good and bad decisions

It’s amazing how hard it is to find pie in restaurants these days, but Coos Bay, being an old funky dock town, seemed as likely a place as any that you could walk into an old 24-hour diner, sit at the counter, and order a cup of coffee and piece of pie from a waitress with a big bouffant hair-do, a cigarette dangling from her lip and a pot of coffee dangling from her index finger. Her name would probably be Bev, and the pie would be unquestionably perfect.
I had read in the newspaper that a new shipwreck had been discovered on the Southern Oregon coast near Coos Bay, and being fascinated with all things left abandoned, and having a hankering for that slice of homemade pie, I decided I had no choice but to go down and find it. It didn’t take much to convince my pal Megan Scheminske to come along, and we loaded up Tess in the Red Baron and headed south.

A shipwreck is the physical manifestation of a bad decision. The decision to go right when you should have gone left, the decision to go forward instead of turning around. Or sometimes it’s just the result of bad luck; some important apparatus stops working, a particularly bad storm hits, or maybe things just don’t go right. Either way, the moment in which the ships crew realizes all is lost must be a heavy one. Crap, we really messed up.
After asking the clerk at a convenience store, the entire wait staff at a restaurant, and the owner of a motel where the shipwreck was located, we were somewhat able to piece enough information together to go find it. While everyone in Coos Bay is aware and excited about the newly discovered shipwreck, it’s on a pretty remote stretch of beach and it seems that very few have actually ventured out to see it.
The new shipwreck is actually an old shipwreck, dating back to 1944, which until just a few weeks ago had been completely covered by a sand dune. But after a winter of punishing storms, the sand dune was swept away by waves, and the old wreck was revealed. It was first discovered by a couple beachcombers, and since has attracted a bevy of maritime enthusiasts and lookie lous from up and down the coast. It took a few days, but amateur maritime historians where able to pinpoint the ship’s identity and determined that it was the George L. Olson, “a 223-foot-long wood-hulled schooner, launched on Jan. 22, 1917, from the W.F. Stone shipyards in Oakland, California” that ran aground and sank in June of 1944. The ship had been all over the world, but on it’s last journey it was attempting to haul a load of timber from Coos Bay to San Francisco.


The shipwreck is on a remote beach that is only accessible by hiking or dune-buggying. Since dune-buggying isn’t really either of our styles we decided to hike it, especially since the hike would take us past another noteworthy shipwreck in the New Carissa. The New Carissa, which was a big ocean freighter that ran aground in 1999, serves as example number one on the list of things not to do when a giant freighter runs aground. First, after the ship ran aground and started spewing bunker oil and diesel fuel into the water, state officials tried to pump the fuel off. When the waves and weather proved that task to be too difficult, the decision was made to burn the fuel off. Many thought that was a curious decision, but they went ahead and ignited the remaining fuel, only to find that instead of slowly burning off, the entire ship exploded into a giant fiery inferno. You’d think that after the famed 1970 whale detonation that state officials would have known better, but days later, when the flames finally receded, it could be noticed that the 640 foot ship had now blown into two pieces and was deeply embedded in the sand. Giant tugboats where called in to tow the ship pieces out to sea, but the lumbering hull wouldn’t budge. Then the navy came in and managed to pull the bow of the ship off the sand bar, but as soon as they let it go, it just drifted back to shore instead of sinking like they thought it would. The tugs pulled it out again, and this time a submarine torpedoed the hull and it finally sank. However, the navy tugs where never able to pull the stern of the ship off the sand bar, and to this day it remains sitting there, slowly rusting away. Apparently there is another attempt scheduled for this summer, I’ll be curious to see what they try this time.

I kind of wish they’d leave the ship there. Considering the original wreck, and the botched attempts to deal with it, the heap that is the New Carissa is essentially a monument to failure and bad decision-making. In fact, instead of removing it they should install a giant marker on the beach that just says FAILURE in really big letters, and maybe some poetic words about remembering all the times we have just totally fucked up.
The hike was an 8 mile round trip journey that left me sore for days. Something about walking in sand seems to get the attention of the most disused muscles in my body. By the time we got back to the car it was obvious that it was time for phase two of our trip to go into effect: find pie. I am not going to lie; I have been on a banana cream pie kick for the past couple of months. There is just something about going into some old funky diner and ordering a cup of coffee and a fat slice of homemade pie. It’s not just a desert, it’s an adventure. And sure enough, we found a place right on Route 101, the Main Street Diner that advertised AWARD WINNING PIES on their decorative neon sign. Our waitress may not have been named Bev, but man was the pie good. Definitely a CORRECT decision.