The bluebells of Echo Mountain
By Maggie Anderson
For the TODAY
The sea has been the backdrop of every phase of my life.
From my earliest memory of Dad running across the sand, an inner tube clutched under his arm, grabbing me just as a wave hit and churned us around like dirty laundry in a sturdy Maytag, to the night I saw my hydrophobic mother toss her crutches aside and lunge to grab hold of a boy so focused on the grunion run he never saw the wave that caught him, the sea has thrumbed its steady rhythm.
The ocean waves were the music that accompanied my first corned beef sandwich, my first roller coaster ride, and my first summer romance.
My husband Hank fell under the ocean's spell on his first trip to southern California as a child. When we started dating, the beaches of Crescent City, California and those in the southern part of Oregon's majestic coastline were our destinations of choice.
The first three months of our marriage we lived the carefree life of vagabonds, pitching our pup tent on a different beach every night. We had a ball.
We will have been married 54 years come June and from those first blissful months on the beach until now every conversation about how the movie of our lives would play out included the dream of someday having a home somewhere near the Oregon the coast.
We live in New Hampshire in the warmer months but, no longer able to manage what comes with unforgiving winters high in the White Mountains, several years ago we began spending our winters here in Lincoln City.
Last year when the pandemic hit and the governor shuttered all of the beach hotels, including the one we had stayed in every winter for the previous three years, we had a mad scramble to find a place to stay until Hank's surgeon gave him the okay to finally run the gauntlet at the airport and fly back to New Hampshire.
Through the generosity of people we barely knew we found ourselves enjoying their hospitality and the little house in Otis they were planning to sell just before the virus changed everybody's plans.
Each evening as Hank and I sat on the porch enjoying a coffee and another amazing sunset we'd look at one another and ask if we thought we could afford to buy it. The answer of course was no, we married for love and found out, far too late, some things actually require cold hard cash, quite a lot of it actually and we knew we'd never have enough.
Still we crunched numbers and approached our hosts with tentative questions about whether what we could do would be enough for them. By the time we headed to the airport, we were the proud owners of a tiny slice of paradise near the coast.
Six weeks later we got a call from the sheriffs' office telling us it was gone.
Friends sent us the first photographs of our little home as soon as the fires had been stopped, the ashes cooled, and the authorities deemed it safe for residents to venture in hoping for miracles as they approached their driveways.
Some found their miracles, sadly often butted up to the debris of their neighbors' burned out homes. Others, we among them, lost everything.
Seeing our little house for the first time was so overwhelming I couldn't even get out of the car that first day. The second day we drove up to our driveway and got out for a closer look.
It was a surreal landscape of twisted metal, crumbling concrete walkways, and scorched trees.
Against all odds I found a bowl sitting on its hand-thrown legs, its beautiful hand-painted flowers erased save the white outlines meant to steer the painter in the right direction.
I bought the bowl in one of the little shops in Lincoln City and took it out to Otis where I set it in the kitchen window so it would be the first thing we saw each time we drove up to the house and the first thing to catch my eye every morning when I went to put the coffee on.
The fire swept down Echo Mountain with such force when it hit the side of our house the bowl was launched out of the window and tossed 20 feet away where it sat itself down on what was left of the lawn, waiting I suppose for our return. I am still trying to decide whether or not to have it repainted.
The other survivors on our little slice of paradise are the tiny bluebells that, as near as I can tell, are botanical cockroaches. They simply cannot be crushed, they multiply like rabbits and, like a new puppy scolded for chewing up the remote, they keep coming back.
Between the open sesame of a whole community stepping up to help, and the resilience of Echo Mountain's bluebells, Otis' Phoenix has begun to spread its wings.
The resilient bowl is among the items on display in “Up From the Ashes,” a show featuring pieces salvaged from and inspired by the Echo Mountain fire. The exhibit will open on April 9 at Lincoln City’s Chessman Gallery. For details, contact Gallery Director Krista Eddy at 541-992-4292.