A heat dome had just high-pressure cooked the Northwest, so a close friend and I drove from Portland to the Pacific, climbing quick straightaways and winding through tens of s-turns, then descending in similar fashion, past sad clearcuts, until Highway 26 ended at Highway 101. We exited north. Past a pot shop, a condemned old crab restaurant, a fancy garden store, a building supply store, a surfboard shaper shack, a quarry, a KOA RV resort, a putt-putt and go-kart and helicopter-tour place, a burger joint, and a high-wire rope course, we finally entered Seaside, Oregon, population 7,020, at about noon.
Apart from excessive Fourth of July fireworks, Seaside doesn’t get exciting. But the town’s quaintness and natural surroundings still attract, more and more, it seems. Best known for vacations involving bumper cars and cotton candy, Seaside remains a blue-collar destination, for now. Growth and a hot real estate market have brought changes to town. The locals, though, they don’t really care. Seaside will always be Seaside, for better or worse, because of what defines the town: its salty western edge.
Bigfoot’s Restaurant had closed its doors due to Covid, but Bell Buoy was still selling crab, clams, salmon and other seafood just as it has since 1946. Traffic slowed the highway in both directions as passers-through, tourists and locals traveled north or south. We pulled into the parking lot at Seaside Surf Shop and stretched in 65-degree, sunny air that carried a hint of brine.
The Pacific Northwest had just survived its greatest heat wave on record. Portland had reached a new all-time high temperature, 116 degrees, the day before, June 28, when Seaside roasted at 103. The Tuesday vibe felt relaxed and relieved, like after recovering from the flu. Everyone referenced the insanity of the past three days: how the wind stopped blowing, a rare event on such a raw stretch of coastline, how difficult it had been to sleep in such heat, how the beach looked like sardine-packed southern California, an Oregonian’s nightmare.
“Dude, it was 100 degrees in here,” said Dennis Smith, owner of Seaside Surf Shop. “The rental surfboards started to delaminate.” At last, something for Seaside to talk about. The place typically seems half asleep.
One of his employees, Shara Ford, born and raised in Seaside, said it took her dad three and a half hours to drive home from Portland that Sunday, instead of the usual 80 minutes. “We live on Highway 26, just out of town, and we watched it all day, solid traffic headed west until 8 p.m.”
Disbelief lingered in the cooling air. Longtime resident Brian Anderson was painting the surf shop’s exterior, while surfboards he shaped, painted and glassed rested on the for-sale racks inside. Brian pointed to the highway, a steady flow of cars, big pickup trucks and semis, and agreed that the previous weekend was “nuts,” as he put it. “But it’s been busy ever since Covid hit,” he said. “It never slowed down. The roads weren’t even mellow last winter.”
Seaside needs a highway expansion, but residents voted against the last proposal, so a slow back-road drive north took us through the tiny downtown, a carnival-like scene of greasy-food restaurants and gaudy facades. We hungered for an old favorite, The Stand, “Legendary since 1990” Mexican-style food, where the old Seaside remains.
“Here you go, Jennifer,” said the server, who later carried a box of food to Jennifer waiting in her car. On our table outside, a plaque remembered a local guy, Jake Soller, who Dennis and Shara and Brian knew until Jake overdosed on heroin. A woman and a young woman had lunch at the next table over, then hugged, and went back to their jobs in town. Bottles of beer cost $3.75, Recession tacos still figured on the menu and the loaded nachos tasted of vacation.
Up above, seagulls looked refreshed in the partly cloudy sky, looping around in the warm southern breeze, which normally blows from the north this time of year. Traffic at the four-way stop in front of The Stand advanced lazily. Kids with a volleyball and skateboard walked past. License plates from Michigan, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, South Dakota, and Texas, lots from Washington, and more from California than we’d ever seen, all rolled by. A young woman with pink hair and hoodie, in a beat-up gold station wagon, yelled “Go!” out her window, breaking the calm.
We drove to the south end of town, to a neighborhood in the cove formed by Tillamook Head. Along the way we saw homeless people wandering through parking lots and straggling down the highway. The liquor store resembled a beehive, customers constantly coming and going.
“Seaside’s eclectic,” Katy Walstra said, with a grin. She moved here from Portland in 2006 and ended up loving the place. We sat in her backyard, three streets from the sand, sipping beer from nearby Astoria. A breeze rippled the recently-planted maples along the fence, and a stone firepit with half-burnt logs shone black from frequent use.
“I used to think Seaside was a little rough around the edges, and it certainly can be, but so can any community,” Katy said. “People in Seaside don’t pretend it’s not there, and I kinda like that. It’s authentic.
Katy, 44, grew up in Portland and always considered Seaside a “carny town.” Bike rides on a 1950s Schwinn changed her perspective. “Driving through Seaside, you don’t get an idea of what this community is,” she said. “There actually are a lot of really cool old homes and history here. I didn’t know how charming Seaside was.” Katy paused, then laughed. “When you know Seaside was in its prime in the 1920s, it all starts to make sense. Things kinda changed in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”
Seaside combines its kitsch carny past with the realism of today’s problems: drug addiction, gentrification and overcrowding, even heat waves. Katy sells real estate here, so she follows the changes taking place. Rain used to scare people away, she said, but growth has increased as Portland has swelled. Katy recognizes the challenges of living in a second-home community, but noted that she is lucky not to neighbor any vacation rentals. In only three years, her property value has increased over a third.
“One of the hard things about living in Seaside now is that word got out, and there’s a lot of investment coming in,” she said. “This is great because it’s going to change the face of some of the more dilapidated structures that you see on the highway. Also, the demographic of this town is really changing. People are coming from lots of metropolitan areas that are just vastly different, culturally, than this town, and a lot of that is good.”
But Katy envisions a stark comparison for Seaside’s future. “In 20 years, we’ll be more like Santa Cruz (California), and Manzanita will be like Carmel, as money comes in and these homes get improved.” Three-story, “monolithic” mansions have replaced many of the oceanfront homes in her neighborhood. The incoming development, Katy said, “will change the face of housing and what is achievable for somebody who wants to have a job here and live here, and who doesn’t have a pile of cash. Seaside used to be an affordable place. The housing market is a lot more challenging now.”
From her backyard, the view southwest reveals the Sitka spruce-forested slope of 1200-foot Tillamook Head. A 10-minute walk takes Katy into the jungle of ferns and evergreens, on a dirt trail where she’ll rarely pass anyone else, but has seen cougars. “I can be completely removed from the craziness of town,” she said. “I think the key to happiness in living on the Oregon coast is going outside, to remind yourself why you’re here in the first place.”
Seaside is changing, again, as if the tide rose over the town and retreated to reveal a new character to this place. Still traditional and non-elitist, welcoming and friendly, Oregon’s 69th largest town is picking up pace. Crowds thicken, roads clog, heat waves visit, tweakers roam, and downtown Seaside remains a cheap-thrills amusement park of corn dogs, skee-bowl and stuffed animal prizes. But the locals don’t budge. They adapt. They get by, feeling safe that at least their western border will always remain uninhabitable.
Our day ended in the Pacific, straight out from Katy’s house, strangely surfing The Cove in summer, in water 15 degrees warmer than normal because of the weird southerly wind following the heat dome. No parking spaces sat vacant overlooking the shore, but the waves stayed surprisingly uncrowded. The noise of traffic and the throngs of cone-licking tourists, the new cost of housing here, the drug problems, none of that made it past the shore. We gazed at the reddening sky and darkening Tillamook Head, aware of why Katy and the others continue to call Seaside home. Like them, we were here for the ocean.