Our toddler finally made us go west. Record snowfall and a two-year old who didn’t like to wear clothes gave us cabin fever this past winter, so we accepted an invitation from my sister-in-law in Portland, Oregon for a month-long visit.
I irrationally resisted visiting for years. I blamed my reluctance on a leftover prejudice that the West Coast was filled with loonies with healing crystals. I grew up in Ohio, where we were afraid of loonies with healing crystals; it’s a Midwestern thing.
But really, I was afraid I might find a different way of living out there, one I would like enough that I would be forced to move away from Maine. I didn’t want to find a better way of doing things. When we first arrived, this fear seemed unfounded.
Portland, Oregon was a fun city, a young city, and there was a certain novelty to taking my child to a different coffee shop every day (she preferred Starbucks), but it was still urban and not my cup of tea. The rain didn’t help.
My Oregon crush began when we struck out for the coast. The sudden sunshine helped, as did seeing live flowers in February, but really it was the coastline itself. There was just so much of it, and so much of it was accessible.
We had planned to work our way to California, stopping at every coastal park along the way, but our plan was impossible. There were just too many stopping opportunities, some no more than a quarter mile apart, including national preserves, state parks, and county parks.
County parks — think about that for a minute. Can you picture Hancock County having its own park? The city of Ellsworth doesn’t even have its own playground.
Where there weren’t parks, there still was public access to the ocean. A state brochure even seemed to apologize that not all of the state’s beaches allowed people to drive on them.
Being a reporter, I couldn’t just enjoy a new place; I had to dig around and find its back-story through online histories and interviews with state officials.
It turns out Oregon’s beaches were once its coastline highway, with steady horse-traffic along the beach. This makes sense once you drive Oregon’s modern coastal highway, a slow road fraught with hairpin turns and rockslide warnings.
For years, the idea of public beach access was entrenched, but not completely codified. Then in 1966, a coastal motel owner decided to partially block access to the beach, igniting controversy.
The next year, the legislature passed a landmark beach bill, declaring all beachfront up to the vegetation line public property. The Supreme Court upheld the law, perhaps because of the coastline’s historical precedent of public use.
The bill just barely passed; one motion went through in the last hour of the last day to keep the bill alive. At one point, the beach bill stalled out in the legislature, only to be saved by public outcry.
The bill’s backers were homegrown and fairly conservative, and the bill was signed into law by a Republican governor. An odd mix of pioneering ecological ethics and libertarianism made the bill happen. One official explained how the bill passed with the unofficial state motto, “Things Look Different Here.”
It gets better. In the 70s the state implemented a handful of land use ordinances, including two requiring coastal towns to prevent sprawl and protect coastal access. Essentially, if an Oregon town wants to develop working waterfront into condominiums, the town has to provide another piece of land for working waterfront.
The results have been fantastic for the Oregon economy, according to state officials; fishing has been protected, tourists flock to the state to visit, and young people flock to the state to stay. Coastal sprawl largely has been contained, concentrated in a few areas. The rest of the shore is left over for magnificent vistas, preserved areas, more than a few dune buggies, and some viable ports.
Public involvement, political will and advanced planning made it happen in Oregon. What about Maine? I know it’s a little late to turn parts of Route 1 into a well-planned and beautiful area, but coming home, I couldn’t help dreaming.
Maybe sprawling development doesn’t need to make an inevitable march up the coastline to Calais. Washington County and some of Hancock County still have a lot of land left that could be preserved for the public to enjoy.
Maybe. If not, I know how to get to a place where things look different.