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Show Go Love/226 Driving south in the clear morning, we roll through these ancient sand dunes that seem like the moon, miles and miles of them, sand dunes drifting in the middle of a blue spruce forest. 101 drifts gently west again after Coos Bay, one state park after another, off the highway where every curve shocks you to the here and now. I've heard about a place that's hard to get to, read about it maybe in one of the See Oregon books Renee's rented from the library. This holy place for the natives where a lighthouse stands on a towering cliff, a Cape where an Irishman lived for thirty years in a fine house of blue spruce He roused up every morning to operate the massive mirrors that shone off Cape Blanco, the furthest point West in the continental U.S., the end of the line, as far as she goes. Cranberry bogs have sprung up now and we roll over a river named Sixes-who on earth names a river Sixes? Have I said that no one driving a vehicle in the state of Oregon is allowed to pump gas? A worker's thing-when jobs were scare and the economy down, maybe about the time they decided to build all these state parks every three miles for four hundred miles of coast, it was decided that workers would be hired to pump gas at every station in the state, people would have jobs and the jobs would give them faith in themselves and they'd buy houses and take their kids to the dentist and make good salads and potatoes to eat with fresh fish. The world would make sense and sustain itself in Oregon-what a great, good place. The cranberry bogs are thick with berries near Port Orford, which I'll learn is one of the world's only open sea ports. Open water means no bay, just wide sea and these gigantic cranes to haul boats from the water each afternoon when they return from fishing, the holes filled with eels, albacore and salmon. Cape Blanco State Park Road is off highway 101, just past the Sixes River by a cranberry bog before the town of Port Orford. Renee's driving, about four in the afternoon, close enough to |