Confluence
Winter on Oregon’s north coast can be uninviting. But the young woman with dark eyes and an artist’s sense of knowing is still here. Wrapped in a cloak, sitting snug with friends in a booth at a brew pub in Astoria, she invited me to join them. We had briefly met the day before when I had first arrived in town. Outside, whipping sheets of horizontal rain lashed at glowing streetlamps. Inside, the storm’s din was quieted by the buzz of voices, a cozy wood fire in the old stone fireplace, and fine house-made ales. “To be in this place, in this town, is home,” she said. Since I was new to Astoria, she told me her tale.
“I love this wild, wet region of the country. For sure, I didn’t belong in southern Florida. One hot, steamy day, I packed my stuff and took off. I had no clue where I was going.
It’s been several months, but I can still hear the car hummin’ down the highway. It followed its own course, away from the hell I was in. The boyfriends, the jobs, the unbearable soaking humidity—it all sucked!
I headed north, then turned west, passing through umpteen towns. Taos looked good. Then I thought maybe Durango, or even Boise. One by one, they were not for me. l was searching for a place where I felt at home, a place where I could do my art.
After several weeks of roaming endless stretches of highway looking for some freedom, I came to the edge of a large river narrowing into a gorge near a dusty village. The sign said, “Boardman.” I was on Oregon’s northern edge along the Columbia, and still don’t remember how I got there. It was all new country to me. The warm overhead sun followed me as I pushed west along the river. Arlington, The Dalles, Hood River, Cascade Locks all flew by until the river shot the mountain gap into Portland.
Knowing that I didn’t want to be in a big city, I kept to the river for the next two hours until halting—here, in downtown Astoria. I clicked off the engine. The silence gave relief. As I gazed peacefully at the high bridge silhouetted in the red evening sun, it hit me—the car and I were home.”
She further described finding a fourth-floor loft, with river views and skylights, near other artists downtown. As gray morning light floods her studio, she puts paint to canvas in a flurry of strokes that smear blues and whites into murky coastal scenes, dappled with crimsons, oranges, and yellows when days are sunnier. Leftover regrets from her failed life in Florida are erased by filling canvases with swells of color. She feels cleansed in the tangle of river, sky, and ocean that is Astoria. She knows positively that this confluence of waters drew her like a vortex to this place of expressive healing. Her friends in the booth felt the same, but she and her friends were not the only ones in the pub that night who had ended up in Astoria miraculously.
I watched her step out into the harsh winter’s night. I imagine that she pulled her cloak close against the driving rain as she hurried home. Feeling stimulated by the storm, she might have stood at her easel, covering old pain with thick layers of color. Her inner muse would have held her long into the night. As the new day dawned, she would have laid down palette and brush to gaze tenderly at her creation. I like to think that shimmering in her glistening dark eyes was an image of new hope.