THE RELUCTANT TIME TRAVELER – by Janeen Phillips

On a warm, breezeless day, rare on the Oregon Coast, I join a queue of impatient motorists going south on the Coast Highway. Arcadia Beach Wayside teems with parked cars as I wedge mine between a dust-coated VW minibus with surfboard atop and a brand-new, shiny red Tesla.  My father believed Oregon and Washington “had it all” so our family vacations were taken in one of these two states ── Arcadia Beach had always been my favorite.

From the parking area, I look to the grassy field where the bathrooms now perch and think back to the handful of cabins that once nestled here when I was a young girl. Today, the only evidence of their existence is one captured moment pasted in my photo album back home.

The image from 1962 shows my older sister, Linda, our mom, and dear friends Artie and Ted and their five-year-old son David, huddled close on the wooden front step. The cozy cabin behind them is covered in cedar shakes with paned windows dressed in gingham print curtains ── I’m guessing red and white. Our Brownie camera colored the world only in monotone black and white.

My father clicked the picture without me as I was nowhere to be found, preferring the company of warm sand and dead, washed-up sea creatures. I’d be forced to return when hunger or my father’s loud, “Janeen, lunchtime,” convinced me to leave the magical beach behind.

On this beach, Lion’s Rock looms to the north, waves crashing on its face, and the craggy outcrop of Hug Point still stands cloaked in mist to the south. In my childhood, a vast, empty expanse of sand stretched between them ── the quiet parameters of my private playground. Although I walk the same path today, I find the beach overrun with tourists who arrived not by the intimacy of chance, but through impersonal online discovery. Rote memory propels me to Hug Point as my footprints vanish in the tide behind me.

Before the beach was closed to vehicular traffic, my father would drive our ‘59 Ford around Hug Point as mom, Linda and I waved him on. When I was ten, I fearlessly skipped around the narrow road carved out of Astoria Formation sandstone, but at 73, I walk cautiously, in measured steps. Visible patches of porous Portland cement tenaciously cling to the barnacled rock but large deep chasms record the ocean’s relentless pursuit to destroy.

Just south of Arcadia Wayside, the Picture Windows Motel once dotted the hillside above the beach. I witnessed its heyday, mourned its decline and now grieve its loss. As a child, I felt the power of an ocean storm lashing the motel’s namesake picture window, and as a twenty-something in the early 70s, I was fortunate to see bioluminescence on the beach below. Drawing neon designs in the sparkling blue sand, I tossed it like electrified confetti and stood spell-bound watching the undulating turquoise and silver sea.

Retracing past memories embedded in a special place is always bittersweet. The beauty of the unfamiliar is it holds no reminders of the passage of time.