The End of Kelp Stories on the Oregon Coast

The Sunday Oregonian recently ran a long investigative piece on the disappearing kelp beds along the Oregon Coast due to warming in the Pacific. The story broke my heart because I have many great stories associated with kelp washed ashore on the state’s socialist beaches. So do many others. In another decade, that kind of story will be extinct.

Below is one of my favorites, from 2006 or 2007 when I was living south of Newport and encountered kelp at the wrack line in abidance after every big storm:

On a rare rainless afternoon in winter, I walked my neighbor’s dog, Crazy Country Maddie, down the beach. We dodged dozens of huge entangled piles of kelp at the wrack line and they vaguely reminded me of creatures from a Jules Verne novel.

A quarter mile into our jaunt, something distant to the north captured my attention: a strand of kelp originating at the base of a cliff that snaked 75 yards westward to the ocean before ending atop a drift log partially submerged in sand.

Curious, I jogged over to investigate. Five minutes later I found myself sprinting back to the house with Maddie to retrieve my camera. I simply had to document the most marvelous engineering project I’ve encountered in all my relentless rambling down Oregon Coast’s publicly-owned beaches.

It was a magisterial work of public art, a fountain made entirely of kelp that must have taken all day to conceive and construct, cost nothing, and had approximately 15 minutes left to survive before the incoming tide demolished it.

How many people noticed the fountain that afternoon? I might have been the only one. I went home, wrote up the story of my discovery….and a few weeks after it was published….

I was ordering a beer at the Salty Dawg in Waldport when a man from my neighborhood came up and said, “The guy that made the kelp fountain is here with me.”

“What? Here? I’ve got to meet him,” I said. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to meet a living Oregonian more.

Every once and a great while, a writer is fortunate to unravel a beautiful mystery by virtue of writing about it for publication.

I walked up to a table decorated with bloody marys and gentlemen fishermen. Outside, all things crabbing on Alsea Bay were going down in noisy, colorful splendor. My neighbor introduced me to Geof and I learned the inspiring story of this magisterial work of public art that the tide swept away 15 minutes after I viewed it. To my total astonishment, Geof wasn’t a former engineer and didn’t claim any special aesthetic sensibility.

An hour later, I opened an email at home and read:

Hi Matt:

 We read your article about the kelp fountain constructed on Thanksgiving Day by my husband, son, daughter and grandchildren. The fountain was the concept of my husband, Geof, who enjoys using whatever is available on the beach to create a project that our family can do altogether. Construction required about two to three hours and everyone contributed, even our littlest guy. We want our grandchildren to enjoy their time at the beach and their Grandpa’s imagination makes it happen. The kids wrote their last name in the sand to sign their work.

 We loved your article and thanks for appreciating a project that made our Thanksgiving special.

Kathy Clayton

When I received this email, which also included a photograph of the construction crew, Geof had not yet told his wife that he had met me in the bar. There was a synchronicity about all of this that frequently happens to me in connection to my beach adventures. I have no explanation for them whatsoever and don’t know why they keep occurring.

I do know something, though. I know that every family that find themselves celebrating Thanksgiving at the Oregon Coast should eat a hearty meal, give thanks to Oregon’s unprecedented legacy of publicly-owned beaches, and go build a kelp fountain or fort together. You can always watch highlights of the Dallas Cowboy game later…or not at all.