900 Tons of Rotting Tuna

Rockaway Beach, Oregon - July 26, 2009

It was sad when the great ship went down. It was 1976 and Betty M. was fully laden with a cargo of 900 tons of fresh tuna. She capsized in the mouth of the Columbia River. Local residents still talk about the stench that lasted for months. The diving here involves 50-degree water temperatures and 10 to 30-foot visibility. I think I'll leave the SCUBA gear in the basement until we get back to Florida.

This is a picture of the Tillamook Naval Air Station back in 1943. The Navy dirigibles photographed her are only slightly shorter than the 800-foot Hindenburg.

One of Mrs. Phred's online friends came to visit. Her name is Laura. Mrs. Phred and Laura go to "Garibaldi days" and have excellent fried oysters for lunch. I stay home and do paperwork. I'm pleased to be able to load Laura up with fresh fish. She drove a long way to meet Mrs. Phred. Laura works in the Oregon mental hospital where "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was filmed starring Jack Nicolson. The book was written by Ken Kesey who got his big start from having his brains jarred loose by the CIA during the MKULTRA project, which involved slipping LSD to unwitting citizens. Kesey's fourth child, conceived with another Merry Prankster, was appropriately named "Sunshine"...
Today we took a three-cape scenic drive along the coast. We both had that deja vu feeling that we'd been here before...perhaps we had. The Tillamook Air Museum is not bad. They had some very nice WWII airplanes and airplane engines on display. My own C-124 engine was there. It was the largest airborne piston engine ever deployed. It was used on the B-36 as well....a radial seven with four rows...28 cylinders...what a hog. 4,500 cubic inches...four engines...no wonder we burned 10,000 gallons of high octane on a ten-hour flight....about five gallons a mile...

The most lovely plane in the museum is a P-38 called the Tangerine.

I don't recognize it at first...light, flighty, lovely and bristling with 50-calibers. The engines rotate in opposite directions to cancel the effects of torque.

Lt. Ethell who flew one this made some kills. The people next to us gave us a plate of freshly boiled crab. It was good but it ruined our appetite for the sockeye salmon I had cooked so I made a sandwich spread from it with eggs, onions, mayonnaise, and chipotle sauce. It made about seven healthy sandwiches.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the air museum was the building housing it. They claim it is the largest wooden building in the world. It's easy to believe. They built it to house Akron Class Navy rigid dirigibles during WWII. They built two, but one burned to the ground about 20 years ago. It had been filled with hundreds of tons of hay. The building that is left houses a bunch of stored boats and RVs in addition to the air museum.

Tomorrow we move on to the mouth of the Columbia where Lewis and Clark wintered in 1805.
I think WWII dirigibles were very useful for convoy duty.


Rotting tuna, Ken Kesey, P-38s, the Merry Pranksters, Chipottle sauce, Project MKULTRA, the CIA, WWII dirigibles, the Oregon coast capes, fresh fish....it all comes together right here in Tillamook. It's interesting that Lt Ethell's son, Jeff Ethell, wrote a book called "Warbirds of WWII" and crashed a restored P-38 and died in Tillamook in 1997. Apparently he lost an engine, failed to maintain a sufficient airspeed and destroyed himself and one of the last of these lovely airplanes in a flat spin.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Coos Bay, Oregon Coast

We're at my favorite spot on the Oregon Coast. This is where I saw the red Coast Guard helicopter rescue diver pluck four dead bodies out of the water. Their boat overturned crossing the bar. The orange life jackets and the boat washed up on the beach, but the bodies kept floating offshore.

One thought struck me
As an ice cube swallowed
that falls near the heart
And just lays there coldly burning
Into fear itself: 

‘When you die
You're part of the furniture.’

Then I whispered
‘Adieu’

Covered his face
And left
-Ronberge (anno tercio)

I go out again with Captain Bill on a 6 AM, five hour, rockfish hunt. He has a high tech fish finder with a 100 foot conical range that tells him the number of fish and their sizes. It seems a little unfair to the fish, but I limit out on seven big black rockfish in a couple of hours. I borrowed a lingcod jig from a garrulous old submariner (my age) who I have been pumping for sub stories on the way out. I use the jig to catch a ling that fillets out to three pounds or four meals. The rockfish each yield two fillets that weigh a pound total, a good weight for dinner for two. We've eaten them twice so far...they have they consistency of halibut and a hint of swordfish flavor.

I find a magic place on my walk today. It's on a cliff that allows access to a deserted beach by lowering yourself with a rope anchored to a tree. I'll make breakfast sandwiches and coffee and take Mrs. Phred to see it in the morning.

Mrs. Phred on the beach. We've been here four nights, which is something of a personal record for being in one place. The white line keeps me asking what's up the road?

Strange things grow on our planet and in the ocean. I'm sorry I forgot my wetsuit. The swimming looks great except for the 55 degree water temperature.

Down the road is a colony of several thousand barking seals.

Crabs are very big along the coast. I buy Mrs. Phred a Crab Louie for here lunch in Winchester Bay today. Next October they will have a community college shooting massacre here that will leave ten dead.

This is the right lower jaw of a 60 foot humpback whale that washed up on the beach near the Umpqua Lighthouse in 1991. We're heading inland in the morning to an RV park about midway between Crater Lake and the whitewater rafting in Bend.

Chainsaw Art on the Siletz River

Coyote Rock RV Resort


We're on the coast of Oregon, but about two miles inland on the banks of the Siletz River. The last time we were here we met two retired policemen from Tampa. They were spending their pensions collecting highly discounted Iraqi dinars. I wonder how that worked out for them?

Mrs. Phred kicks back and watches the Siletz River flow in front of her living room picture window. When you can rent a view like this for $20 a night (including cable TV, garbage collection, lawn maintenance, water, electricity and security), why buy?

I'm doing another fishing trip out of Depoe Bay in the morning.

We found a tennis court near the ocean in nearby Lincoln City.

Cruising the country road along the Siletz, we ran into this statue. The owner bought it from the winner of last year's chainsaw art festival in Reedsport. He has it chained down although it weighs 800 pounds. If you stole something like this, you couldn't put it in your front yard. 

In the afternoon, we spotted a whale feeding offshore. I know....it's not a great picture. I have better in my archive....

Where Have All the Payphones Gone?

 Coos Bay, Oregon

I have a new avatar on "Second Life" . I've read that some people spend 10 to 20 hours a day on the Second Life site.There are so many new things: Twitter, Face book, Second Life. But the payphones have all disappeared.

Yesterday I went to a place on Second Life that invited me to jump into a "dance bubble" with a randomly selected member of the opposite gender.You can almost hear your own brain calcifying as the Nation's youth jump headlong into the next new thing and a 20 year-old Internet billionaire invents a new word..

You can pick any gender you like in Second Life. I tried to modify my avatar to be wearing glasses, having wrinkles and a big belly, but those options were not available. Everyone in Second Life is young and beautiful,  even me. It might be that the Internet is just a better place than the real world...

So...here I am in a "dance bubble" with a beautiful young girl who might be an overweight Italian-American man from Cleveland wearing  a wife-beater t-shirt...But.....does it even make a difference from the viewpoint of virtual reality? Two American men were recently unmasked as fake Syrian Lesbian bloggers. They were both from somewhere in Ohio.

I like to see the lovely tide pools in Coos Bay.

We play  some tennis, read several books and check out the Shark Bites restaurants in downtown Coos Bay. I read "Hunting Eichmann".  My basic belief is that the nature of man is plastic. You get your Mother Theresa and your Doctor Mengele...Your own job is just simply to behave in a way that reflects credit on your species....I am an existentialist. It's on my dog tags...I love America... the only question the sergeant had in making the religious preference on my dog tags was "how do you spell it?"

Fish heads fish heads
Roly poly fish heads
fish heads fish heads
eat them up, yum!
In the morning laughing happy fish heads
In the evening floating in the soup
Ask a fish head anything you want to
they wont answer they cant talk.
I took a fish head out to see a mooovie
did.nt have to pay to get it in.

 

The fishing trip in Banden was typical for Oregon. I caught big black Rock fish, Quill backs, Vermilion's, Ling Cod and other Pacific bottom fish.  One young man caught a 45 pound halibut. I've been cooking every day, using my halibut recipes for the delicate white flesh of the bottom fish.

You Can't Keep the Wild Ones

Sarasota, Florida

Salmon fishing in Oregon is good. We cut though the cool fog on the Pacific Ocean for an hour or so, then catch our limit of six Coho salmon in a couple of hours. We can only keep the hatchery salmon with the clipped adipose fins. We throw the wild ones back.

The Oregon sand dunes extend for miles. The weather is very cool on the coast, even in July.

There seems to be a prevailing wind.

This is called Devil's Churn. You get some strange wave effects as the tide changes.

I have an appointment with the Veteran's Administration this morning. They will provide Mom with a pension to help pay for her care at the assisted living center. The application takes five or six months to grind though the bureaucracy. You have to be a combat veteran or a veteran's spouse to receive this assistance.

This seal is clapping for fish parts. He hangs around where the fishing boats clean fish for the customers.

The "feels like" temperature in Sarasota today will be over 100 degrees.



The Columbia River near where Lewis and Clark spent a dismal winter eating salmon until they were sick of it.

The Columbia a few hundred miles to the east of the ocean.

Sunset.

Hell's Canyon & The Craters of the Moon

Along the Snake River
East Oregon and South Idaho

We did the 200 mile Hell's Canyon scenic loop yesterday. We saw miles of fertile farmland and winding US Forest Service roads.

Hell's Canyon is the deepest gorge in America at 1.5 miles deep. It was formed as part of an arc of undersea volcanic mountains in the South Pacific about 300 million years ago. Limestone rocks formed over the igneous rock on the sea bottom.The chunk of tectonic plate floated 2,000 miles north and collided with America. A vast uplifting and new igneous rock intrusions then took place amid considerable volcanism. During the ice ages, vast lakes in Montana repeatedly broke though glaciers and formed rivers with 1,000 times the volume of all the present day rivers in the world...at least so say the geologists. A strange and twisted history...geologic time runs on a different scale than human time.

Lewis and Clark crossed the Rockies and made their was down the Clearwater River to the Snake and then on to the Columbia.
I was a little surprised to see the Snake flowing north, but the Columbia is that way so it makes a certain sense. Lewis and Clark passed by here in the summer of 1804. The dams and locks make the rivers much easier to navigate for the most part.

These wild blackberries along the riverbank were very good.

Today was a fantastic driving day. Mrs. Phred did most of it. I discovered my old box of compilation CDs that I made while drinking Wild Turkey, late at night, back when I had to work. We turn it up and listen to Pink Floyd, Alvin Lee, The Stones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Credence Clearwater, Hot Tuna, Santana, The Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, The Platters, Randy Newman, Jimmi Hendrix, ZZ Top, etc. and watch the mountains, rivers and Idaho farmland roll by. For a change we hit the road at 6AM and make 450 miles by 3PM. The drive to the Grand Tetons tomorrow will only be a few hours more.

Suddenly we run into a blizzard of yellow grasshoppers in Idaho. Smack! Smack! All over the windshield. Just past that we drive through the the hundreds of square miles of The Craters of the Moon National Monument. Strangely, I'd been trying to remember the name of this place and where it was located for several days....there it was.
Blasted, torn, jagged black lava as far as the eye can see. Totally worthless desolate wasteland. What genius it was to turn it into a National Monument. I love it.

Our RV park is just down the road from Atomic City, the home of the first nuclear reactor in 1951. They have a couple of nuclear aircraft engines on display and Atomic Burgers...it's a must see in the morning.

Mrs. Phred Calls a Halt

La Grande, Oregon

Mrs. Phred wants to see the Hell's Canyon scenic loop here in eastern Oregon. We checked into the Eagle Hot Lake RV Park and will take the Toyota on the 200 mile loop in the morning.

The drive here along the north bank of the Columbia River was very scenic.
We've struck out with booking raft trips so far. It's hot, hot hot and all the rivers and lakes are full of Oregonians looking for relief from the record temperatures. It kind of reminds me of the summer we visited London. Our hotel didn't have air-conditioning although it was very hot. Up here most of the homes are also not air conditioned.

We are warned to run the water here for several minutes to blow out the earwigs. I saw an earwig when I disconnected the water at the last place. My ear feels itchy. Maybe an earwig crawled in last night. They lay eggs in your ear that burrow into your brain to lay eggs..then the larvae eat their way out again...