Cannon Beach — Tide Pools, Dogs, and the Goonies Coast

Montesano, Washington — Before the Coast

The trip starts in Montesano, Washington — county seat of Grays Harbor County, population just over four thousand, sitting at the confluence of the Wynoochee and Chehalis rivers. Kurt Cobain is from nearby Aberdeen. The Melvins formed here in 1983. The courthouse has a dent in the front door where a sheriff fired at a fleeing felon. The town motto, apparently, is "come on vacation, leave on probation."

I spend a few hours at a coffee shop working on this website and studying for my GISP exam — the kind of productive morning that only happens when you're somewhere unfamiliar and there's nothing else demanding your attention. Good light, good coffee, a few hours of actual focus.

Then the library. There are therapy dogs there — the kind of program where you can just sit and read with a dog nearby, which turns out to be exactly as good as it sounds. Found two geocaches while I was in town: one hidden inside a book at the library, the other tucked into a figurine at a church. Small finds, but that's the point — the cache is never really the point.

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Cannon Beach — Haystack Rock

Cannon Beach, Oregon. The Goonies were filmed about twenty miles north of here, and you can feel it in the coastline — like the place is still half set, half real life. Something about the light, the scale of the rock formations, the way the fog moves through.

Haystack Rock anchors the whole place. It's been here for about 25 million years, which makes human timelines feel almost accidental. You stand next to it and the math just stops working — your sense of duration recalibrates somewhere in the neighborhood of "this doesn't apply to me."

The Tide Pools

The tide pool meditation kept looping in my head all day. It wasn't just observation — it had a rhythm to it, something close to the way Rush frames "Natural Science," especially the opening section, "Tide Pools." That same idea: small contained worlds, all running on their own rules, nested inside something much larger and older. Watching it in real time on the coast felt like stepping into that concept instead of just thinking about it.

In the tide pools themselves, time becomes visible in a different way. Mussels everywhere — some over ten inches long, thick clusters layered on rock like they've been building this structure for a very long time. Long enough that "long" stops meaning much. There's a kind of quiet meditation in that — just looking at something that clearly outlasts you, and will likely outlast whatever we think we are right now.

A Taxonomy of Beach Visitors

The beach is full of people trying to exist inside that same space:

• Careful walkers with cameras and binoculars, moving slowly, reading the water.
• Kids sprinting straight into cold water like consequence isn't real.
• Dogs in every possible emotional state — joy, panic, obsession, total sensory overload.
• And then there was the disco dog — a blur of motion with a bright green flashing light strapped to it, running full speed through the beach chaos like it was chasing something only it could see.

There was also a "No Kings" protest happening on the beach. Hard to miss even in a place like this — people standing in wind and salt air, holding something steady against something larger than the moment. The weather kept shifting — sun breaking through cloud, then disappearing again. Light changing everything without warning.

Manzanita, just down the coast, felt quieter. Not empty — just slower, like it had stepped back from the noise and decided to observe instead.

But mostly it was the ocean doing what it has always done: insisting on itself. Tide in, tide out. No explanation required. No urgency. Just duration.

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Astoria Afternoon — Fort George Brewery

The afternoon settles into Fort George Brewery & Public House in Astoria — a place that feels like it runs on momentum. People cycling through flights, conversations overlapping, the constant rotation of something being poured and something being decided. Lunch becomes less about food and more about sequence.

There's something interesting about being in a space where experimentation is normal — where "not finished yet" is part of the menu. Fort George itself feels like that idea scaled up: a whole block of brewing, tasting, music, production, and constant iteration. A working system of beer and people and coastal air.

And underneath it all, the same Oregon coast energy that's been running the whole trip: weather shifting, light changing, everything slightly in motion even when it looks still. Just another afternoon where time doesn't feel linear so much as poured in rounds.