Oregon’s ISOLATE COAST, When A Continent and Ocean Collide

Description

Home to a 10,000 year story of powerful natural events and human struggle, Oregon’s Isolate Coast is located in the heart of Curry County’s most rugged terrain.  Cataclysmic events and a ruthless ocean have taken turns relentlessly battering the continent over millennia.  Then came man.

The landscape has been defined by hundreds of centuries of events so large it is difficult to comprehend their magnitude.  At first, climate and the wrath of nature were so treacherous that humans couldn’t survive.  Even as time between big events grew and consequences waned, ancient peoples were randomly trapped with little forewarning by giant firestorms, floods, earthquakes, wind, rain, and tsunamis.  Walls of seawater rose and crested over the top of the coast, not once but many times.  Volcanoes erupted, spewing lava down valleys and ash into the air that changed the climate around the world for years.  Pressure from within pushed the earth’s mantle skyward leaving in its wake an awkward disarray of stone.  Floodwater covered plateaus and villages, erasing what had been.  The magnitude of all this was bigger than anything mankind has experienced anywhere on the planet for many centuries.

About 5000 years ago Cascadia events started to settle down and immigration started into a foreboding yet plush region.  Past the effects of slow and big longue duree and day-to-day firefly events, a major paradigm shift started to transform the region in the late 1700s.  Especially in times of human conflict, there would be no shortage of controversy as the prime story told from different sides and bias compete to create differing versions of singular events.

A part of America’s imperfect history, the Isolate Coast held kind, humble, and good people and there were also a few crudely bad people.  There were those who won, those who lost, those who received what they earned, and those who got what they deserved.  As much as Euro-Americans and Indians already knew about kindness, the two cultures could have been best of friends and neighbors but instead became enemies.  The actions of people already in the Isolate Coast and those arriving, like others across the North American continent, became characters of stories of pride and accomplishment alongside shame and exploitation.  This history, Oregon’s ISOLATE COAST, When A Continent and An Ocean Collide, includes both stories of achievement and stories that some people would like to ignore, forget, change, or erase.

The narrative is woven into a colorful documentation of natural history, early inhabitants, conflicts caused by European-American expansion, and inevitable changes brought to the area that were ushered in during the second half of the 19^th century.  Foibles, drama, and the frailty of mankind are described as acts of both great accomplishment and deeds of barbarism.  The storyline culminates with the gradual introduction of an industrial age defined by seekers struggling to carve out an improved quality of life and fortune in a land not governed by the thrones of kings, altars, or aristocracies.

The straight-forward style of narration combines a layman’s understanding of the world using common sense, easy to understand, thought-provoking, and inspirational ways.  Oregon’s ISOLATE COAST, When a Continent and an OceanCollide is set in Oregon’s Isolate Coast, a place where mountains tumble directly into the sea and surf roars as it has for millennia, is a story of the rugged and unique nature of Southwest Oregon’s Isolate Coast, peoples who called this place, Duh-neh, home for centuries, and the white man’s earliest years. 

At the end of an axiomatic road, the Isolate Coast is a place where beginnings and endings blur in a timeless march through the past, present, and into the future.