Graffiti

Notes from Lynn:

A crude swastika, scratched with a sharp instrument, embellishes the inside door of the lavatory stall in the men’s room for Loop A in the campground at Fort Stevens State Park. It shouldn’t be worth mentioning, not if you’re accustomed to the casual vandalism in San Francisco and everywhere else (London, Vienna, Auckland and a lot of places I’ve visited).
In a week of travel in Oregon, from Medford to Bend to Portland and points in between, I hadn’t seen one graffito in the state’s immaculate restrooms. Not in the vault toilets at our camp in McKenzie Bridge National Forest, not in the Multmonah Branch Library in a neighborhood of modest homes in Portland, not in the Chevron gas station in Wilsonville. No tags. No pieces. No gang markers.
Were this a newspaper story instead of bloggery, I would have interviewed someone at Portland’s Department of Public Works or perhaps a Reed College authority on the vandalistic angst of juveniles or maybe a teenager on a skateboard on Burnside Street. But I didn’t. Instead, being a blogger with no obligations but to entertain, I can assert with unattributed confidence that commercial graffiti, also known as billboards, are responsible for amateur graffiti in San Francisco and elsewhere.
In Oregon, as in Hawaii, Vermont and any community with million-dollar homes, billboards are so tightly regulated that the roads are uncluttered with commercial graffiti. And if you don’t believe that billboards cause graffiti, well, you can interview the experts yourself.
As for the swastika, someone else had scratched “my girlfriend is sexy” in the upper right arm and, above the lower right leg of the ultimate symbol of hatred, “God is Love.” Below is a carefully embellished “PEACE.”

Notable:
Thank the Great Spirit for global warming. We visited Fort Clatsop on a perfect September day, the seventh in a series. (The photo at the top of this post is Lynn at Fort Clatsop.) We learned that Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the Corps of Discovery spent four months at the log outpost in a winter of unrelenting rain. Permanent shelters protect picnic tables in Astoria, and umbrellas are handy everywhere in a state where the leading university’s athletes are known as the Ducks. As for our own Corps of Discovery, we need to buy more sunblock.

We visited the wreck of the Peter Iredale, one of 200 ships that have sunk or run aground in these treacherous waters over the past 150 years. (At right, Lynn studies the wreckage.)

Notes from Margo:

We spent a day seeing the sights in and around Astoria. At Fort Clatsop, we tarried over wonderful exhibits about the Corps of Discovery’s time here in the rain in 1805. One notable fact that I hadn’t known before, despite my reading, was that Lewis’ servant, York, was a slave whom he freed a few years after the expedition. The Indians along much of the route were fascinated by York; one tribe thought he might have been a human incarnation of a bison, which they had been praying and singing for. Anyway, that was news to me.

We also climbed the Astoria Column, built in 1926, modeled on Trajan’s Column and set on a hilltop above the town named for John Jacob Astor. The column has the history of Oregon, rather than of Rome, spiraling up the outside. From the viewing platform, we could see for miles – Cape Disappointment, the sand spits on both sides of the mouth of the Columbia River, the hills inland and south. It was spectacular! And we found out how the locals induce their kids to cheerfully climb about five stories up in a steep spiral staircase – they let ‘em throw little balsa wood airplanes off the viewing platform. We watched with the same glee as the kids as the planes drifted downward slowly, circling on the air currents until they crashed in the carefully groomed lawn below.

Notable:
We’re having our first car trouble – the sliding side door of the van is stubbornly stuck open. So today, on Yom Kippur, we're at the Toyota dealership conveniently located near the Fort Stevens campground, getting the bad news about ordering parts and finding an appointment in their service calendar. Our itinerary is about to be modified.

Milage today: 10

Total mileage: 840