Northwest Sites

From the time I first saw the Pacific Ocean and visited the small beach at Point Fermin in San Pedro, the ocean and the West Coast sea coast have held a great attraction for me. At the time I was very impressionable, since up till that time I had had indeed a very limited geographic experience and this new vista fixed itself firmly in my psyche. Whether it was because my first encounter with an ocean was on the West Coast or because the Pacific shoreline is more spectacular and rugged, but I still am attracted to it more than the Atlantic or Gulf coasts. The latter have wide and more extensive beaches but the lack the scenic features of the Pacific coast.

Over the year we have traversed the entire coastline from San Diego to the Canadian border at least once and parts of it numerous times. While the California coast is very appealing, such stretches of coast as that from Monterey south to Pismo Beach are beautiful, my liking centers on the Oregon coast with its mixture of craggy parts, sand beaches and sand dunes. I suppose I should say that my liking extends farther south, say to Eureka and [a] bit farther south in California.

One of my most memorable sensations was once when I was walking along a beach in northern California. The weather was foggy and as I walked along it was as if my universe was bounded by the fog that kept everything more than 50 yards away in the mist and near objects hazy in outline. I felt as if I were truly isolated from the rest of the world.

I should mention Fern Canyon in California as a coastal feature of unusual beauty. I also like the northern California and Oregon coasts for the periodic fishing towns with their picturesque boat moorings and fishing boats tied up at the docks and piers. All along the coast there are many opportunities for sketching interesting scenes and I have done this on numerous occasions.

Further north along the Washington coast the scenery is less lovely, though perhaps because we have traversed it only the single time, I didn’t get an adequate appreciation of it. Truly the rainforest in the Olympic park is striking and I recall well the sensation of walking through the lush vegetation.

Jean and I have also visited Vancouver Island and the coast along British Columbia just north of the city of Vancouver. Victoria and Butchart Gardens are indeed scenic but what I remember most vividly from this trip is a visit to a virgin stand of immense Douglas firs. This preserved stand was along the eastern coast of the island, perhaps halfway from north to south. The trees were as large as many of the coastal redwoods in the redwood parks in northern California and just as spectacular.

The city of Vancouver is for me more appealing than Victoria and I was more attracted and appreciative of the parks we saw there than I was to the more publicized Butchart Gardens. Vancouver has also museums that include artifacts such as totem poles of the northwest coastal Indian tribes; I find the art of these Indians unusual and truly lovely.

Jean and I have visited other spots through Washington and Oregon. Included are such places as Wenatchee in central Washington — there the transport north through Lake Wenatchee was by boat, to the cabin where we spent several days [he might be getting Lake Wenatchee confused with Lake Chelan and Stehekin —LS]. And there is the area in central Oregon where we went with a bird-watching group once — low, marshy areas that have their own particular appeal. This was after the time I started sketching and I later used one of the sketches for an oil painting in one of the classes I later took at the college here in Ashland.

The one Elderhostel program that Jean and I participated in was at Eastern Oregon State University in La Grande, Oregon. Along with the week we spent at the Elderhostel (or was it a two-week period — I really don’t recall) we also spent some time exploring the Wallowa lake/mountain area. We had initially expected to stay at a facility within the Wallowa park or recreation area itself and had a reservation there; however the bed wasn’t to our liking so we moved to a motel on the road to the park and drove into the park each day. I have perhaps half a dozen detailed drawings from this trip, one of which I later used as the basis for an ink brush painting. This ink drawing we used on our Christmas card one year recently.

The Elderhostel program we attended was divided into two sections. One was on local points of interest and on the period of the ’30s and ’40s as I recall; Jean attended these sessions. The second section was on figure drawing and painting and this was my introduction to this phase of art, which I have pursued since then with further classes at Southern Oregon State College and at the Rogue Gallery in Medford.