#26 / 2003 Tour 2: Nov. Oregon Coast

I FIND MY SOUL IN OREGON

#26

I wasn’t prepared for the power and majesty of the Oregon Coast. The beaches are not very populated so there are long stretches of natural wonders. Enormous boulders line the coastline, they are enormous, creating a primal and raw atmosphere. The sunlight refracts off the sea as far as the eyes can see. Viewing all this power and majesty for the first time, I had an epiphany. I have been to this great and powerful Northwest twice now, and I have had this reaction I couldn’t quite place, a powerful reaction within me to all I had seen and heard. All at once I realized why. It was here, somewhere here in the vast region of the great Pacific Ocean that my soul entered this world. For the first time I realized that indeed my mother became pregnant in Seattle. The date of my birth bears this out.

Somewhere in this powerful atmosphere, at the reunion of Howard Adams and Laverne “Nernie” Adams, my soul entered my mother’s womb. Here in this great turgid sea these two souls conjured me forth. I know their reunion was not necessarily a happy one. Without a lot of details mother had informed us that the happy-go-lucky farm boy that left Lewisburg, Tennessee, for the Second World War was not the man she encountered in Seattle. “He was another person,” was all she ever said.

Somewhere far from the realities of the theater of war in the Philippines, my father looked across these waters from the prow of a ship, and contemplated the rest of his life as he tried to deal with the horrors and damage that war had brought him. And there in Seattle, how did my mother’s disillusioned soul cry out to the heavens after their first conjugal meeting after the war? I’ll never know, but what I do know for the first time now, is that it was here in this cold Pacific Northwest that their pained souls called me forth to this earth. Somehow I feel like I have found a part of my own soul here, I have a realization that defines my self image in a way I had never thought of before. It conflicts with my warm Southern roots as both a painful and profound realization. The conflicts within my own soul are still so great, my struggles for inner peace rage against the struggles of my daily existence, just as the waves of the sea crash against the harsh realities of the ragged rocks on shore.

My mind reeled with all this contemplation as we skirted the coastline. Joe found a great place to camp, a little road tucked behind a hillside that led right off the highway only a few feet. We settled in for the night cooking a meal outdoors as we watched the sun set. We woke up to dense fog and opted for Interstate 5 and a quick ride on down to California.