#73 Coveys Great Adventure – October 2020 – Nehalem OR

October 2020 – Nehalem OR

Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach 

If Benson AZ is our home base, Nehalem Bay State Park is a close second. This
was our sixth year camp hosting at our favorite campground. On October 1, we shoehorned our way into site A2 and had our first camper interaction before we got completely set up. The whole Park was open for camping and it was full every weekend despite some pretty wet weather. Oregonians are tough.

 I think I mentioned last year that many trees were being killed by moss. The moss essentially strangles the the tree. The shore pines that dominate the Park's tree coverage are especially vulnerable and the change from last year was striking. Apparently this is a naturally occurring cycle, not an invasive attack, so OPRD has no choice bu to let it run its course. When we first visited the Park in 2014, the trees grew so thickly that it was almost impossible to walk off the trails. Now you can see for dozens of yards as you walk and the trail sides are littered with fallen  trees. After every storm the rangers have to clear dead trees off the trails. 

Covid hit OPRD quite hard because it is completely dependent on the revenues it generates. It doesn’t get any tax support, so when the virus forced the closure of all of Oregon's state parks for several months the revenue simply stopped. Between the layoffs and deferred seasonal hiring campground maintenance really suffered.

One of the big jobs at Nehalem is keeping all the trees trimmed back so that large rigs like ours are able to get into the sites, even to get down the roads in many cases without scraping tree branches. Site A2 is always a challenge for us to get into, but this year the staffing shortage made it especially so. I didn’t time it, but I’ll bet it took us 15 minutes of backing and filling to get in unscathed. I do know we held up traffic for quite awhile, but everyone was patient. Kayeanne is a very good guide; there’s no way to do that kind of maneuvering alone.

A few days later, during a heavy rain, one of the large overhanging trees split and started to fall onto the coach. I got onto the roof and cut away enough of it with a small bow saw that we carry to get Ripley out of the site undamaged. The rangers brought out chainsaws and removed that tree and one next to it. There’s a third one that will need to go soon, too.

The beach at Manzanita was pure joy

As much as we like Nehalem, I think the dogs truly love it. As soon as we pulled into the Park they both stood up and start sniffing. Schroeder immediately went on deer, squirrel and rabbit alert. They both seemed to experience real joy when they hit the beach and the leashes come off. Lucy is now so lame that we didn’t try to make it over the dunes to get to the beach from the Park, we took them to Manzanita where the beach access is much easier.

Covid hadn’t hit the Park quite as hard as it did the Mill, but it certainly made an impact. All of the yurts were closed, which did make our job easier, but that was offset by fewer hosts. There are usually eight host couples in the park, but this year just five. It wasn’t bad during the week, but the Park was sold out every weekend and the work load got pretty heavy. One change that really helped was that the rangers delivered pallets of firewood right to our site. We no longer had to ferry it from the wood barn a few bundles at a time in a golf cart. Now we can sell it right off the pallet. The bathrooms were open, but the showers weren’t, something the campers, and I, really missed.

My first shot at Nan bread

Despite being shorthanded, we still had time for special projects. Kayeanne joined with another host to make new curtains for the yurts. They set up a production line in the meeting hall (closed for Covid) and knocked out several sets. I tried a couple of new recipes.

We became friends with Sharon and Gary Sams last year when we both hosted here. We got together in Park City in June, and they included Manzanita on their Oregon coast road trip. We had a great time with them around a fire one evening drinking quite good wine at The Winery at Manzanita, and then eating great fish tacos at Riverside Fish & Chips beside the Nehalem River. I hope we can see them again when we are in Salt Lake over Thanksgiving.

Voting while on the road certainly wasn’t easy. We applied for Texas absentee ballots in August, as soon as the application was posted. I had them sent to General Delivery at the post office in Manzanita, the closest one to the Park. Kayeanne’s arrived on October 8, but mine didn’t. I waited a few days and then called Polk County. I discovered that they had sent my ballot to our co-op mailbox in Benson, the address we used for the primary election ballots. The person I talked to acknowledged the error, but said Texas state law prohibited sending out another ballot. I called the Benson post office to see what could be done. While they were sympathetic, none of the suggestions were workable given that we had the only key to the mailbox and the time left to election day. I resigned myself to not voting.

Then, on October 27 I got a text message from the Texas Democratic Party reminding me to send in my ballot. For some reason, I replied. 15 minutes later I got a call from a woman who took immediate issue with the clerk’s interpretation of the voting law. An hour later I was on a conference call with her, lawyers for the Party, and Schelana Hock, the Polk County Clerk. The upshot of the call was that Ms. Hock agreed to send another ballot, and even volunteered to drop it off on her way home. That’s when I made a mistake.

It never occurred to me that the she would spend the money to use FedEx to send it. I assumed she would use Priority Mail and gave her the Manzanita post office address. As soon as I saw the tracking number the next morning I realized that I had screwed up. FedEx won’t deliver to post offices because the post offices don’t get paid to handle FedEx deliveries.

I spent the next two days battling with FedEx’s really terrible automated system trying to get the package rerouted. Trying to deal with that system raised my blood pressure to dangerous levels and sent the dogs into hiding. I had given up when I got a call from a real person at the FedEx distribution center in Portland where the package surfaced for the second time. She finally figured out how to get it delivered on Saturday, October 31, to a FedEx drop off location 15 miles away in Rockaway. An hour after it arrived there I had my ballot! Now, all I had to do was fill it out and give it back to FedEx. Except, that this location was just a pickup and drop off point. They could not originate shipments. The closest FedEx location that could on Saturday was in, wait for it, … Portland, a hundred miles away. It was now 2 PM and I was supposed to be working. I’m thinking I’m done, when Kayeanne pointed out that UPS offers overnight service. too. The UPS Store in Warrenton 45 miles away was open. Victory was in sight! Sure enough, they can guarantee delivery by 10 AM on November 3. for just $85.10. Yikes! But too many people had worked too hard for me to quit now. I now know the cost of virtue, but I VOTED!

Just a word about Schelana Hock: To me, she personifies the meaning of “public servant”. She could have shrugged this off, but instead she took it upon herself to fix it. I am grateful to her for her service. I’ll bet every one of the thousands of county clerks and ballot handlers in this country hold themselves to the same standard. 

October seemed to fly by; suddenly it was Nov, 1. We turned in our keys and headed to Eugene to begin to work our way to Salt Lake City to spend Thanksgiving with Liesa and Cory. 

For some reason I don’t seem to be doing much reading lately, but wine drinking hasn’t tailed off. This month we enjoyed Trader Joe’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon – Napa 2017, and a very nice Spanish white wine Raimat Saira Albarino, also from Trader Joe’s.

More soon,

Bob