I've been meaning to blog about my soujourn on the coast a couple of weeks ago with five of my art quilter friends. It was new territory for me -- Oceanside, OR, a few miles from Tillamook -- and I really enjoyed seeing the ocean again, as well as getting better acquainted with these interesting and creative women. I posted some of my artsy beach photos on Flickr, but I can't add much to Gerrie's and Terry's excellent accounts of the weekend itself.

Timber Ridge

When we lived on the coast, we had a huge window seat -- it would sleep four adults comfortably, we always said -- facing west. The view was meadow, then trees, and beyond, the blue of the Pacific. No crashing surf, nothing truly dramatic, but the ocean was palpably there, in the distance.

In 2002, after I'd been quilting for about a year, I was moved to depict that view. I was still working fulltime, and the hours I got to spend on the window seat, reading for pleasure or just spacing out, were a measure of the degree to which my life was in balance, or not. Most of the time it was not.

I drew the landscape, simplified my drawing, figured out how to piece it, made a pattern and, using the commercial fabrics in my stash, went for it. I knew at the time it would be one in a series -- a series of two, perhaps, but a series nevertheless. The light outside that window was so remarkable, so changeable, that one "Timber Ridge" couldn't possibly define the view.

Three years later, I took a class from Ruth McDowell, and realized "I've already done this." My job in the workshop, I figured, was to complexify what I'd done. Hence, Timber Ridge 2. This one sat, unfinished, for more than a year while we got ready to move and, eventually, made the transition from the window seat house up to Portland. A week or so ago, after finishing the Flatirons commission (see below) -- another landscape quilt, but one that reflects what I've learned in the interim about value and curved piecing, among other things -- I exhumed TR2 and, in a two-day frenzy, quilted every blessed centimeter of it. This evening I sewed on the sleeve and, ta da, the label. So it's finished.

I actually think the earlier version is more successful, though this one is more of a tour de force, I suppose. TR1 feels more dynamic, somehow, and the double border, traditional as it is, adds balance and a sense of completion. Maybe I can still add some yellow... nah. Whatever. It's like Grandma Moses (i.e. naive primitive-ism) versus Over-Complexification, and guess who won? Well, that's a lesson, too.

Coasting

Jer and I spent three days last week on the Washington coast, just north of Astoria. Friends own a house about halfway up Long Beach peninsula, a couple of blocks from the beach, and when they offered we couldn't resist. Getting to the coast hadn't been a big priority since we moved to Oregon, since we lived at the coast for almost ten years. But we really missed the ocean -- the sight and the sound of it, and the proximity -- simply knowing that it was there.

Off-season, mid-week, Long Beach is a sleepy place. This sign about sums it up.




















But we checked out pretty much everything that was open, from the sublime -- that would be Leadbetter Point, where a flock of shorebirds, literally hundreds of them, wheeled over our heads -- to the ridiculous, e.g. Jake the Alligator Man at Marsh's deeply weird and mildly depressing Free Museum. Found quite a few interesting objets rusting in the marsh grass along Willapa Bay, some v. cool driftwood and an astounding abundance and variety of mushrooms in the woods. Oh yes, and some of us (i.e. moi) ate oysters. Advice to oyster-philes: Counter-intuitive as it might seem, when it comes to Willapa Bay oysters, "extra-small" is what you want. These puppies tend toward the, ah, big-boned end of the spectrum, oyster-wise. To use a cat metaphor, they are the ragdolls of the mollusc world.




















On the way home, we stopped at Cape Disappointment (that, along with Dismal Nitch (sic), has to be one of the best place names in the Northwest) and the excellent Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. L&C bicentennial-mania was just peaking when we moved here last summer; at the time, unpacking and settling in was a much higher priority than satisfying any incipient curiosity I might've felt about those guys and what, exactly, they'd accomplished. Now I'd like to learn more. Good job, Interpretive Center!

Jer and I aren't lighthouse freaks, but we do make a point of climbing every legally-accessible iconic tower-like structure a new place might offer. I took a bunch of arty closeups at Cape D's North Head Lighthouse, on view in my Washington Coast set on Flickr.