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| image: A.N. Smith-Lee |
Dragging ourselves out of bed the next morning, we went down to a pleasant
continental breakfast and headed out Rhododendron Drive to the jetty. The
weather had become more of what we expected: windy, cold and wet. It was
beautiful, and wild. We walked out the jetty, comprised of hundreds of massive
stones to protect Florence harbor. A man I talked to said the sand covering the
rocks was seasonal – In midwinter, it’s blown off, leaving the rocks bare for
shell hunters; in spring, it begins to blow again, covering the rocks and
causing the dunes to shift into high gear for the summer. Fishermen cast off
all along the jetty; a lone surfer in full wetsuit came in from the cold. We retired
back to the Bridgewater for a bowl of their fish stew (highly recommended).
Then, off to another marvel – the Heceta Light. If you’ve read any of my books
on Maryland, Delaware or the Chesapeake Bay, or the blog on lighthouses in
Marin County, you know lighthouses are one of my passions.
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| image: A.N. Smith-Lee |
Twelve miles north of Florence on US 101, we crossed a magnificent iron
bridge over a pale sand beach and turned onto Heceta Head. Named for Don Bruno
de Heceta, the surveyor who traveled the Oregon coast for the Royal Spanish
Navy in 1775, Hecata Head became the site for a light station in 1892, Stone
from the Clackamas River and bricks from San Francisco were brought in by ship,
ferried into the beach, and carried hundreds of feet up the side of Hecata Head
to build a 56-foot lighthouse, housing for the head lightkeeper, two assistant
lightkeepers and their families, a barn and two kerosene oil houses. The
first-order (largest) Fresnel prism lens –the only one still operational in the
US, created in Britain by the Chance Brothers – first illuminated the night in
1894. It continues to operate today, producing 2.5 million candle power, one
flash every 10 seconds, reaching to the horizon.
The light and remaining structures are surrounded by trails and forest. A fresh,
insistent wind billows out jackets and caps. Before electricity, there was a
path with a chain-rail from the lightkeeper’s cottage up to the light itself;
the rail was to hang onto in the black and windy night when a shift change was
called for; you can still see part of it on the trail. Volunteer guides give an
excellent accounting of the life of lightkeepers and the history of the light
itself. |
| Lightkeeper's cottage B&B Image: A.N.Smith-Lee |
Back to Florence to turn east again, through the luminous mist and clouds of country along the route from the coast to Junction City. A friend had lived a very contented life there 20 years ago, and my image was of a small country town. Incorrect. Junction City is now a miles-long highway strip mall along Rte. 99 with tire dealers, smoke shops and the occasional gentlemen’s club. I could see, from the main drag, an older part of town that once charmed those who lived there. Time doesn’t just march on, sometimes. It stumbles, scrapes both knees, and doesn’t bother to clean itself up.
I ended up making a phone call in the public restroom of the Junction City Safeway to our
hotel for the night in Eugene, the Valley River Inn. Most accommodating, they
were able to change our reservations to one night earlier.We headed south on Hwy. 5, and pulled into the Inn, at the base of a large shopping center, Macy’s et al. The hotel was vast, as was our room, which looked out onto a pleasant vista: a branch of the Willamette River. Dinner that night was cross-your-fingers: we drove in the dark to a place in the newish north east part of town, Pho the Good Times – kinda corny name, but good noodles, and popular with the dinner crowd. Google Maps got us there and back, and so to bed.
Unless stated all images by Joanne Orion Miller
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