In Oregon, beaches are free. All of them are owned and easily accessed by “we the people”. Oregonians are justly proud of this and take great fun in teasing other ocean front states where people must crowd together on “public beaches” under their little sand umbrellas while sitting on beach towels to protect their behinds from syringe needles. In those states, when some fat, beer-belching bubba with his three nasty children all named Kyle, sits down next to you, you’re stuck, even though just 100 yards away the beach is empty and pristine. You can’t pack up and move to that strand as it is owned by some rich Republican or Hollywood Democrat. It is off limits by rule of law. While in Oregon, you are that owner. You can move down the beach and sit anywhere you like, as there are no fences, generally no paying to park, fewer syringe needles and usually no beach umbrellas. It’s not that we have anything against beach umbrellas, it’s just that when the wind blows they turn into untethered kites with 5 foot spears attached.
I would really like to tell you that this public beach ownership was due to the far-sightedness of the people of Oregon, or some politician who was looking out for the greater good rather than his own wallet, but sadly this not the case. The real reason is that Oregonians are cheap mothers who even to this day don’t like to pay for public roads. In the 20’s the beach at low tide was the original Highway 101, while the beach at high tide was the prototype of the junk yard auto crusher. At headlands, where there is no beach to drive on at any tide, there were dirt road. As it pretty much rains from September to July on the Oregon Coast, they were not technically dirt roads. To solve this problem the “roads” were “paved” with logs placed side by side. Oregonians actually drove their cars, which at that time had no suspension elements and were equipped with hard rubber tires over this ball busting thing which was euphemistically referred to as a “corduroy” road. And Oregonians were perfectly fine with this. Who needs kidneys and the booze used medicinally to survive the jarring would likely take organs out long before the bad roads did. We were happy with this state-of-affairs. So, what if we had to wait six hours for the tide to go out before resuming a trip to the mother-in-laws. It could be worse. She could live closer, and there was always an inn, tavern, or cat house at the corduroy-beach interface. What could be better?
But then the State and Federal Government stepped in. In 1916, Oregon Gov. Oswald West signed a bill that designated Oregon Beaches as State Highways. In the convoluted logic of all politicos, this of course meant that Oregon officials were committed to eliminating the beach as a highway. The final section of beach highway was eliminated in 1929 by the completion of the coast highway between Newport and Waldport. Waldport is my home town who’s motto should be: “Always last and damn proud of it.” Once government got into it, the next thing you know you could only drive on the beach with a permit for which you had to have a valid reason. Firewood collection is the one I like to use. But there are still beach sections where you are allowed to drive without a valid reason. From the mouth of the Columbia to Seaside is one. Sand Lake is another. But by far the best is the middle of the Oregon Coast within the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. Because of the undersea geology of the area, it produces up to 2.5-mile-wide by 40 to 50 mile long strip of sand between the ocean and Highway 101. Within this area sand has been piling up for the past six millennia to produce the highest sand dunes in the world. It is a wonderland of sand, freshwater lake oases, and picturesque island hills of beach pines. It’s a perfect place to bird watch, swim naked in a secluded lake, or just picnic on the beach. Just remember to bring your ear plugs, ‘cause you will be sharing this with thousands of quads, sand rails, and motocross bikes with riders who look like extras in those post apocalypse Road Warrior movies. They are all trying to kill themselves and anyone foolish enough to be walking out there unarmed. Judy is one of the former.
You would think that a 55-year-old grandmother of eight would have some common sense about ATV’s. Nope, not an ounce; full throttle with her hair on fire, and absolutely no experience. She did not even start riding till she was 53. We don’t own an ATV, so she only gets to ride when Alan or Mark and Jen bring theirs. Does that slow her down? Not one bit. I at least have had some experience in my youth. I owned a dirt bike. I loved that bike and spent many happy hours in the hills around Medford, OR, sliding down a gravel forest service road on my ass after doing something truly stupid, like starting it. Eventually I sold the bike to buy a ring for my bride. I really miss that bike.
As I intimated, Judy had no experience with these off-road hells, that is until the infamous Horsefalls incident. Horsefalls is a public campground just north of Coos Bay at the southern end of the recreation area. The campground is fully paved but without electric, water and sewer hook ups with the exception of the campground host’s spot. The host, Ron, showed up almost immediately after we arrived directing us into a set of campsites which would accommodate not only Alan’s and my camp trailer but, Papa Day’s, Mark and Jen’s, plus miscellaneous trailers and extra vehicles which would be arriving over the course of the next day or so as our battalion bivouacked in earnest. Ron was the perfect host, fun, laid back, and one of those few hosts who you invite over for a scotch and cigar around the campfire that you actually want to show up. Unlike some hosts, he did not pass judgment on us by immediately regurgitating the camp rules about quiet times and dogs on leashes, even though collarless Hannah was pushing up his hand demanding a pet. He was also not wearing a side arm, always a good sign.
After setting up camp, we spent the rest of the evening having a good time with a little champagne, scotch, and cigars. The next morning, we spent some time prepping the quads and Alan’s motocross beater. He has a 350 Yamaha 2-stroke which is almost impossible to start. Even Alan who is 270 pounds on 6’5’’ frame does not try to kick start it when it is cold. One of us must pull the bike around the campground with a quad while Alan tries to start it in gear. The pulling is made all the worse as the bike is equipped with sand tires. Sand tires have a series of rubber reverse facing paddles which really improve the performance of the bike or other ATV types on the dunes and have the dual purpose of enabling the rider to kick sand in the face of anyone who is stupid enough to tailgate. It also allows you to kick sand in the face of anyone you don’t like and make a quick getaway. Alan is especially fond of this feature. After about a half an hour of pulling, Alan’s bike fires up with an explosive concussion which sends any combat veteran in the radius of mile, diving into a ditch. We are now all primed to go riding but then someone notices that Alan has forgotten to attach his flag.
The flag is a red pennant on a fiber glass pole which is required by the state to be on any ATV, even four-wheel drive SUVs and Pickups which you take into the state’s sand paradises. Also required is a current off-road permit. The cost for these items is nominal; about $10 for the permit and about the same for the flag. For years we ignored this requirement. In truth I didn’t know, and Alan believed he wouldn’t get caught. I found out about the law while attempting to drive my truck by a state cop. He explained to me that I had a choice to go back to town and purchase, then display said items or he would fine me $150 and then make me go back into town to buy them anyway. I mulled it over for a bit then opted for option A. I will say that the cop was rather nice about it, although I did detect a touch of sarcasm in his voice.
It only took us an hour or two to make the purchases which turned out to be yet another adventure as the closest place was a “guns and grocery”. This is an unfranchised store chain peculiar to the West which sells milk, eggs, and handguns. The walls of these places are festooned with taxidermized heads of dear, bear, elk, and shop-lifters. If you have to frequent such an establishment, refrain from any small talk about politics, evolution, or gay rights. Also make sure to park your Volvo or VW bus out of sight. If you are gay, calmly turn around and walk slowly out, then when you are about forty yards away run like hell as you have made it out of pistol range and their sniper rifle is likely unloaded.
Once the flag was attached and the permits affixed, we were ready to ride. Oops! Forgot the helmet. While it is okay to ride off-road without a helmet, if you wish to be able to talk in your latter years without slurring or drooling, it is best to wear one. You can pick up a helmet at a garage sale or pay over $100 retail. I bought mine new for $50. Okay it’s not a for real ATV helmet; it is a snow boarder’s helmet. Even though it has a warning label about not being approved for ATVs, have you ever watched those guys in the X-games? They are going much faster and landing much harder than I am ever going to do on an ATV. For Judy’s helmet I borrow a full-face job with neck support from Alan.
Now we can finally start our ride with Alan leading so that he can kick sand in our faces. Judy next while I am in last place. After about 5 minutes, I lose them, which is usual. After that, I normally spend the next hour or so looking for them before putt-putting back to camp. However, on this occasion I was able, with the aid of binoculars to spot them flying over the next dune a mile or so ahead and had actually caught up with them to observe the “incident”. Alan was at the bottom of this particularly steep dune. Judy was screaming down behind him when the quad launched itself in a perfect double forward somersault, rolled over Judy’s back landing upright with Judy ending up in a spread-eagle face plant in the sand. Judges would have given it a 9.5. It might even have gotten a perfect 10 except she spoiled the presentation by having to spit sand for the next 15 minutes in an effort to talk. What she did manage to say between spits was that the brakes on the quad were not working. This was a shocking surprise to me as I just assumed, she had never ever used them. Other than a sprained ankle and badly sprained wrist she was fine. However, her blue jeans were terminal, having several vertical splits from waist to crotch. I had no trouble keeping up with her as we went back to camp because she had to operate the ATV with only one hand, and she wanted me to follow closely behind to obscure her nakedness.
The next day, she wanted to go riding again even though she could not run the throttle. Her reasoning was that we could wire the throttle wide open and drive one handed. We pointed out the obvious safety issues, but she came right back that she would only ride on the flat beach rather than the dunes, where “it would be no problem”. When I pointed out the brakes were bad on the quad she was riding, there was dead silence, indicating that she had not planned on using them. For once Alan came to my aid by hiding the keys. Thank God for that as I would have felt obligated to go with her and after the ride the day before, I was having trouble sitting down as my sore ass felt like it had lost its virginity to bubba. Her frustration with not being able to convince us to allow her to ride was not helped by our constant teasing about the fashion risk she had taken the day before in wearing the “distressed Levi’s”. She tried to sneak them into the garbage, but the ever-vigilant Alan salvaged them from the trash and made Japanese head bands out of them in remembrance of the incident. We wore them around camp the whole next day much to Judy’s embarrassment. Ron the host also got a good laugh.
Even with her injuries Judy was still lobbying me about buying a couple of ATVs. It is not that they are too expensive, or I fear for my spouse’s life that I have so far resisted these efforts. We just have no place to store them out of the weather. Anything left outside on the coast, even in our carport, gets infected with coastal cancer almost immediately. I need a garage, preferably one with a cool remote control to open the garage door. I figure that this will cost about 20K, but could be less if I can do a lot of the work myself as I am pretty handy with a nail gun having once shot a contractor in the ass at 50 yards. New quads are about 5 to 8K each. I figure we will most likely use them about four times a year for the next 10 years which should be about the time either they or we break down. Based on our inability to ride more than one day before major physical injury, that works out to about $500 for each hour of riding pleasure. I know that sounds like a lot money, but it is nothing compared to what I am about to tell you.
The second evening we were in camp, a 45-foot motor home drives in with an equally humongous trailer, requiring two camping spaces. The trailer then disgorges this truly awesome sand rail, which seats four in bucket seats equipped with strap-in belts like Maverick and Goose wore in Top Gun. It would not have surprised me if it also had ejection seats as you just knew it spent a lot of time in the air. The sand rail was powered by a massive, chromed V-8, with a chromed radiator sitting on top of the engine for no purpose that I could perceive other than to cause premature ejaculation in any male that saw it. It had gauges for everything that I know about with some extra ones just for show that sprouted off the steering column like giant analog brussel sprouts on the stalk. It was equipped with a GPS so you couldn’t get lost and a MP3 player so that if you did you could seduce your date with rape music. The one-piece fiberglass body was covered with green flames on an alabaster background. This was the Holy Grail, mother of all sand rails. Every guy in camp and some of the women soon gathered round where the owner could gloatingly show it off. I have often thought that guys buy things like this to compensate for a lack of biological equipment. If my theory is true, this guy had to have had a close encounter with an improvised explosive device that had removed all of his hangy down part. I have no clue how much this toy had cost, but I bet it was a lot more than the 30K I would have to put out for two quads. But I know for sure it’s per hour cost was way beyond my estimated $500 per hour as the next day the owner spent all morning trying to get it started. It never moved the whole time we were at Horsefalls.
Alan of course had to have one and did by the next year. It was not as fancy and only sat two, but it had a V-8 with the power of 300 horses in a body that weighed 1000 pounds. When he asked me if I wanted to ride, I jumped in or more precisely contorted my body into positions that it was not meant to be in, to get in. Once seated Alan proceeded to attach the lap, shoulder, and crotch belts, leaning back with his full body weight to pull them so tight that I could have worn an antebellum ball dress. He then crawled into the driver’s side of the rail, strapped himself in and snapped in the steering wheel which did not quite clear his donelop (his belly donelop over his belt). Throwing a switch, the motor exploded into life with a sound which would have gotten him arrested in most other places on the planet. I was in for the ride of my life.
We drove down the bumpy road that led to the beach at a leisurely pace waving to the quad and motorcycle riders who looked on in envy at our ride. Alan began to gun the motor as we turned to go on the beach, then floored the foot feed and slammed us into a right-hand turn with the rear tires spinning and the front wheels coming slightly off the ground. After the rail straightened out, he really floored it. I went instantly blind as the tears welling up in my eyes blew back under my glasses. If I had been sane, I might have noticed that I was also partially deaf as my cheeks had blown back and covered my ears. Later I was to realize that the high whining sound I heard was coming from me. I wasn’t really screaming like a girl was I? Of course not, it was two octaves higher than a girly scream probably because my testicles were trying to crawl back into my body cavity to never descend again.
Mercifully, Alan slowed as he turned off the beach toward the sand dunes behind the beach. I was still alive! I could see! I could hear! My crotch was still dry! Then the “fun” really began. While the beach was relatively flat, the dunes were not. He pointed the rail at a 50-footer with a near vertical face and gunned it. The rail slammed into the base then shot up the face without losing momentum. Just before the top Alan turned to the left to avoid flying over the top as he was “taking it easy on me”. He screamed along the crest of the dune for a bit then spying what he was looking for turned and headed straight down the steepest part. I would say that it was like a roller coaster ride, but roller coasters creep up hills and the ride lasts only a minute or so. This shit went on for an hour. When we finally made it back to the parking lot, I had to be assisted out of the seat and barely managed to walk on my watery legs to a camp chair. I had lots to be thankful for. I was alive, my sphincter had not let go, and urine dries quickly in the sun.
But that event was mercifully in the future. That first night back at Horsefalls the previous year we watched a movie. Alan has a TV projector that he can run off his laptop. We fired up a generator on a long extension cord to move the noise as far away from our camp as possible and hung a blue sheet for a screen from the awning of our trailer. Although a white sheet would have been better, it was the best we had at the time. Alan had bought a package deal from some guy on the internet which had a bunch of DVD’s with 10,000 books and 1500 movies. Looking though the movie list we decided on “Women of the Prehistoric Planet”, partly because most of the other movies were Roy Roger’s westerns and Women of the Prehistoric Planet according to Alan’s movie list starred Mamie Van Doren.
Mamie Van Doren was one of the least remembered sex symbols of the sixty’s, falling way behind Marylyn Monroe and even behind that other blonde bombshell who lost her head in a tragic car accident. Mamie is probably best remembered from her starring role in an after shave commercial where she spoke the tag line: “there is something about an Aqua Velva man” while draping her scantily clad body all over that of some more than handsome guy. The other thing I remember about that commercial was the male model was gay, otherwise they could only have shown the couple from the waste up. Mamie also starred in one of my favorite movies, “The Navy vs. the Night Monsters”. In that one, a plant that looked like a cross between a cedar stump and a palm tree is brought on to a naval air base in the tropics from its natural habitat in the Antarctic. The refrigeration on the plane fails and the stump, now released from the retarding effects of the cold, escapes from the plane, multiplies, and starts searching for human flesh. Mamie plays a nurse in love with the commanding officer of the base, who pretty much ignores her throughout the whole movie. Why does she seem to always get stuck with the gay guys?
I won’t go into the plot of “Women of the Prehistoric Planet” as you might want to rent it or buy it from some guy on the internet. However, if you do watch it, could you please send me an EMAIL as to which one of the fur clad babes is Mamie Van Doren. Because of the blue sheet I could not figure out which one was the blonde, if in fact there even was a blonde. I found out years later that she was not in the movie, turns out Alan’s movie list had it wrong. So much for buying movies off some internet guy. The dialog in the movie was really, really, sparse as is the case with all caveman movies. The exception to this rule was the move “Quest For Fire”, which had lots of dialog in a foreign language, but was so rushed into the American movie market that they neglected to add the subtitles.
During the middle of the movie and long after the posted quiet time, Ron, our wonderful camp host, showed up at our camp. I fully expected the “no generators after 9 PM speech”. He might have even come over to deliver it but after watching “Women of the Prehistoric Planet” for a few minutes, and speculating some about which one of the babes was Mamie Van Doren, he simply shook his head, remarked that now he had truly seen everything and left.
The next evening one of the campers down the row came running past us to the main road. She was flagging down an ambulance which had just driven past the campground entrance. Seems Ron was at their campsite and had just collapsed. Talking and joking one second, then gurgle once and collapsed. Even though he was given immediate CPR, as there was a trained person right there, and the ambulance had arrived in less than 10 minutes, Ron passed before making it to the hospital. I guess he had truly seen everything. That night we had planned on showing “Wild Women of Wonko”, but no one seemed interested.