watershed

WEATHER OR NOT

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

We’ve been talking about moving. To be candid, we’ve talked about moving on and off ever since we moved to my family’s home on the Oregon coast in 1979. We missed family and friends. Now it’s the non-stop stream of tourists in a residential neighborhood that used to house people who actually lived here. The truth is, however, that we like the climate, the weather, and our permanent neighbors. We raised our children here, wetsuits dripping over the tub. They moved off but we stayed. We love our daily walks on the shore, even when our fingers and toes go numb in winter. We are accustomed to the continual roar of ocean and water shifting stone. We are used to silence.

We are used to seeing sky, to watching the storms roll in, the sea go high, the gulls and black oystercatchers and broken shells in the rocks. We enjoy finding the shoreline changed every day. This past year has not been easy for most people. The weather alone has been, as they say, interesting.

You can see the two fallen-over trees on the cape are still hanging on. So are we.
Continue reading →

PUBLIC COMMENT

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment
IMG_2717

 

We found a 10-day-old parking ticket from Portland the other day. Often the plastic trash we find has baby barnacles. It’s been out in the water a long time before we collect it.

It’s not the only thing and west is not the only direction.

We get our water from the Coast Range. “Here’s another map showing the area at the Arch Cape Creek headwaters that will be arial sprayed. There is a comment period that will end May 6 or 9th.

“If you want to comment email: jasen.r.mccoy@oregon.gov” 

31487881_10211864031983998_8701270628327489536_o.jpg

They are, essentially, spraying my backyard.

The goal of spraying is to prevent plant growth. They do not want weeds or natural forest succession to begin—from shrubs, then hardwood (alder), to conifers (spruce and hemlock). They want a marketable crop as soon as possible. To achieve that goal they spray chemicals closely related to Agent Orange. On land where I have walked, land rinsed by our future drinking water.

This is my public comment: My family has summered in Arch Cape since 1911. We have lived here year around since the 1940s. I moved to Arch Cape in 1979 with my husband Gary C. Anderson just after the last clearcut, and I recall saying to him that there would not be another for at least 30 years. I knew what they had been spraying up in those hills. And I knew that rain would flush some it it down into local drinking water.

My husband and I have lived here for 39 years and raised our children here. My husband worked in local businesses and I taught in the Seaside School District. Each morning since our retirement we walk the beach and pick up trash from the shore. I can see the plastic bottles and broken toothbrushes, the bottle caps and nylon rope, the plastic foam and cigarette lighters. We see the trash and we can walk by or carry it home to put in the trash.

We cannot see the toxins deliberately introduced into our ecosystem.

It is criminal that this still happens at a time when so many people have become ill and even died from the impact of deliberate human action.

Please do not poison our watershed. Again.