The allure of the Oregon Coast: It’s not for everyone

They were newcomers to the little dirt road on which our cabin sits, appearing just before dark. A buck and a doe. Both nonchalantly nibbling their way along the twinberry honeysuckle, the surf stretching white-foam fingers ashore beyond. A rare treat, seeing deer this close to the beach, like a few weeks ago when, for the first time, we saw a river otter splash up a creek.

Sometimes it’s the unexpected. Sometimes it’s the routine. But this place never disappoints.

I’ve been coming to this spot on the central Oregon coast for 71 years.

It’s my refuge. My tradition. My privilege, not in the sense of nose-in-the-air arrogance — this is Yachats, not Martha’s Vineyard — but in the way of good fortune. I am the grandson of a Corvallis couple who, in their late 30s, brought a small cabin with no heat, no foundation and no insulation beyond the newspapers we found stuffed between the studs when we rebuilt 20 years ago.

My grandparents paid $500 for it in 1936. To the north of them: beach. To the south: cow pastures and a scattering of other such cabins.

My late mother began coming here when she was 9 — and walked barefoot on the beach at 90. We have a photo of her grandfather on the front porch. I grew up skim-boarding the backwash of waves.

I envied California for its real surfers. Here you body-surf for 15 minutes, then race ashore to a beach fire with hopes of rediscovering the feeling in your hands and feet.

My wife, Sally, and I honeymooned at the cabin 50 years ago next month. We later watched our two boys bicycle down the beach pretending to be Ponch and Jon from TV’s CHiPS, bury each other in the sand, and turn marshmallows into “Indiana Jones” torches on summer evenings.

Our grandchildren come here now, making it six generations who have fallen asleep to the sound of the surf rolling ashore at Yachats.

On the Thursday night we recently arrived, the beach was bathed in buttery sunshine, a rarity this summer. When heat wilts the Willamette Valley, a marine layer often cloaks the coast, bringing wind, low visibility and cool temperatures. We had fires in the cabin morning and night, even as the petunias in our flower box back home succumbed in the 95-degree heat.

“I don’t get the Oregon Coast,” a former newspaper colleague once told me. “Rain. Cold. Not much to do.”

Yes, the coast isn’t for everybody. But ironically, those are the very things I love about this place.

Such weather is why you can often be alone on the beach here. What a place doesn’t have — the warm weather of, say, Southern California — protects what it does have. It prevents hordes of people flocking here to spoil a raw beauty you won’t find on a Coney Island-style beach.

Though we enjoy the rare dinner on the porch in summer, Sally and I are storm lovers, known to time our winter visits to forecasts of heavy rain and high winds — once stupidly driving Highway 126 as trees were getting blown down along the road.

We get grumpy if it stays too nice too long in, say, January or February. And adjust to whatever the weather offers. My rule of thumb for beach-walking attire is “one more layer than you think.”

You learn to make peace with the weather. Monopoly. Sequence. Parchisi. Such board games have saved our family on many a wet weekend. True, before we rebuilt the cabin, our garage roof once peeled back like a cat-food lid during a winter storm. But we joke that the steelhead-themed table made in the 1960s by my mother — a rock-and-shell mosaic that’s roughly the size of a tractor tire — holds down the cabin like a giant paper weight.

As for the “not-much-to-do” comment — that depends on your definition of “do.” If watching waves, whales, California seals, people, birds, wildlife, storms, kites, boats, tidepools and little kids jumping waves with utter delight isn’t your thing, you’re right. There’s nothing to do. Especially if you don’t enjoy falling asleep with a book on your chest.

Yachats’ allure is subtle. It’s the brackish smell of salt air, wet sand, dry seaweed and whatever else gets thrown into the breeze blender. The squawk of a gull, the whoosh of the surf, the come-and-go thrum of the Coast Guard helicopter that’s the same fiery orange as  the arching stems of crocosmia, bowing in the wind.

No pretense here. No pressure either. In Yachats, you don’t run by iPhone time but by ocean tides; they tell you when you can expect wide swaths of sand for walks on the beach and high surf for walks above the rocks. What else do you need to know?

You don’t come for the pay-for-view entertainment, just the micro-changes that amortize daily: the height, personality and panache of the waves; the shifting sand — Whale Rock appears to be sinking this summer — and the colors of the sea that span a huge swath of the Sherwin-Williams paint chart.

In winter, I have seen waves explode above the rip-rapped bank, telephone-pole-sized logs tossed around like Popsicle sticks. And I have arrived on a summer Friday night to find a young man paddleboarding on an ocean that was eerily still, more lake than sea.

Rain or shine, a mellowness prevails among this place and the people who frequent it. When friends down the way, Gail and Paul, return from their morning walk, we catch up where we left off a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, they’ve seen the deer, too; a buck, doe and three fawns are bedding down behind their place each night. Yes, they’ve seen the river otters. No, they hadn’t heard about the free barbecue later that day put on by the Yachats Lions Club to celebrate their 75^th anniversary.

We go. Why not? You make a small donation, eat few hot dogs and cupcakes, see the guy who used to be the town’s Santa Claus, chat with the quilt-raffle woman who’s trying to read Shakespeare’s Henry VI between customers, admire the woman in a cow suit (no, not my bovine-loving wife), feel the warmth of a sudden splash of sunshine and hear a guy named Gabriel tickling the ivories.

What’s not to like?

You learn to notice the nuances, to appreciate the subtle changes, to use your imagination.

Whenever I walk past Dead Man’s Gulch, so named by my mother, I expect to see the skeletal remains of 1930s rum runner. Last night, the light of a single boat lit the darkening horizon. And I wondered: How big a boat? How many on board? What are they fishing for? What port are they out of? And, of course, do they see the light of our cabin? Are they wondering about us as I wonder about them?

In December and January, when the commercial crabbing season begins, such boats at night will look like a string of white Christmas lights.

Pelicans, absent for decades, are back. A string of 12 rise and fall above the swells as if a graceful roller coaster.

Equally interesting: the humanoids. The parade of passersby whose walks transition from sand to rocks. Some remarkable for being “winter bundled” in July, others for braving the ocean in swimsuits.

One winter morning, a man stripped naked, ran into the surf, raced back to his clothes, dressed and walked past us, smiling large.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m German!”

Now, that guy found something to do, didn’t he? All part of the Yachats drama over the decades where change comes grudgingly. A Dollar General store popped up a few years back — the first chain store in Yachats I can remember since the Dairy Queen gave way to what eventually became the Green Salmon. City Hall took over the former bank. And the prices at Luna Sea rise like the tides, but not enough to dissuade us from our regular orders of fish and chips to go.

Still, in some ways, Yachats transcends time. Views along the rocks and beach look much like they looked half a century ago. As they have for decades, people still dance to big-band music at The Commons on the first Thursday of each month. The brush rabbits weave in and out of the salal as if on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland. And beach kids still laugh and dig holes and create castles and dream dreams — oblivious to the weather.

“They sound just like we used to sound playing down there,” my mother once said. “That’s why I love this place. Always something to do.”