The Oregon coast gets a lot of attention for being a great place to vacation. You hear it all the time from the valley dwellers. How we’re an hour away from everywhere: the coast, the city (Portland), or the mountains. I’ve also heard most of those same people profess their love for Oregon because of its vast abundance of green. Not like the red sands of the deserts, or the white snows of the colder states, but instead a luscious and never changing green.
This picture is an accurate depiction of what that green is paired with for about 7-8 months of the year. Dreary cloud cover and the associated rain or ‘liquid sunshine’ as the locals love to spout. Isn’t sunshine supposed to go away at night? Make no mistake, this land does have it’s beauty as I’ve shown in various photos elsewhere. But it’s certainly not without it’s plan shattering and depression inducing faults. I’m not trying to say that this place is the most horrible place in the world to be in, as I would put a good summer day here up against any paradise the world has to offer. But as you can see in the Pittock Mansion post or the McDowell Creek Tree post, it’s not usually like this.
I shed my gills while living in Las Vegas for a brief time. I had to learn a more conventional means of ingesting water rather than the osmosis that normally happens in Oregon. Before I knew it, I was on my back porch enjoying the light show from a thunderstorm! I had grown an appreciation for the periodic precipitate, and found myself looking forward to the flood inducing storms. When the topsoil thickness measures in fractions of an inch, they are much more exciting. Don’t tell anyone, but I found myself thinking of the Oregon coast and it’s exquisite beer selection quite often.
I’ve since moved back here (Oregon) and the dreaded rain still weighs on my mind. There is a certain peace of mind when I consider that somewhere out there, hundreds of miles away, it’s dry!