May 29, 2013
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Yachats
I drove through or around and into and out of Yachats, once. I wasn’t there long enough to learn how to pronounce it. I must have read it on my map. I was in Oregon with a rental car that had 500 miles at my disposal and I had orders from my Beloved, who had rented the car for me, to use us all 500 of them. My home base was Corvallis, but every morning she got up and went to dirt class (she was learning about the organisms that enrich soil) and I got into my rented Focus and drove. Over the mountains, through the woods, up and down the coast, into and out of the state parks that dot the coastline, north, south… Somewhere in all of that is Yachats. I remember it because I remember thinking, How do you suppose these people pronounce that?
I learned on facebook this morning that Yachats has a camp for reactive dogs. I like the word ‘reactive’–it’s so much more politically correct that ‘hostile to every other dog on the planet’.You can take any little black, reactive dog you might happen to have to Yachats and you and your dog can go camping. I am trying to visualize this.
Not very hard, really–I am not a sleeping-on-the-ground kind of girl.
I see this camp patrolled by regular troops of square, head-shaved, perhaps tattooed bikers with chains and cattle prods.
“Ma’am. Ma’am–your dog is reacting.”
“It’s okay, Ma’am, we’ve got this.” (Shoulders machine gun.)
I would go back to Yachats. I would probably investigate how they actually pronounce it before I talked to anyone. I’m not sure I would take Annie. Like many dogs, Annie comes to a whistle, she comes to her name called, she comes when you’ve been out of sight ‘too long’…she does all of these things as long as she’s not seriously doing something else. like barking at squirrels or digging a particularly satisfying hole. But I loved Oregon. I suspect I loved Oregon because I was there during 6 of the 15 days of clear skies they enjoy each year. On the seventh day the fog rolled in and I was standing so close to a lighthouse that when it sounded it nearly blew out my eardrums and I couldn’t even see the fence at the end of the parking lot. I was touching it at the time. Fog and rain are indistinguishable, in Oregon.
So…camping with your reactive dog. Sleeping on the ground with one eye open for the other 50 reactive dogs in the area…in the down-pouring rain.
I have literally thousands of lovely pictures of my trip to Oregon.
However, the up-loader is mad at me. So you can’t see my pictures.
Nope. Not working.
Anyway. Every day for five days I jumped into my Focus, which fit much like an exoskeleton, and drove 50 miles to the coast and ran up and down Highway 101. Jumped out every 5-10 miles and to take photographs. This to me is a perfect vacation. Water, camera, scenic overlooks, a working car. I also drove around in the 50 miles between Corvallis and the coast, which is where (I think) Yachats is. I’m not sure I ever actually saw Yachats. I was in the area.
Well, yes I was. (Just took a brief visit to Wikipedia.) Yachats is one of the tiny cities (pop 690 in 2010) on the coastline on Highway 101. My short term memory is gone, so I can no longer tell you what I just read, but there is Newport, which is where an explorer like myself pops out of the woods and onto the beach by driving west out of Corvallis, there is Florence…I think, about 50 miles to the south, and–again, I think–Yachats is between them. I was there for a week in 2006. There is, however, also the Yachats river, which I wandered around, so I must have been, at one time, in Yachats itself. It is pronounced YAH-hahts. And it is indeed half-way between Florence and Newport.
Anyway. If I were so inspired, I could take my reactive little black dog on a camping trip on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by other reactive dogs who presumably cannot see or smell each other because of the dense and persistent fog for while the northern Pacific coast is known.
All I have to do now is get her there.
