MAKAH INDIAN RESERVATION, Wash. — There are more remote outposts in America than this one. There are places where the wind can be more brutal, the rain more relentless and the sea, maybe, mightier. There are points farther from major airports and Interstates, places that have changed even less than this one has over the millennia since people somehow first found it.
Yet what marks this area, the site of the most northwesterly piece of earth in the contiguous United States, with such a cumulative and commercially viable sense of extremity — of age and edge, of euphoria and gloom — is that you can actually get here and feel it all so honestly. And still catch the ferry home for dinner.
As Meredith Parker, the general manager of the Makah Indian Nation (and the president of the new local chamber of commerce), put it, “We’re accessibly remote.”
Now, several thousand years after the Makah arrived and built a way of life based on hunting whales and seals and catching salmon, they are taking small but significant steps to invite a wider world to join them, at least for the weekend. And beyond their distinctive history and geography, long assured to lure a certain kind of cultural explorer, among the elements the Makah have chosen to promote more recently are the elements themselves, the same meteorological smack that many people have long viewed as a reason not to come.
“I love the sun,” Ms. Parker said, “but there’s nothing like a winter storm hitting you right in the face, and I mean literally. And even when it’s just cloudy, I think that makes the lushness and colors really pop.”
In the last few years, the tribe has created the Neah Bay Chamber of Commerce, named for the town of 900 where most people here live. It has paved the four-mile-long and previously gravel road to Cape Flattery, the nation’s northwestern corner, to make it easier for outsiders to make what one recent visitor called a “geographic pilgrimage.”
It recently built a new Web site and a big sign at the entrance to town promoting amenities like the Apocalypto Motel — and where to find wireless Internet. It has rolled in 16 cabins (mobile homes in clever disguise) and positioned them directly across from the huge waves that pound Hobuck Beach. The cabins are equipped with battery-powered lanterns for use during power failures.
Winter is prime storm tourism season, when the winds are at their fiercest. And after several years of flat or declining tourism, the new outreach is making a difference.
“We’re completely booked,” Debbie Hernandez, working the desk at the Hobuck Beach Resort, said just before New Year’s.
The summertime window when Pacific Northwest beaches boast relatively consistent blue skies is narrow, and the water is virtually never anyone’s idea of warm. Unlike most of California, where the coast is clogged with development, the shores of Oregon and Washington have no major cities and only a few substantial beach towns. But their beauty and intensity appeal to many mind-sets.
“Nothing stops us,” Sean Kirschner said recently, bounding toward the short hiking trail to Cape Flattery with his wife, Kristi, and their children, ages 14, 12, 10 and 8. “If you’re going to live in the Pacific Northwest, you might as well see what it’s known for.”
The Makah, whose reservation is a little more than four hours from Seattle by car and ferry, have joined a steadily growing effort to recast the Northwest Coast. Farther south, in La Push, Wash. (average annual rainfall: 100 inches), the Quileute Tribe has opened a new hotel and cabins on the ocean, drawing storm watchers as well as fans of the “Twilight” movie series, which is partly set there. Still farther south is a far more elaborate development, Seabrook, a meticulously planned quasi-Cape Cod that opened in 2006 and that promotes itself as “a new beach town.” So far, about 200 of 300 planned houses have been built.
The development treads carefully around the weather issue. Images on its extensive Web site tend to emphasize clouds that are mostly luminous and ornamental as opposed to those inclined toward suffocating oppression. It notes that “the coast offers more sun breaks than the Seattle/Portland area because weather systems are able to move through more quickly since they are not blocked by the Cascade mountain range.”
But it also allows space for a weather forecaster from Seattle, a Seabrook homeowner, to call the weather “fascinating.”
As with beach trips everywhere, sometimes the weather on the Northwest Coast can be disappointing.
Andy Kleaman and his wife, Sky, had rented a cabin on the Strait of Juan de Fuca and slept with the sliding glass door open all night, just in case.
“The owner said, ‘Hopefully, there will be a big storm and you can watch the spray go right over the house,’ ” Mr. Kleaman said. “He said he had to clean kelp off the windows sometimes.”
Instead it was calm, so the couple decided to hike the three miles out to Shi Shi Beach, in Olympic National Park, to get closer to the power of the sea. Sure enough, they were met with a rising wall of wind and gray. A new front with gusts up to 60 miles per hour was forecast to arrive that night.
Miranda Moser and Daniel Bakke would ride it out in a tent at a campground attached to Hobuck Beach. They said they wound up on the reservation in the waning days of 2011 on the recommendation of “the woman who works at the Shell in Clallam Bay” and “the guy in Seaside.”
They had come down from Calgary, Alberta, looking for good waves for surfing, not extremes. But Ms. Moser said that even though her home country had plenty of rough Pacific Coast of its own, there was something about this place.
“We know there’s almost 40 million people just north of here,” Ms. Moser said, “but this feels like the end of the world.”
And then the couple booked one more night.
NYT
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment