9

 I take the bus to Seaside, as a kind of bookend to the trip I took there in January. I’d like to stay overnight but room prices are astronomical, partly because it’s peak vacation season and partly because I unwittingly happened to pick the weekend of the Hood to Coast Relay. As the name suggests, the relay starts at Mt. Hood and ends right here, a distance of 200 miles. Huge tents and stages are being set up on the beach, and the town is packed with tourists. I visit the junk shops then wade in the surf for a while before setting to visit the Salt Works.

In early 1806, while the Lewis and Clark expedition rested for the winter nearby, five of the men traipsed out to the coast to make salt for their journey back east. These men built a stone oven with kettles on top to boil away the seawater. No one knows exactly where this happened; the heritage site stands in a spot pointed out by an 85-year-old Clatsop woman in 1900. She said that when she was a girl, her father had pointed to a pile of rocks and told her he had once seen white men boiling water there, years before she was born.

The stone oven standing there now was built in the fifties, using that same pile of rocks, It’s situated a block from the beach, in a residential neighborhood. As historical monuments go, it’s extremely modest. The oven is rounded and open at both ends, like a little tunnel, with five metal pots on top. A low wall topped by an iron fence surrounds it. The whole thing resembles a cemetery plot. Maybe that’s what drives me to visit it: to pay my respects, though I’m not sure to whom or what I’m paying my respects to. Like the sign on the promenade reads, this is the end of the trail. There is no Northwest Passage. Having made their salt, Lewis and Clark packed their things and headed back east. More and more these days, especially as my folks get older, I find myself wondering if I should do the same.

Before I catch the bus back, I stop for an early at a place I had a good meal at during my last visit. The dining room is empty, but I can hear shouts and loud music from the bar in the back. I slide into a booth and order. A couple lumbers in followed by their two large daughters and they all head back to the bar. Ten minutes later they all file out. One of the daughters hollers behind her, “Guess it’s too much to ask for a fucking drink around here! It is supposed to be a bar.”

“They’re not worth it, honey,” says the mother.

“Oh I know they’re not fucking worth it!” the daughter screams. “They won’t stay in business long with fucking service like that!” She slams the door and the glass rattles.

“We’ve been here for twenty five years,” my server says. She disappears and another server comes by and asks me if I’m ready for my check. I tell her I’m still waiting for my food. Her eyes get wide and she runs off without another word.

Twenty minutes pass and though I still have time, I’m getting a little nervous about catching my bus.  Finally my food arrives, brought by yet another server. She seems stoned out of her mind, or maybe just somewhat dim, but she apologizes for the delay and touches my shoulder in a way which I find endearing. There’s an extra hunk of fish hidden beneath the others.

Despite my hunger, I chew slowly and methodically. The stoned server comes back and asks if everything is okay and if I need more lemon, and I tell her everything is great and no I don’t need more lemon. Without being prompted, she starts to tell me about her three kids and how all they want to eat is Go-Gurt. She wonders aloud what mothers did before they invented Go-Gurt. Her oldest is 16 and works at the restaurant on weekends. Her own family moved around a lot when she was a kid, she says; she was an army brat. She’s so sweet and slow or maybe just very high, and I tell her that the fish is utterly delectable, which it is. She tells me they just added fish tacos to the menu and that they’re really good but a little different from how other places make them and that they also serve the best breakfast in town but not many people realize that so it’s never really busy. She keeps touching me on the shoulder in a way that seems calculated to get her a decent tip, and you know what, it does.