ASTORIA, OR (2018) “Après Surf Date”

Three gifted siblings, each of them brilliant in their own way. It was all very glamorous by Portland standards.

Astoria Bay

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You know how sometimes you feel inexplicably brave and you do something you probably shouldn’t have? That’s what happened when I Facebook messaged a woman I barely knew who had recently moved from Portland to Astoria.

Astoria is a gloomy little seaport town in the very far NW corner of Oregon. It’s where the mighty Columbia River enters the Pacific Ocean. It’s where the first settlers landed. Lewis and Clark spent a winter there huddled in the cold.

The area around Astoria is rainy and wet and covered in giant evergreen trees. The topography is like a mini-San Francisco, steep hills going down to the bay. But the city itself is small. It’s not even a city. It’s more like an outpost. There, on the edge of the western world.

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The woman I barely knew was named Jessica [not her real name]. I didn’t know why she had moved to Astoria. I just saw her talking about it on Facebook.

So I messaged her and said that I surf a lot and I was in Seaside all the time (just down the road from Astoria), and would she want to get a coffee or a drink sometime?

I was thinking that anyone who lived in Astoria would probably be up for a drink. What else was there to do? I mean, not in a negative way, not like Astoria is so deathly boring.

But in a positive way, like if I lived somewhere as unusual and iconic as Astoria and someone wanted to visit and check it out, I’d be up for meeting them. To give them the low-down or whatever.

I was also curious to hear who else lived in Astoria. It only had like 10k people. Portland, by comparison, has 600k. And yet every ten years or so, people in Portland would start talking about Astoria as an “escape city” or the new “cool place”.

You’d hear about young people moving there and buying houses for cheap. Or someone would open a music club there. Or there’d be talk of an emerging artistic or literary community.