Page:The Overland Monthly, Jan-June 1894.djvu/210

146 rocks or drift for the greater part of that distance, so that driving is one of its chief pleasures. I studied its features for two weeks last summer, and found it, aside from the good driving, the least interesting sea-beach I had ever visited. Day after day when the tide was out there was the brown level stretch of sand extending northward out of sight; the sea, bluish green and foam-lined, lazily rolling against it on one side, and on the other a bank of sand, with here and there a log protruding from it which invited the pedestrian to be seated and yield to the spell of inanition which the scene flings over the beholder. What a naked, spiritless coast scene! To the south of my position (at Long Beach,) the green headland of the Cape stands with its feet in the sea. Some large rocks and bowlders are scattered for a little distance above that, and then, nothing! Not a shell, or wading bird, not even a rope of kelp on the sands, or a bit of colored seaweed to catch the eye; only the ever-restless, but at this season unimpassioned, sea. Even the wind has ceased to buffet us, and only the free motion of our clean-limbed roadster makes a breeze to quicken the blood in our cheeks.

Still it is a picture full of quiet power and suggestiveness. Great possibilities are lying dormant here: tempest and terror only await for the spirit that broods over the face of the waters to utter its command, and lo, the shore trembles with its assault. So dull, so apathetic, is the soul at times, to be roused by the breath of emotion to ungovernable discords. Today nothing more moving is in sight than a few straggling clam-diggers, and even they are spiritless, for the fresh-water floods of last winter have destroyed the young mollusks near the Columbia.

The sea to me is not an object of love. It is an emblem of remorseless strength used without love or pity. It is cruel, cold, often beautiful, but never to be thought of with a tender longing. So we turn away from the beach and plunge into a forest pathway overhung by shrubby cliffs on one side and a wealth of arborescent beauty on the other. A cool green light sifts softly through the interlacing branches, a delicate fragrance of ferns and woodsy plants and flowers pervades the air that breathes over us as we bowl along. Ah, to linger in these sylvan woods with the friends of our choosing, to dream, to utter our soul secrets, and bare our hearts as we never can in the glare of a work-a-day world! What is the charm of Nature that so wins our confidence when Humanity fails?— our loving mother Nature, to whom we refuse no secret, on whose bosom we yearn to lay our heads when weary of the strain and stress of living.

On we go, pausing a moment by a cool and shaded spring, following roads little traversed by visitors to the beach, over marshes bridged or crossed by sandy highways, through thickets of spruce, hemlock, alder, eider, willow, crab-apple, wild rose, and spirea, emerging now and then on little plains, grass-covered and sheltered round by dense groves of spruce, where the air is sunny, yet soft and cool. And so home.

It is this amplitude of choice in a day’s pleasures which constitutes the popularity of Ilwaco Beach. A trip to Sealand or Shoal water Bay, by rail, or a drive along the shore of that beautiful sheet of inland water, to reach which you must take a delightful route through a forest rank with the growth of centuries, and which leads you, if you choose, to that novelty,—a cranberry farm. And speaking of edibles, the oyster of Shoalwater Bay, fresh from its native bed, is the most delicious morsel to be found anywhere,— small, delicate, dainty, delectable.

Boarding houses and private cottages, with some quite capacious mansions owned by Portland people that come