Our destination was the small beach town of Manzanita, Oregon, but the vacation started the moment we got into the rental car in Portland. With startling quickness, we were out of the city and into the woods, careening our way through old-growth conifer forests on roads that belonged in a car commercial. My husband, Leon, was driving, and I was in the back seat with our year-old daughter, Tess, who seemed to love as much as I did the dense dark green out the window. Brambles of blackberry bushes grew along the shoulders and wildflowers bloomed. What appeared at first to be thorny branches were elk that scampered into the thickets. The sky shone. Even the businesses (an improbable-seeming quantity of lumberyards, a purveyor of exotic meat jerky housed in a log cabin) contributed to the soaring, pioneer-like mood.
I’ve spent the last 20 years—my entire adulthood—living in New York, and I long ago became desensitized to the dreary logistics of East Coast vacations: the need to travel through unrelenting ugliness to finally arrive at beauty and peace. But on the West Coast, where I grew up, the journey can be—and often is—at least as good as its end. We arrived in Manzanita having been invigorated by the drive rather than destroyed by it.
It was July, and the sky was a bright blue that I would have taken as a matter of course on the East Coast. Here in Oregon, though, it felt lucky and precious, a rare gift to be thankful for. I was raised in Northern California, in a place notorious for its fog, and only recently have I been able to dispense with what was for years a self-defeating greediness for sunny weather. But in Oregon the pathology returned instantly. I had an almost bodily need to make use of what I knew we could not count on for long. In Manzanita we met my sister, Gracie, and her husband, Lucas, who live in Portland and had driven out earlier that day to stay at Lucas’s family home. I explained my desire to be outside—urgently!—so instead of going to the house directly and unpacking, we met them in town.
The Oregon Coast, to Gracie’s constant bafflement, feels almost entirely undeveloped—the by-product, like so many atmospheric mysteries, of long-ago legislation. Passed in 1967 in response to an avaricious motel owner, the beach bill, as it is referred to colloquially, established that all shoreline up to 16 feet above the low-tide mark would be accessible to the public, regardless of who owns the adjacent property. The result is an air of geographical bounty and otherworldliness evident in nearly everything. Despite being so close to a city known for its easily parodied prizing of lifestyle, there is none of what makes Portland so fun to mock and so begrudgingly pleasant to spend time in. No cool coffee shops, no high-design signage, not much to buy. I had sort of doubted my sister’s assessment until seeing it for myself. It really was like going back in time—not too far back in time and not to any particularly romantic era, just to a period before social media introduced anyone and everyone with a phone to some baseline of what counts as “nice.”
We popped into Manzanita Sweets for saltwater taffy; pleasingly, the assortment of flavors included nothing artisanal. Down the street, at the Manzanita Coffee Co., a young man in green Converse served us to-go coffees that tasted like the sort you get at a bodega—milky, not at all bitter. A family sat outside playing Uno, the young boy clutching a plush shark obviously purchased just minutes before at the nearby gift shop that sold mostly sun umbrellas and tie-dyed T-shirts. We passed a gallery showcasing driftwood sculptures and hammered-metal wind chimes. It was a luxury to want nothing.
The restaurants along the main road, Laneda Avenue, were mostly family-owned and had unselfconscious menus: steamer clams, burgers, Caesar salads, always with one or two more complicated dishes of a quaintly ’90s variety (baked Brie with a raspberry port reduction at one, frequent additions of chipotle sauce at another). The Cloud & Leaf Bookstore, which also sold hand-pressed stationery cards made by the owner, was packed to a degree that seemed antique and wholesome. We passed many vans with many bumper stickers (“I’d rather be slowly consumed by moss” was my favorite). By the time we reached our ultimate destination—the beach—I felt restored by the experience of spending leisure time and money in a place that wasn’t pandering to some imaginary version of me.
