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This past weekend my wife had a meeting in Astoria, Oregon, so we decided to tag along and make a short vacation. We'd never been to Astoria before and I didn't know much about it (other than that The Goonies was set and filmed there). We only spent most of one day there, but my kids and I learned a whole lot about a wide range of topics, and I'm hoping we'll get a chance to go back and explore things in more detail in the future.
Astoria was the first permanent U.S. settlement on the Pacific coast, and the site of the first Post Office west of the Rockies. It was named after John Jacob Astor, whose American Fur Company funded an expedition there and established Fort Astoria in 1811. (Lewis and Clark had spent a rough winter nearby a few years earlier at Fort Clatsop.) Astoria became an important port town in the fur trade, and later developed a booming cannery trade for all the seafood. Today it's less of a port town because of Portland and Seattle, but there's a lot of history in this seaside city.
Our first stop of the morning was the Astoria Column. It's a 125-foot tower, built by the Astor family in 1926, and it's up on a high hill that overlooks the city. The outside of the tower has a spiral frieze that depicts scenes of early Oregon history, and the inside has a 164-step spiral staircase that you can climb to the top. From a distance, it doesn't really look like a structure that you could go inside, but it's a lot bigger once you get close up.
It's a good workout getting to top, but the view is absolutely worth it. You can see the Columbia and the impressive 4.2-mile-long Astoria–Megler Bridge that crosses into Washington, and the entire city spread out between the Columbia and Youngs Bay. Also, you can buy little balsa wood airplanes at the gift shop at the bottom, and throw them from the top of the column. (We tried some paper airplanes, but the wind was a little too strong for those.)
And if you're a fan of cable television, this is also a significant spot for a different reason: it's the location of the first Community Antenna Television (CATV) installation in the U.S. Before "cable" as we know it today, some places had trouble receiving signals over the air because of geography. Ed Parsons' solution was to erect a large "community antenna" to receive the signals, and then run cables to individual homes. The system carried its first transmission, from Seattle's KRSC-TV, on Thanksgiving Day, 1948. A plaque near the tower commemorates the "beginning of cable TV": you could make a pilgrimage there and leave offerings of old rabbit ear antennas.
Our next stop was the Columbia Maritime Museum, devoted to the rich maritime history of the Columbia River region. The current special exhibit is "Envisioning the World," about the first printed maps — they're stunning, but my kids had a little less patience for those. However, there was plenty to keep them busy, too. There were various different types of boats that were or are used on the Columbia River, from the sailing gillnetter which is no longer used to the Coast Guard motor lifeboat that sits up at an incredibly steep angle, simulating what it's like when you hit the big waves.
We watched a short video about the Columbia River Bar and it was fascinating and terrifying. Where the river meets the Pacific Ocean, there's a treacherous sand bar; in addition to that, the river itself can be very difficult to navigate. There are specially trained bar pilots (only two dozen of them now) who will get on board a moving ship, navigate them over the bar, and then jump back into the small boat to shore. Then a Columbia River pilot boards and takes over the rest of the navigation down the river. The pilots have to be able to draw a map of the river by heart, knowing what all the landmarks and buoys are, and where the river is deep enough for these big cargo vessels to go.
In one area of the museum, there was a section devoted to warships. They actually have the entire bridge of the USS Knapp, a destroyer that was decommissioned (for the last time) in March 1957. The ship was sold and broken up for scrap in 1973, but the bridge was donated to the museum. They shipped it down the river, put it at its current location, and then built the museum building around it. Museum visitors can walk around inside it and fiddle with controls, and my kids loved getting that hands-on experience.
There were also some things from the USS Missouri battleship, and since we'd just assembled the Kre-O battleship set recently, they were fascinated to see the real-life counterparts. Above is one of the 20mm anti-aircraft guns from the Missouri, and to the left is a 16-inch shell from the big guns on the ship. They had a photo of the Missouri firing one of these shells, and it's amazing to see this actual shell sitting next to the photo and think about it flying out of the end of a barrel so huge I could just about put both my kids in it next to each other. (Now there's a mental image for when I'm totally fed up at bedtime.)
The museum also has exhibits covering the long history of ships on the Columbia, from paddleboats to tugboats to galleons to the massive modern-day cargo ships. I could have spent even longer browsing the exhibits but eventually the kids got impatient and needed to get outside.
Speaking of outside, the museum also has the Columbia Lightship (pictured at top) permanently docked outside and you can go on board. I didn't know anything at all about lightships, but they were basically floating lighthouses, used in areas where it wasn't feasible to build an actual lighthouse. The Columbia was the last active-duty lightship on the West Coast when it was decommissioned in 1979. It sat about 5 miles out from the Columbia River mouth, signalling to ships where the bar and port were. Imagine living on a small boat for extended periods of time, so close to shore but unable to walk on dry land. Remember, kids, this is before iPhones and Xbox.
The Astoria Riverfront Trolley travels up and down the shore of the Columbia, and you can hop on for a buck and ride as long as you like. "Old 300" was a streetcar built in 1913 for San Antonio, but it's been in the Pacific Northwest for some time now. It's volunteer-run and is entirely funded by donations and sales of tickets and souvenirs. If you're ever in Astoria, you should definitely look up the trolley schedule and take a ride. The entire round trip takes about an hour, and you'll get to see many of sights, narrated by whoever happens to be your tour guide for the day.
From the trolley we got to see two landmarks from The Goonies: the house and the old County Jail. Our tour guide noted that when the Fratellis break out of the jail, they end up in Cannon Beach about five seconds later, even though that's about 25 miles away. We didn't have time to make the trek to see the house up close, but it was pretty fun to see it from the trolley. The house is up on a hill and is quite visible from down below. If you happen to be in Astoria on June 7, 2012, you can even celebrate Goonies Day!)
Another movie location we spotted was Astor Elementary School, where Arnold Schwarzenegger went undercover as Kindergarten Cop, thus setting the stage for other action heroes to star in movies for kids (cf. The Pacifier, Tooth Fairy ... Hmm, come to think of it, maybe he just paved the way for Dwayne Johnson). "Who is your daddy and what does he do?"
After lunch we stopped for ice cream and then wandered over to the Fernhill Glass Studios, where we watched Claude Kurtz creating some glass bottles. My kids had never seen glass blowing, so it was really cool to watch one bottle being made from start to (almost) finish. At the end the bottle was placed in the kiln (the square-ish box on the left edge of the photo), which lets it cool down very slowly. Kurtz explained that if it cooled too quickly it would shatter, so it sits in there for a day before they take it out.
If you've never watched a glass blower at work, you should. It's a fascinating process to see a glob of molten glass become a bottle or vase or sculpture. Fernhill Glass Studios even has a "Blow Your Own Ornament" option, but you have to wait until the next day to pick them up so we'll have to try that some other time.
This was just a short trip to Astoria — we left Saturday afternoon — but there was so much more to see. I don't know when exactly we'll get back next, but I'm hoping to check out some of the other museums, go across the bridge to Washington, and maybe rent a kayak.
Oh, and hunt down some of the locations where Short Circuit was filmed.
All photos by Jonathan Liu
