CHAPTER 1
THE SWADDLED HAM
1913
WITH A FIDGETY MIND, the boy silently reeled off names of the stops in front of them, depots strung along the rails running south from where the river started. Warrenton. Columbia Beach. Carnahan. West Gearhart. Surf. Seaside. The ten-year-old knew the list by heart: half a dozen stations along the fifteen-mile Clatsop Beach Line on the Astoria and Columbia River Railroad, last leg of the five-hour journey from Portland. The boy and his mother would get off at West Gearhart, which everybody called Gearhart Park: ticket men and porters, and the women shouting above the rumble and roar of the day coaches, acquaintances of his mother’s who’d likewise started out on the No. 29, the early beach train from town. With each stop, James’s picture of their house on Salmon Street would grow blurrier, its sadness and sharp edges dissolving under the promise of summer and release. With each slowing, each lurch to a halt in a new station, another piece of him would jostle free.
This was James’s escape, a journey he and Elizabeth took three times a year. In the weeks till August gave out, he would try to evade her jurisdiction—not difficult, since she would have a hundred daily preoccupations, as usual. For the next three months, James would keep as much as he could to the shelter of knolls and dune hollows, of old pathways and unfathomable forests at the top of Tillamook Head, and to the cold embrace of the ocean (even now he was a strong swimmer), paddling far out, deaf to cries from shore. For the next three months, his favorite taste would be of oysters, hauled down from shoals above the terrifyingly wide mouth of the Columbia and fried in an abundance of butter. He knew the sound they’d make, hissing and foaming, edging into brownness, with a scent so rich it would seem capable of tinting the air gold.
James’s father rarely joined them at the beach. John Beard almost always stayed behind on Salmon Street with James’s older half-sister Lucille (a schoolteacher) and her husband, Clarence. John seemed a man invariably absorbed in his work as chief examiner of goods from China and Japan, squinting over wrenched-open crates of import merchandise at the US Custom House in Portland. With James and Elizabeth gone, John would have unchallenged dominion over the dark rooms on Salmon Street. The boy knew that in place of the taut silence that reigned when the family was together, the house would soften under the influence of John’s odious smells: balsam hair oil; cigarettes; boiled pork side meat. Yet the trying things about home would recede further and further from James’s thoughts as the train headed toward the coast. From his stool on the deck of the observation car (two coaches behind Elizabeth, who rode on green plush), James watched dull-black coal smoke erupt from the locomotive and fog the cars behind. It curled around the edges of the train and faded, like the after-flourish in a magician’s vanishing trick.
At Columbia Beach, James watched the train disgorge flushed women lugging valises, and children reeking of sour sweat and drooled stick candy, a rabble as eager as he was for summer to start. Porters hauled off steamer trunks and sacks of letters that had packed the cars’ vestibules since the train crossed the long, rickety-scaled rail bridge at Astoria. Mothers yelled to their broods to step lively crossing the tracks before scrabbling off to the shade of scalloped overhangs slumping from depots not much grander than sheds, set on one long, south-yawning plain, damp with the breath of ocean. They were so unlike James and his mother, these frazzled women and their horrible offspring. James was a precocious boy, raised to air his opinions, no matter how disagreeably. Elizabeth had seen to that.
Even at this age, he found opera divine. Elizabeth took him to hear Madama Butterfly when he was five, and the beauty of it made him weep. His ardor ripened in the parlor recitals he and his mother attended in the houses and boarding-hotel rooms of friends his father avoided: actresses who laced their tea with brandy; men who winked at James and gave him sticky homemade marshmallows or nougat. Today the wail of cast-iron wheels at each curve along the rails rang in his ears like the cry of Violetta in La Traviata: É strano! É strano!—How strange! While the cry of the steam whistle sounded back A diletti sempre nuovi: Always new to delight.
They’d started from home that morning just after seven, in a hired cart with their hoard of trunks, hand luggage, and hatboxes; a summer’s worth of library books, stacked and tied with sash cord; and a large, unwieldy, and thick-reeded picnic hamper. Elizabeth had swaddled the cooked ham like an enormous baby (first in waxed paper, then canvas), but James could smell it leaking through the wicker—cedar smoke fused with the mustard and molasses-sugar of the glaze, acrid and sweet. James had barely finished his breakfast tea and coddled egg and toast fingers. The aroma of ham left him hungry again.
They jolted westward across Portland’s shiny, still-new Hawthorne Bridge, above a Willamette riverfront clotted with double-decked ferries and billboards vaunting sacks of High-Flight flour, bottles of Coca-Cola, and Preferred Stock in cans: the fascinating things James’s mother thought too vapid or vulgar to allow through the screened back porch to her kitchen.
At forty-seven, Elizabeth had a plush figure and a biscuit-dough complexion. Her forehead was broad, above a powerful nose and eyebrows so fine and pale they looked transparent. They gave her a blank expression—guarded, scoured of passion—except that the combination of a taut mouth below cautious, heavily lidded eyes made her appear perpetually skeptical. Though she had lived in Portland for thirty years, her English accent persisted, the skimmed consonants of an impatient Londoner extracted from a gentle Wiltshire burr.
This morning she wore a hat trimmed with small crepe roses and a brim that cantilevered out to her shoulders. A long-skirted traveling suit fell from her hips and flared under a knee-length summer coat in sandy linen already creasing at the elbows. She was a barricade of fabric and flesh.
James was encased in the blue serge suit with long pants he’d begged Elizabeth to buy. (She’d balked at the twenty-five dollars it cost, but when she learned John also disapproved, she bought it, if only to needle her husband and prove her independence.) On James, the jacket bulged around the seams of its sewn-in belt, refusing to cinch like the ones in the Morning Oregonian ads. James’s eyes were guarded and delicate, sunk in a face as plump and pale as milk-poached meringue. Under the flat cap he wore tipped back, James had groomed his thick brown hair to lie flat against his forehead, a look more awkward and innocent than the glinting comb-backs on the boys who posed in smudged newspaper ink.
At 8:15 their train, the northwest-bound No. 29 to Astoria, juddered out of Portland’s red-brick North Bank station, the passenger terminal for the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway. It rocked along at twenty miles an hour on steel rails quivering in bright, cloud-filtered light, tracing the south bank of the Columbia River. In the southeasterly distance, the solitary twisted fang of Mount Hood dissolved in haze. Soon even Portland—the frieze-topped hotels downtown and houses poking corbelled mansards through the trees of the western hills—petered out. First myrtles and spruce, then forests swallowed the riverbank’s roads and rail yards, its icehouses, and eventually its salmon canneries, before which Chinese workers paused on planks strung across rough piers to watch the train lurch by in a burgeoning black chrysanthemum of coal smoke.
James’s eyes settled on one man, smoking as he loitered outside a salmon shack perched on stilts in the wide river. Wearing boots and a long rubber apron slicked with scales and guts, he raised his hand to wave at the boy in the blue suit, seated on a campstool on the awning-sheltered platform behind the observation parlor car, the train’s last. James waved back, and for a half-second thought it was Jue Let, the Beard family cook (recently departed), whose tea cakes and curries, Welsh rabbits and roast ducks, were even now the vivid memory pictures in a fairy story of life on Salmon Street that existed far from reality. But the man with the cigarette, disappearing now as the train banked along a bend in the tracks, was a stranger, whose wave was nothing more than a curious, ultimately disinterested hello.
: : :
FROM THE OBSERVATION DECK, James followed the rise and fall of scenery beyond the spill of the city. He knew it all, every mile, just as he knew the hinged tableaus in a well-loved pop-up picture book: the river’s curves, scribed along the south bank in sagging telegraph wires strung from stripped pines; the fenced pastures and farmhouses with here and there a huffing smokehouse; the slovenly shacks and prim white Rural Gothic churches. Their pointy narrow windows looked to James, if he squinted, like ears of corn in the husk.
First stop was St. Helens, a town at the northern tip of Sauvie Island, where Multnomah Channel cleaved apart from the Columbia. James could just make out the arctic dome of Washington’s famous dormant volcano, in the boy’s imagination a hibernating mastodon the world had left to sleep.
Next was Rainier, a lumber boomtown strung up on forested hills. Below the railway lay the riverbank, frenzied with lumber mills’ churning smokestacks and new boards stacked high into megaliths, pale as tender flesh in the intensifying daylight. (For a hundred years, Portlanders’ faith in the ability to grow their city had been as infinite as the surrounding trees, and the building frenzy of the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition had hoisted optimism and an appetite for virgin forest all the way to the ridgetops.)
Like James, Elizabeth relished their spring migration from Portland. Travel made her independent again, a woman of her own affairs, as she once had been, a person of business. She had friends in Rainier, people she’d known years ago in Portland when she was unattached, a widow from her first marriage, mistress of a proper boardinghouse and not just a housekeeper for Lucille, whom she always disliked, and Lucille’s lunkhead husband. Elizabeth had written to her Rainier friends to say which train she’d be on. They were in the station to meet it, and in the few minutes of its loitering would gab with Elizabeth about how well she looked, how much James had grown since last year, and about the warmth of the spring so far and the early peas they reckoned were only days from harvesting.
The locomotive lurched and rolled again. (É straano! É straaano!) Dogs, making the summer migration to the coast with their families, yapped and nipped at children. Freed from leash-holds, they nosed around the day coaches, lifting legs to doorway edges and unlucky trunks in the vestibules. Sweating porters picked around them while scuttling through to deliver wax-papered chicken sandwiches and stoneware bottles of ginger beer. This was a midweek train at the start of summer vacation, so almost all the passengers were women and kids en route to beach cottages and hotels. They’d spend the weeks till September teetering in the frigid ankle-waves of the Pacific, weighed down by heavy woolen bathing suits with modesty skirts, larking about at strawberry-gathering parties and ice cream socials, and above all picnicking, braced before the soft, wind-protected humps of the dunes. A diletti . . . sempre nuovi.
The Saturday morning run to the coast was dubbed the Daddy Train. Husbands and fathers like John Beard, who stayed in town to work, would ride out for weekends and make the five-hour return on Monday mornings. James’s father made the journey only once or twice all summer. He cited social obligations in town he couldn’t ignore, since he owed his position at the Custom House in part to being in good standing with the heirs to his political patron, the late General Owen Summers (James’s godfather). Besides, the beach was Elizabeth’s realm, a place to entertain her women friends without the demands of Salmon Street, and to resume her catering business, an enterprise that earned her money she could save or spend as she liked.
Elizabeth and James always rode the train apart: she in the bustling day coach filled with gossip and sociability, he in the open, amid the blasting solitude on the deck of the observation car. It was the only place the boy would sit, willingly and without throwing tantrums. Securing space there was why he and Elizabeth needed to arrive early at the station, to tip a porter to slap the dust off a campstool, cover it with a napkin to protect the boy’s blue serge, and set out a little table to hold his boxed snack.
James folded himself into the landscape and the rush of wind, the smell of countryside between cindery blasts of locomotive smoke. He almost relished the fine grit of coal dust on his neck, face, and hands and even loved clinkers, the fused shards of molten rock and coal shoveled from the engine’s firebox as they built up and flung from the side of the train off a shovel’s tip. The clinkers rode the headwind down along the cars to the observation deck, to glance like dull needles off the boy’s skin, a sensation rippling with excitement and danger.
Alone on the observation deck, as soon as the tracks banked away from the Columbia toward the low green clearing of Clatskanie (last stop before Astoria), James would open the paperboard box he’d set on the floor back at North Bank station. It was his snack, something Elizabeth always prepared to hold him over between breakfast and luncheon, which they would have at their cottage in Gearhart Park. Inside were butter-and-marmalade sandwiches: his mother’s own bread, with bitter-orange marmalade cooked in the big copper boiler, and butter from Grace Harris, a special friend of Elizabeth’s who lived with a cruel husband on a farm at the pasture’s edge of Oregon City. There was a hard-boiled egg and some of the first cherries of the season from the Salmon Street garden: pinkish-yellow Royal Anns, tender and sweet. There were cookies—small, buttery, and crisp, the way Elizabeth insisted cookies should be—everything concealed in its own packet of wax paper, folded with exacting efficiency, all of it lavish yet constrained.
James had grown up with a sense of his mother’s impatience with him. He knew she would have preferred him to be an adult, not a boy who needed things, became sick and disrupted the household order, or cried some nights until his tears soaked the feathers in his pillow. As long as James could remember, Elizabeth had wanted him to be a partner, an ally in her endless simmering war with John. But now, with summer and the beach so close at hand, all James wanted was to disappear.
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TO SKIRT THE FISHHOOK turn of the riverbank, the train ran for miles along a low trestle bridge over open water, a wood-stilt structure fording the Columbia’s shallows west from Tongue Point clear through to the main harbor. Once the train crossed the John Day River and the tracks veered northward, James glimpsed the thickening cluster of boats and pilings and knew they were close: Astoria, city of salmon!
On the bankside south of the trestle bridge, low boathouses with pitched roofs stretched from shore on jetties running perpendicular to the tracks. They came within spitting range of any train running the track. Through the windows of the boat shacks, James could see gillnetters blued by tobacco smoke mending their seines; other nets, drying under the bright-white sky, hung limp as dead fish from poles sunk in the muddy bottom.
As the Columbia yawned wider, James felt the river’s spray from waves, looking more and more like ocean whitecaps, slapping trestles beneath the train. Off in the channel, he spied four-masted old battle frigates converted to salmon seiners; closer in, the hulking offshore cannery of the Union Fishermen’s Co-Operative, top-heavy on chopstick stilts. Men here dragged huge fish from the water, silver bellies flashing, the way James had scooped pollywogs from Clackamette Park pond in his tiny muslin net. Astoria was a town built on plucking things out of this confluence of river and ocean. (In 1811, from far-off New York, town namesake John Jacob Astor had shanghaied the area’s hordes of otters for his empire of fur.)
Sturdy Finnish and Norwegian gillnetters strung their seines on anchor poles arrayed in circles and filled the holds of their boats with thumping cargoes of freshwater silvers and huge, hideous Chinooks, crook-jawed and nail-toothed like Punch and Judy faces. Here Chinese workers gutted and skinned these seasonal hauls and canned the rich, oily meat to ship all over the nation, but especially to the Northeast, where once-teeming spring salmon runs were already trickling out.
James found joy in Astoria, in the whirl of its sawmills, canneries, and factory smokestacks; in its forest of telephone-cable poles; in the streetcars with slender connector arms gripped to floating electric wires, as if dynamism hovered in the air; in its elegant city hall with columns that appeared piped from buttercream, its oyster parlors, its boardinghouses fronting the piers with signs hawking rooms and home-cooked meals. James adored the waterfront’s clutter of advertising placards, the ones for cheap salmon-cheek suppers, whiskey, and beer in a glass some sign-painter Rembrandt had rendered frosty.
The grand part of town scaled the hills as if on risers, petering out before reaching the patchy border of firs and hemlocks on its scarred and craggy ridgeline. James spied tall mansions with ornate tracery, turrets sprouting black-iron finials, every window with its rippled curtain of ivory lace. Yet beyond the edges of Astoria’s elegance, a frontier rawness persisted. Down where the train rumbled through to its terminus, past the rough and graceless municipal docks, Astoria’s perennially chill and humid air was heavy with the charred-wood and fish-oil pungency of smokehouses, the tannic smell of creosote in wooden trestles, and the hot-iron tang of wheels grinding on rails (é strano). Suffusing everything were salt gusts of ocean, the boy’s first tastes of summer.
Like Lewis and Clark a century before them, James and his mother were finally—at last!—in sight of the Pacific, closer than ever to Gearhart Park. Soon they’d lose sight of the wide Columbia, where tree-covered bluffs stepped back to give the river room enough to meet the ocean. From there, the ocean carried river waters far out to a world the boy longed to see and supposed he someday would.
The train stopped at Astoria station—it was red brick and bulky, with huge circular windows like Chinese moon gates, closed up by a jumble of small panes. Mrs. Beard and her son didn’t have long. In only fifteen minutes, James and Elizabeth would have to hustle from the cars of the Spokane, Portland & Seattle, dodging children and dogs, flagging a porter to make sure their trunks, valises, books, and above all the picnic hamper, with its large and fragrant ham, would be transferred properly to the new train, the six-car Astoria and Columbia River Railroad, bound south for Seaside and all stops between. Just as at Rainier, friends of Elizabeth’s say hello. Harry Hamblet, a local real estate speculator, and Peter Grant, who was in the canning business, trundled her and the boy quickly into a new coach.
The train then skulked across the slender, squat, and dainty-looking trestle bridge that spanned Young’s Bay, a connector so long, across a body of water so wide, that passengers could feel as if they were hovering above the sea itself, drifting toward a new continent. Once across, the train picked up speed as James silently recited the stations to come like an incantation: Warrenton . . . Columbia Beach . . . Carnahan. . . .
Finally the rails left the wide, unending meadow, above which it rumbled on a flattened spine of dune. The train slowed as it entered a familiar stand of Douglas firs and Sitka spruces (to James, an enchanted forest) and rolled to a stop in a clearing: Gearhart Park. The station was small and clapboarded and stood to the side of a bare-dirt platform beneath a high wooden roof forming a shallow V. It always looked to James like abstract hands touching at the wrists, splayed beneath the pale sky.
They’d arrived at last: the place James had fantasized about all through the long days of April and the first weeks in May. He and his mother had been here only two months earlier, for the Easter holidays, when the rain didn’t stop and they holed up in separate corners of the cottage with books, listening to the eaves drip. Already that felt like last year.
The conductor was eager to push off toward Seaside (destination for most on the train), but Elizabeth was not to be hurried. While Gearhart Park’s old stationmaster (who doubled as the high school teacher) struggled with a large wooden hand truck, ferrying luggage and the picnic hamper onto the platform, Elizabeth stepped off the coach with the poise of a star aware of her audience. She let the conductor reach for her gloved fingers at the bottom of the steps, and paused to wave to those she knew who were still on board, as if she were Mary Garden, the world-famous Scottish soprano, emerging from her first-class carriage at the Gare de Lyon, as James had seen her do in a photograph in the Oregonian. In that photo, she was in the act of turning back, as if to acknowledge the fans crowding the windows of the second- and third-class coaches before facing the dignitaries waiting on the station platform to welcome her. Though for Elizabeth, the only people there to bid her welcome were the stationmaster and the manager of the local livery stable—Elizabeth had written them to meet her on arrival.
A diletti sempre nuovi . . . A diletti! The locomotive shot a white plume from its smokestack. É straano! The engineer sounded the whistle. With a rumble and the hiss of steam, the train rolled toward Surf, and beyond that to the crowds and automobiles and ice cream cones of Seaside.
It was just after one-thirty, an inconvenient hour for the railroad men to schedule arrival. James and his mother would have to scurry to the cottage for luncheon, though he doubted she’d let him run on ahead, alone.
: : :
JOHN TYBERG, the stable man, loaded the Beards’ luggage on his wagon and set out on Railroad Avenue, heading north to Summit. He would cross Neacoxie Creek (brown and smooth as glass) at Gearhart Lane, then turn south to trace the eastern flank of the golf course on Cottage Avenue, straight on to E Street and the Beards’ cabin. Elizabeth and James would go by foot. Though the social pages of the Morning Oregonian and the Morning Astorian might report in a week or so that the Beards had opened their cottage for the summer (part of a long list of seasonal arrivals), there was no good reason for Elizabeth to delay advertising her presence. The former proprietress of the Gladstone boardinghouse was available to hire for beach picnics and parties.
There were so many parties in summer: strawberry-picking socials in the troughs behind the dunes, everyone sprawled on blankets for a boxed-lunch picnic; organized clamming in the early mornings, followed by a beach breakfast of hotcakes, bacon, and eggs fried over a driftwood fire. Hostesses had to write early to engage the services of Mrs. Beard, whose plump son sometimes helped her. You could arrange for her to cook a private luncheon or supper in the Beard cottage: razor-clam chowder, delicate biscuits, and some of the petite local peas suffused with the mineral sweetness of Clatsop soil, lavished with butter churned nearby at Henry Ober’s dairy farm.
Elizabeth and James walked from the station along a narrow-plank pedestrian boardwalk named Pacific Way, though everyone called it the Boulevard. It ran west through hemlocks and spruces to the old Gearhart Hotel and the Chautauqua Hall, the green and barren golf course, and eventually to the great ocean and its horizon, so vast it seemed infinite.
They turned south at Cottage Avenue, the primary north–south road, which ran along the ridge of a larger dune sprouting roomy summer houses. They had weathered shakes and dormers, and west-facing porches, places for teacup socializing and naps beneath open numbers of the Seaside Gazette, shelter from the prism glare of sunsets.
For centuries, Clatsop Indians trudged along the shoulder of compressed dirt and sand, in bare feet or in deerskin moccasins, sheathed in tule-reed capes when it rained. The road James and his mother walked was a native highway between winter and summer settlements. Lengthening days drew them to the Clatsop Plain, its hollows and creeks, river and beaches, for camass roots and razor clams; huckleberries, thimbleberries, high-bush cranberries, dewberries, and wild grapes. Above all, it called to them for salmon: Ten varieties of the sacred fish offered themselves for harvest in the southern estuary and its feeders.
James knew that tomorrow morning by five, if the tide was low, his mother would be on the beach in her best bathing dress, with a shovel in one hand and a bucket in the other. She’d join others up and down the vast expanse of mud-colored sand, as pale-gray morning broke, shoveling sand before kneeling to dig for razor clams with bare hands. Most clammers were men, digging in rolled shirtsleeves as dogs barked and wrestled and rolled on washed-up skate carcasses to pick up the stink. Only a handful of women would be on the beach, mostly to watch, scarves tied at the chin against the wind, in mutton-sleeve coats so long the hems grazed the sand. Elizabeth was different. After an hour or two of clamming, she’d walk back along the dune path, toting as many as six dozen razors in a bucket that must have weighed thirty pounds.
This was a place where food—the search for it, the killing and plucking and skinning and roasting of it, the drying and smoking of it—ruled life. It occurred to James that food must have been why the Russians and Scandinavians and Americans had come in, learned from the Indians, and then brutally choked them out, because anybody who came to this rich place of eating would surely wax greedy and plot how to seize it. The train that brought Portland families to Gearhart Park and Seaside for summering in cottages or chic, rambling hotels or boardinghouses smelling of boiled cabbage was merely the trailing shadow of an old and irresistible longing.
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GEARHART PARK SAW its first, studiously pastoral cottages rise early in the 1890s, just after the tracks that James and Elizabeth so recently arrived on were laid. The colony’s founders were a canned-salmon baron and his wife, an apostle in the Christian temperance movement.
Marshall and Narcissa Kinney conceived of Gearhart as a place of American optimism, dedicated to a worshipful pursuit of leisure. Astoria, fourteen miles to its north, was a dank and rusted town, ruled by shipping, sawmills, and the Iron Chink—the salmon-butchering machine that replaced Chinese workers—where, to the Kinneys’ minds, the detritus of old worlds (Finns, Russians, Chinese, Swedes) washed up to grasp at dollars, only to squander them on liquor and other transgressions.
The Kinneys envisioned a New Jerusalem in the trees, a white utopia consecrated to a rapturous, wholly decorous appreciation of God’s handprint on the land. They sought to rededicate Oregon’s coastal frontier to pioneer values, a place where whiskey and vice would find no sanction and where Christianity and the restrictive deed covenant reigned.
In 1851, a settler, Philip Gearhart, paid a thousand dollars for squatter’s rights to native land in the Clatsop Plain, ultimately acquiring almost two thousand acres. By 1880, a small summer resort called Sea Side had sprouted just south of Gearhart’s holdings, in view of Tillamook Head’s brooding grandeur, with a beachfront of fine sand. Getting there from Portland, however, required taking a long, bilious journey by stagecoach or paddleboat.
Sensing opportunity, Marshall Kinney bought up acre after acre from Gearhart’s heirs. In 1888, he founded the Astoria & South Coast Railway. As owner of the land under which future trains would run, Kinney deeded the transit pathway to himself for a fat sum. In 1890, the first train lumbered south from Astoria to the still-new resort with a freshly squeezed-together name: Seaside. Soon, Kinney and his wife were drawing up plans for a rival vacation colony with a name reminiscent of a British country estate: Gearhart Park.
Narcissa oversaw the platting of Gearhart Park’s two hundred acres and the drafting of its charter. An ardent officer in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she decreed that no alcoholic beverage was to be fermented, distilled, brewed, or sold within municipal limits for a hundred years. Unlike Seaside, which had turned its beachfront into a carnival jumble of souvenir picture studios, ice cream parlors, oyster shacks, and saloons, Gearhart would keep its coastline pristine. Cottages would keep to the interior dunes and meadows and appear modest, rustic, and tasteful, lit by oil lamps and candles instead of the electric glare of Mr. Edison’s bulbs, which must, surely, dim the stars.
At the edge of a meadow, the Kinneys built a large and comfortable hotel in Queen Anne style, with a façade of gables, bays, and sunbursts formed of wooden spindles. Nearby, in a clearing of pines and spruces, was the center of Narcissa’s grand vision: the assembly hall of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. It was a large auditorium of unvarnished wood, with clerestory windows and soaring, cathedral-like arches.
In its prime in the 1890s, Gearhart Park’s Chautauqua was a jamboree ground for American energy and optimism, awash in the fervor of bootstrap capitalism. Its rafters rang with shouted speeches declaring the moral vibrancy of a nation of white pioneers (distinct from those with origins in wretched swarthy lands) eager to export its ideals on the wings of imperialist adventure.
Then came the Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair of 1905, marking the hundred-year anniversary of the fateful expedition. Over nineteen weeks, more than a million and a half visitors surged through the grounds at the northwest edge of Portland, then rising in a curve of the Willamette River. By 1910, a hundred thousand new residents had settled in Portland. The city had become irreversibly fixed in the American imagination.
Theodore Kruse bet that the Lewis and Clark Exposition would be a boon for the entire region, and especially the picturesque coast south of Astoria. Kruse was a German who’d jumped ship in Alaska and found his way to Portland. In 1906, the year the expo closed, Kruse acquired all of Gearhart Park, including its hotel, from Marshall Kinney. (Kinney became a widower in 1901, when Narcissa, just forty-six, heeded her untimely summons to heaven.) Kruse’s purchase coincided with the year Elizabeth and James, a shaggy blond toddler of three, took their first holiday in Gearhart Park in a rented cottage, and four summers before Elizabeth built them a place of their own.
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THE BEARD COTTAGE STOOD in a neighborhood called the Meadow, a grid of raw streets on a field of undulating green. There were widely scattered residences with picket fences, yards with young pines and ancient black spruce scribing jagged outlines against the sky. Compared with the respectable homes of Cottage Avenue, the Beard place was a shack: a box twenty by twelve, with a porch in front and a roof with a high peak that sought to lend the place a greater presence. The house was hardly adequate for two. It had a kitchen, a combination dining room and parlor, and a pair of small bedrooms. Outside, it was covered in unpainted cedar shingles; inside, it had tongue-and-groove fir, oiled to keep the grain visible.
The Meadow was beyond the formal boundary of Gearhart Park, though within its communal realm. Lots were cheaper here than in Gearhart proper. Harry Hamblet, husband of Elizabeth’s friend Polly, had a real estate office in Astoria. He found Elizabeth her plat on E Street, negotiated the purchase (the deed listed Elizabeth’s name alone, without John’s), and hired and supervised the builder.
James disliked the cottage. It smelled like turpentine and there were spiders. The kitchen was so small that all the work except the cooking took place around the table in the central room. The stove itself was tiny, barely big enough to hold Elizabeth’s capacious iron chowder kettle. It burned wood, and to James it seemed capable of only one temperature: blasting. Only Elizabeth knew how to bake in it.
Many families entrusted John Tyberg with a key. They would write him in advance to open their cottages on the day they arrived, as he’d done for the Beards that morning: swept the front steps, then pried the boards from the door and the shutters from the windows. There had been a rash of fires and vandalism lately at empty cottages, no doubt perpetrated by anarchists or tramps. Tyberg had pushed open the windows to let air in, and filled the stove with logs and kindling. Elizabeth immediately set to boiling water for tea.
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AT THE TIME he acquired Gearhart Park, Theodore Kruse owned a well-known restaurant in Portland, the mirrored, palm-filled Louvre. It had a scandalous reputation, a record of liquor-law violations, and reports of immoral behavior on its premises. It was said that Kruse himself turned a blind eye to the circle of so-called inverts, homosexuals who gathered in the Louvre’s men-only grill room. Elizabeth was a regular at the restaurant, despite John’s angry disapproval. She would take James to dine and make him be polite to gentlemen in tight trousers with velvet jacket lapels and ladies who ate and drank with abandon.
Kruse directed town officials to rezone Gearhart, opening Narcissa’s pristine beachfront to development and imposing new plats onto the original grid. Speculators shoehorned bungalows and hulking Dutch colonials onto the crowded heights of the western foredune, now with the grand name of Ocean Avenue. A strip with magnificent views of the sea, it was sited just outside the Alcoholic Beverage Covenant zone. It would come to be known as Gin Ridge, a name of cruel irony to rattle Narcissa’s ghost.
Summers became a whirl. The beach pages of the Morning Astorian noted the arrival of the celebrated and the well-off who journeyed by train or steamer from Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco, even from as far away as Baltimore and New York. Men in woolen bathing tunics and bowler hats mugged for portraits in camera studios, frozen in he-man flexes in front of canvases painted with ferocious curling whitecaps. At night there were dances at beach-facing villas with carefree, romantic, or cheeky Indian-lodge names: Tillzeronia, Ivanhoe, Sleepy Hollow, Uneedarest, Takit-Eezy. Parties spilled out to cottage gardens trellised in clematis and climbing roses.
In 1910, after months of publicity in the Portland papers, a brash new beachfront hotel welcomed its first guests. Designed by Portland architect Morris H. Whitehouse, Kruse’s Beach Hotel was a wonder, with a porch like a colonnade, showy awnings to shield guests from the lowering sun, and a shocking green carpet of lawn spread across a berm flanking Gearhart Park Beach. The hotel’s roof, in tiles of zinnia red, was a complicated arrangement of dormers and gables cutting into the pastel blue sky. Likewise beyond the western limit of the dry zone, Kruse’s new hotel was awash in liquor.
Kruse had met Elizabeth many times at the Louvre, and he must have known her reputation as the capable former mistress of the Gladstone. At the beach, on nights when there were multiple banquets and parties at the hotel and Kruse needed someone with an eye, a palate, and a calloused pair of hands, he would send word to Elizabeth (discreetly, almost as a friend) to take charge.
In the evenings, in the hotel ballroom, women showed off dresses trimmed in flowers, the younger ladies in princess gowns with unpadded hips, a silhouette still daring in Oregon. Couples twirled to the “Merry Widow Waltz” near the romantic crashing Pacific, even though the blare of Kruse’s orchestra nearly drowned out the ocean. A hulking natatorium eventually rose next door, making the ocean more or less irrelevant. It became scenery, like the backdrops in photo studios.
In time, even Narcissa’s precious Chautauqua succumbed to this new Gearhart. It began showing motion pictures. In the weeks after James and Elizabeth arrived in the summer of 1913, vacationers (some undoubtedly with liquor on their breath) packed the wooden benches to watch the lurid and thrilling Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring chin-dimpled King Baggot; and The Girl and the Greaser, with hot tomato Charlotte Burton. Electric lights, brighter now than even Edison’s filament bulbs, had been strung along the Boulevard so the crowds could make their way home in the dark. If the lights outshone the stars, nobody seemed to mind.
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ELIZABETH DIRECTED TYBERG to muscle the wicker picnic hamper into the kitchen first, before stacking trunks and suitcases onto the tiny porch, making it barely passable. When he’d gone, she set about making lunch. She got out the canister with the tea leaves she had blended to her liking, a large tin of crackers, a lump of Grace Harris’s butter wrapped in paper, and straw-sheathed jars she had filled with apricot-pineapple preserves, thumb-size cucumbers pickled in olive oil with mustard seed, her precious white asparagus—enough jars to give them a start, not last all summer.
James helped her lift the swaddled ham from the basket. The canvas was stained where the mustard and brown sugar glaze had begun to seep. Elizabeth unwrapped it, carefully, peeling away the waxed paper where it had stuck. With James’s help, she set it on the freshly scrubbed board stowed next to the stove. She removed a slicing knife (wrapped in canvas and tucked in the hamper) and, for their lunch, cut thin slices of the enormous dark and sticky and beautifully shiny thing she’d glazed only yesterday.
Every year, Elizabeth received two smoked hams, each weighing nearly twenty pounds. They came from John’s sister’s ranch in eastern Oregon: hogs slaughtered in the fall, their haunches cured in salt and hung up for weeks in the smokehouse—the Beards, after all, could trace their people to Kentucky. Blackened, hard, and moldy, the hams arrived at Salmon Street at winter’s end. James sometimes went to the cellar to smell them: to close his eyes and catch the ghost of burning alder (earthy-sweet, like overripe bananas) from branches culled on his aunt’s ranch; the mineral whiff of salt; and a goading tang of rot.
Cooking a ham for the journey to the coast had become a ritual for Elizabeth, and James was her eager altar boy. It had to be soaked for days in the tin baby’s bathtub she kept for poaching salmon, then scrubbed with a stiff-bristled brush (James’s task) to remove most of the ashy mold. It simmered for hours, also in the tin tub, in water and vinegar and a small sheaf of bay leaves, until the liquid turned the color of strong tea. After fishing the ham from the tub and cooling it, Elizabeth baked it for several hours. At last it was ready for painting with a slurry of English mustard powder and water. Elizabeth would pack it with a mix of sieved brown sugar and fine breadcrumbs, heave it with James’s help, now that Let was gone, into a fast oven, and bake it until the surface looked like burnished saddle leather.
Her hat and jacket now off, Elizabeth cut thin slices on the oblique. And she and James, also in shirtsleeves, sat at the parlor table, bathed in the sun reflecting off the raw wood walls, and ate what was always the first meal of their Gearhart summer: cold ham with buttered crackers, oil-cured pickles, and a little reconstituted English mustard that burned in the nose like coal fire. They drank their tea neat—they’d buy milk from Henry Ober when next he rattled down E Street on his cart.
The ham was salty and pungent. Its smokiness and moldy specter would linger as the first taste on the coast, its flavor the threshold onto an existence reset to a familiar rhythm. In the next few days, thick slices would fry in the cottage’s black iron skillet. They’d push sunny-side-up eggs to the rims of Elizabeth’s beloved Blue Willow plates, chipped and therefore banished to the coast. Later the boy would shave off chewy bits as snacks, to push into split biscuits or between slices of bread, both of which his mother could coax from the edges of her blasting oven. Elizabeth would turn the minced leftovers into ham cakes held together with flour and egg and fried crisp in the skillet. She’d press the wrack of ham pieces into boiled and crushed potatoes—the little yellow ones from the farm at the coast road—to make hash. Finally, she’d crack the bone into pieces small enough to fit the kettle, and extract from them a broth that recalled the flavors of the vanished meat. It would seep into chowders, made from razor clams dug on the beach just across the final dune before you came to the Pacific, on broad, wind-carved sands that James almost never stopped imagining.
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AFTER LUNCH, there was the hurly-burly of emptying the trunks and cases. James, however, moved the collection of blue-green and drab gray Chinese ginger jars, carried from Salmon Street after Let drained their contents for cakes and other things, from shelves to the table. He told Elizabeth he needed to gather flowers from the weedy trough that ran between beach berm and foredune. He hurried out before she could order him to stop.
He walked the short distance on E Street west to the dune, past the Marias’s cottage and up the road to Ocean Avenue, where Harry Hamblet was building houses far grander than the shoebox Beard cottage. Below him in the hollow was a low thicket where wild iris, Indian paintbrush, and flowering currant grew, and native strawberries stretched in angled chains across a mix of dirt and sand. From there, he could take in summer’s most crucial vista: Tillamook Head, rising from its southern sweep of beach beyond the mouth of the Necanicum River.
Millions of years ago, Tillamook Head was the last great bloody-red blob of lava to heave out of the earth in what is now Idaho, then to surge through the Columbia River Valley and push to the Pacific. In 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark heard rumors of a whale beached south of their expedition’s camp, near what is now Astoria. Determined to hack oil and blubber from the carcass, Clark, with Sacagawea and a small party, climbed Tillamook Head and traced its pathways south. They noted five Indian lodges on the molar-surface plateau thick with trees before reaching the mouth of a creek called Ecola, whale in the language of the Tillamook.
One day, Clark looked down on the wide flank of the Pacific: at the rocks rising like the peaks of mountains from the ocean floor, at the far-off outcropping from the water (later named Haystack), and at the vertical plunge of cliffs into waves. He declared that he “beheld the grandest and most pleasing prospects” his eyes had ever seen—this from a man who had traced most of the northern tier of a continent! As though merely taking in a landscape, being in the thrall of a particular place, living off its berries and its fish (which Clark had learned from the Indians to roast leaned up against a fire) had changed him.
James Beard would absorb the history in these landforms: William Clark’s sense of wonder; Narcissa Kinney’s reverence for place; Theodore Kruse’s flamboyance and love of pleasure. They would coexist in James.
The next three months would bring days of escape and discovery for the boy. In the gaps between his mother’s orders, her picnic jobs and parties, he’d find freedom enough to dawdle on the beach; to swim. To go out during slack tide (the moment when the tidal stream goes still, before the flow reverses) armed with a garden rake for catching shy, vulnerable summer Dungeness crabs buried at the margins of beach, not far from the inlets and tide pools where they feed, keen to the movement of water. To wade up creeks with Mary Hamblet (Harry’s little girl) and pick huckleberries that stained his fingers, and then stop on the way back to eat ice cream and pickles (both technically forbidden). Mornings to troll the Necanicum River above the estuary at the foot of the Meadows, dangling in the water scraps of beef liver tied on string for luring crawfish; afternoons to fish for trout. Hours to read and study the clouds through the pines on Strawberry Knoll, whose needle-cluster branches breathed in wind sucked from far out in the ocean and exhaled in swirls that would rustle the pages of his book and trouble his hair.
He scrambled into the hollow to gather flowers as fast as he could, before his mother’s anger surged to dangerous. She was a woman who would brook no disrespect. James knew from her stories, which she told endlessly, that she’d lived through too much to stand for that.