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COMMON GROUND - 10/15/2008
(by Anita Yarossi - OpEd Columnist - October 15, 2008)
Amidst the beauty, economic pressures still reign
I am away from Ringwood as I write this column, clear on the other side of the country on the Oregon Coast. It is arrestingly beautiful here. Old growth forests of cedars and spruces soar up to the sky and slope down to the wild coastline. This is an old logging area, rugged, with rivers running down to the shores forming magnificent estuaries where the fresh water and the sea meet on broad flat expanses of sand. Ducks, herons and gulls feast daily on small fish and shellfish washed in on roiling tides and seal otters and seal pups play in the crashing surf. At low tides you can walk all the way across the bay and find starfish and sea anemones among the volcanic rocks and boulders left there eons ago. At night the moonlight bathes the area creating an ethereal landscape. On their days off, the locals build campfires on the beach beneath the cliffs and watch the ever-changing play of light and water.
A little over six years ago, a couple of friends of mine bought a restaurant with a big bar and a dance floor that sits right on top of an estuary on this coast. Both of them were professional people looking for a major change in their lives, but they wanted something that they could do together as a couple. To say that this has been an enormous challenge would be a huge understatement. The Oregon Coast is seasonal and the tiny town that they live in is busy in the late spring, the summer and the early fall. When the November storms start to roll in, the tourists disappear. The logging industry, once huge here, is now dead and the commercial fishing industry, which was lively here until just this year, is now banned.
Lately, my friend Marilyn tells me, properties in Yachats are being bought up by wealthy people from California. So maybe there is hope that this fragile economy will not shut down. They have worked so hard, put their life savings into and taken out loans to upgrade and improve The Landmark, which is what the restaurant is called. Just down the road on the edge of the Yachats River, I stayed in a grouping of rustic cabins called "lodgettes," built in 1953 on a spit of land overlooking the estuary. The place has been sold and will close in January. It is rumored that there will be condos and fancy homes going in. But who knows if that will happen now, with people who could afford to invest in this idyllic spot probably watching their investment holdings cut in half. With credit difficult to get, retirees' nest eggs disappearing overnight, college funds depleted, whole industries shutting down, fuel difficult to get in parts of the country, grocery shelves going unstocked, and the cold grip of fear setting in across this nation, there is only a modicum of hope for small business owners like my friends in Yachats.
I know that there is a cyclical nature to the economy - fluctuations, corrections, bull and bear markets, but in my lifetime I have never seen such a rapid global seismic response to a series of negative blows as we have seen in these past weeks. I am hoping that just as the Chinook Salmon begin their yearly fall run from the seas to the rivers and streams to spawn, we will see a rebirth of hope and investment in the future of this changing world.
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