The Yachats Well Has Run Dry: Sibling Assignment #30

For this week's sibling assignment, InlandEmpireGirl asked us to think of a town that evokes memories from a time ( or times) spent there. We can't write about Kellogg, Spokane, or Orofino. InlandEmpireGirl wrote about Moscow, Idaho, here and Silver Valley Girl wrote about Seattle, here.

I first went to Yachats, Oregon in 1980. My first wife and I were good friends with a couple who had access to cabin overlooking the violent waves that blasted the rocky beach below. Barbara and John introduced us to Le Serre, an airy restaurant decorated with ferns, and featuring seafood dishes far better than Mo's Chowder House or other modest restaurants we'd tried before on the coast.

The night we went to Le Serre, we plied ourselves with bottles of wine and a luscious variety of shellfish and salmon. When we left, we stopped at a grocery store and each bought another bottle of wine. We were new to Gewürztraminer and went back to the cabin and greedily continued to slurp it down.

We decided it would be fun to play the board game Sorry!. Outside the ocean glowed under a pale moon, phosphorous particles glowing and sparkling. It was like we'd dropped acid, so much did it seem we'd transported ourselves into an alternative reality.

Slowly, the game of Sorry! transformed into "Fuck You" Sorry!. Each time we bumped each other or got bumped, we laughed hysterically as we said "fuck you" to each other, turning a child's game into a parody of competitiveness and violence.

This cabin is no longer available to rent. The last time I spent time there was with my mom and dad in 1986.

It's not the only way that Yachats stands, in my memory, for good times lost. Many years ago a friend and I surprised ourselves by holding hands while walking on a path overlooking the ocean on an unusually warm evening and began a romance that lasted for over a year.

Eventually, our romance had to end and we've gone our separate ways. Whenever I go to Yachats, I think how sweet that night was and how much we enjoyed each other over the next year and often feel melancholy that circumstances took us in different directions so that we have no contact with each other.

Our family went to Yachats together many times in the 80's and 90's. We tried out restaurants, prepared fun food, went on outings to Newport and Florence, played some golf, fished in the ocean, and looked meditatively out on the ocean as the sun set, hoping for streaks of salmon pink and pale blue.

Those days, too, are over. Dad passed away. Mom finds it difficult to travel. Kellogg, not Yachats, has become our center of getting together.

Whenever I got to Yachats, now, I feel a tinge of melancholy, longing for those jovial times our family spent together.

Every time I went to Yachats for many years, it was a peak experience of some kind, whether enjoying the company of my first wife and our friends, enjoying the first night of a surprise romance, or enjoying the conviviality of time with my sisters and parents.

Except for the magic memories it holds, Yachats is just another town to me now. It's gone the way of many coastal towns: more houses have been built, hillsides that were thick with trees have been stripped so houses can be built, more appeal is made to tourists, and it's more expensive than ever to find a place to stay.

There are places we go to in our lives that seem to have had a certain amount of water in their well of good times. Then the well runs dry. We always remember how sweet the water was.
The memories are sweet. The remembering is wistful.

Yachats has run dry for me.

Nonetheless, few places have afforded me more sweet and memorable times than I had there.

I miss those good times.