A Grand Day Out in Seaside, Oregon

It seems a few members of the Vegetarian & Vegan Meet-Up Group were scared off by the weather: it was supposed to rain in Seaside, where we were going to collect litter on the beach. It’s an annual volunteer event organized by an organization called SOLV, which stands for Stop Oregon Litter and Vandalism. I figured rain wouldn’t be a big deal; after all, it’s Oregon, so it rains a lot and it’s usually a gentle, calm rain, not the torrential grumbly thunderstorms of Kansas.

It took over an hour to get to Seaside, Oregon, which turned out to be a cute touristy seaside town with rows of old-fashioned flat-fronted wood shops and restaurants. We parked in a lot for free, a couple blocks from the Lewis and Clark statue at a turnaround on Broadway. The statue ends the road, because beyond that is the beach and the Pacific Ocean. By the time we arrived, the rain had gotten to be surprisingly heavy by Oregon standards. We walked in the rain to the beach, and despite the rain and chill I grinned and nearly hopped at sight of the white foamy waves under the grey sky, and the seagulls flying and walking and squawking.

Seagulls

We all met up on the beach and took big white and green plastic bags for collecting litter. Many other people, of more or less all ages, were also slowly walking on the beach in the rain, even though it didn’t look like an especially littered beach.

Many seagulls

We trudged along with our bags and I picked up many tiny bits of bright blue or turquoise plastic and bits of thread or string. I picked up something dark brown and curvaceous that I thought was a broken piece of a bottle, but I later realized that it was a piece of weird seaweed. I often stopped to take a picture or gawk at something extraordinary.

Guess what: even more seagulls.

In addition to the foamy white waves shushing and shushing in the ocean, and the seagulls swooping and gliding and walking along on the beach, I came across countless broken shells and broken sand dollars. I put some of these pieces in my water-resistant coat pocket and found a small white shell that was complete, but I never came across a whole sand dollar. But the most amazing sight, and the most unexpected, was the seaweed.

A walrus-sized pile of seaweed. Weird.

I had no idea that seaweed comes in many sizes and colors. It can be blackish green and dark green and medium green and grayish green and even pink. It can be as thin as the reel out of a cassette tape, or as thick as a boa constrictor. I kept seeing seaweed that was at least four inches in diameter, hollow in the center, and ending in a bulb with many talons sticking out of the top. The first time I saw one of these bulbs, I thought it was a dead octopus. The seaweed looks slick and slimy, of course. All along the beach were swirling arrangements of seaweed in different shapes and sizes. We encountered quite a few huge mounds of jumbo-size seaweed, like beached Cthulhu monsters, or gigantic plates of noodles. James actually arranged one pile of seaweed so that it had a hair of eyes and a mouth: spontaneous outdoor art.

Cthulhu comes ashore, creeping ever closer.

Chili peppers?

Imagine this wrapped around your sushi.

Yummy noodles

Bad hair day

I collected the remnants of fireworks and a few other plastic things besides the tiny bits of blue and turquoise, and some more string and thread, and several cigarette butts, but that was it. I didn’t fill much of the bag. By the time we had been out for, say, forty minutes, it was very windy and the rain was torrential. Someone later described it as like a tsunami. As we headed back, we were walking directly into the wind, and it was a vicious struggle. We were terribly cold, soaked to the skin, and eager to get indoors to a heated and dry place. We turned in our bags, which were certainly not very full, and wandered around the charming downtown of Seaside. We went into a mall with a lively carrousel in the center; the animals included ostriches, light blue sea monsters, and cats with fishes in their mouths, in addition to more traditional carrousel critters. In a toy shop a five-foot-tall sock monkey was attached to the window, as if it wanted to get out.

We went to a beautiful sushi restaurant, decorated with many paper lanterns and silk curtains, and I ate sushi for the first time. I’ve been to a dozen different countries, and here in Oregon I went to a beach on the Pacific Ocean and a sushi restaurant, both for the first time in my life. I went to the bathroom to wash my sandy hands and rearranged my bedraggled hair, taking it down and putting it piled up on top of my head, before I even looked at the menu. After I returned to the table and ordered, I placed napkins on my chair seat and they became utterly soaked, of course. I noticed what looked like a little tea house behind us, with silk curtains in the doorway and straw mats for guests to sit on, around a table over a sunken space.

Lewis and Clark statue (with a shaggy dog at their feet)

We had a pot of green tea with earthenware cups, and each of us held the cups with both hands and savored the heat from the tea, in addition to the taste as it warmed our mouths and throats. The server brought out sushi arranged on leaf-shaped plates and square plates. I’m more familiar with Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese food (not to mention Nepalese and Tibetan) than with Japanese, and I had never tasted wasabi paste before. You’re supposed to use little rectangular dishes to mix soy sauce with green wasabi paste, which is made of horse radish. Then you pick up a sushi wrap with your chop sticks and dip it in the sauce. I discovered that the less wasabi, the tastier. The little rolls of sushi were dainty little works of art with vegetables, nuts, and plums in the center. James had ordered one of every vegetarian sushi dish, and he encouraged us all to help ourselves, and oh we did. I let others take some of the tempera sushi that I had ordered (along with a delicious plate of fried tofu in sauce). Since we were sharing all these dishes, someone commented that it was a communal meal.

After we stood up from the table and were no longer drinking hot tea, I found myself shivering convulsively. The meal was wonderful, but I would have liked the heat turned up more. I was still soaking wet, and remained so until after I got home and took off my wet, sandy clothes, took a steaming hot shower, and was wearing a dry change of clothes. Aside from the cold, wet, and wind, I had a great time. Next year I’ll be sure to have an extra change of clothes in my car and bring my Wellington boots and wear a trench coat instead of a short rain-resistant jacket. I now have raincoats for all occasions.