31 Oct Oregon Coast — Night Falls in a Ghost Forest

Listed among the things I’d rather not know about are Cascadia earthquakes.

They strike the Pacific Northwest roughly every five-hundred-and seventy-five years. Roughly, because they can be as close together as three-hundred years, and the last one came calling was on January 26, 1700 at 9:00 in the evening, Pacific Standard Time.

That one was a magnitude 9 that unleashed a tsunami wiping out villages along the Pacific Coast from Vancouver Island to what’s now northern California, then rolled across the Pacific to Japan . . . which is how we know the exact time. The Japanese keep records of tsunamis and marked that one down as an orphan. A tsunami without an earthquake.

According to people who know about such things, the next one will pretty much level everything west of Interstate 5, which is saying a lot since there are seventy miles of Oregon between I 5 and the coast. We’re all encouraged to lay aside food and fresh water and clothes and medicine because, with the bridges at the bottom of the river, and the port facilities washed away, help will be a long time acoming. Only, it isn’t clear where to store all that stuff because our basements will be over on the next block somewhere.

The quake that struck in 170 BC dropped the land so precipitously that an entire forest of sitka spruce wound up in the ocean. And it’s still there. A few times a year the heavens align, the ocean pulls back in a super low tide, and the stumps reappear off the coast near Neskowin.

The day Peggy and I went to see, there’d been a total eclipse of the moon just before dawn, which meant the super low tide happened just before sunset. We left the car at a state park, walked out along a beach, waded and jumped across a small stream, walked another ten minutes, sat on a log washed back against the dunes, pulled out some sandwiches, popped the cork on a bottle of prosecco, and watched a ghost forest older than the Roman Empire emerge from the waves.

There’s not much more to say about that except, with the sun low in the sky, the stumps were exceptionally photogenic and I think the pictures turned out pretty.

And

and

the color began to fade.

The shadows lengthened.

The sky became darker.

The sun fell below the horizon

and we walked back across the beach, forded the little stream and rescued our car before before the state park closed for the night.