Our biennial reunion, as has always been the case, exceeded our expectations, which have become pretty high. Even the weather on the Oregon coast was unusually clear. Appropriately, the day that we said our goodbyes and departed, the sky was leaden and the air was saturated.
We stayed on for another week, seeing some magnificent sights and some interesting towns in western Oregon and Washington, with a quick trip to Victoria, British Columbia, thrown in.
We spent the week on the move. It is possible, I discovered, to be away from cell phone service, the Internet and even the daily papers without suffering psychic harm.
The week was time for relaxation, not research, but it some patterns were seemed obvious.
One was the abundance of flowers, not only along the roadsides, but also in the towns.
Many of the towns we visited, or just passed through, seek tourists, and one thing that makes a dramatic impression on visitors, is flowers. Admittedly, the weather in the places we have visited is often gray, and color makes an even greater impression. But planters along sidewalks and window boxes add interest and energy to the streetscape. They give the impression that the residents are proud of their community. Really, that's probably as important to the local residents as it is to visitors.
And we saw very little litter, either on rural roads or in the towns. It's something that I am acutely aware of, since we in the South seem to accept litter as a fact of life instead of treating it as a blight on our beautiful land.
It takes a while to notice the absence of something, so it took a few days to realize that one reason we were so aware of the beauty of the countryside was the fact that we could see the countryside without peering through a jungle of roadside signs and billboards. (I must admit that I often rely on signs to tell me where the next eating place or gas station is located, though the growing number of car navigation systems and cell phones that can access such information may one day make billboards superfluous.) There are many places, though, where a sign is like a zit on the face of a beauty queen.
I did not expect to be particularly impressed by Port Angeles, Washington, which is probably best known as a place to catch the ferry over to Victoria, but I revised my opinion. The city itself has a population of around 19,000, but it thinks a lot bigger than that. With Victoria just a short ferry ride away, it is important, I would imagine, to give visitors a reason to linger in Port Angeles, if only for a few hours.
There is the profusion of flowers that we noticed in other towns, but there's more. A local Rotary club sparked the creation of several striking murals depicting the city's history, and along the streets are all kinds of public art, apparently sponsored by local businesses.
In any number of towns, we saw that instead of being razed to make way for new businesses with their standard one-design fits all architecture, many older structures had been adapted to new uses. Again, that is an important part of being attractive to visitors. I believe that it was Ed McMahon, the preservationist, not Johnny Carson's sidekick, who said that tourists weeks out places that don't look like the place where they live.
As we drove through our hometown on the way home, I recognized that ours is a pretty place. I realized, too, that there is a lot more that we could do.
The writer can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com
