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Please see the March 29, 2001 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

These are scenes from the Oregon Coast Aquarium at Newport, Oregon. This facility was the home of Keiko, the orca whale made famous in the movie " Free Willy." Keiko now lives in a special habitat off the coast of Iceland while scientists there try to get him truly free and at home again in the ocean.

The first picture is of a jellyfish that is nearly a foot (31 centimeters) across. In the aquarium there is a whole wing devoted to jellyfish, which are housed in different size cylindrical tanks so that people can see them from all sides. Some jellyfish I saw are as tiny as my little fingernail. Many are in shimmering, iridescent colors. This one in the picture was in a large column with maybe about twenty others like it; I thought they were the most beautiful of all. They were certainly the largest. I watched as it spread itself out then pulled the edge of its circle in close to push water out and propel itself. Even though it can control some of its movements, it goes where the currents of the sea take it. There were jellyfish on earth even before the dinosaurs!

The next two pictures show the part of the aquarium called Passages of the Deep. This is where Keiko used to live, but it’s now composed of three separate ocean habitats--a reef, a flat shelf of the ocean where halibut live, and the open sea. What you are seeing is a tube that people walk through in the part of the tank that depicts the open sea, where there are many kinds of sharks swimming all around you--above and below. It was difficult in the low light to get a good picture because the sharks are always moving. They look like blurs in the pictures, but I think you can make out their shapes. I watched a movie on sharks in the auditorium of the aquarium and was reminded that sharks have no bones in their bodies--only cartilage.

I spent three wonderful hours at this large aquarium, and before I left I spent a few more minutes talking to one of the staff members. She told me that they all miss Keiko but that they’re happy he’s becoming more at home in the open sea off Iceland. He doesn’t seem to be much interested in finding his own food when he’s out in the open sea (always with an accompanying boat to make sure he stays safe). He’d rather eat the food provided for him in his private living space in a bay. He has made contact with other orcas but hasn’t yet shown any interest in going to live permanently with them. Do visit his website--and someday if you can, come visit this fascinating aquarium on the coast of Oregon.

This monument in Seaside, Oregon, was built according to historians’ best guesses as to what Lewis and Clark’s salt works would have looked like. In this place near the ocean several men from Lewis and Clark’s expedition spent several weeks in the winter of 1806 making salt, which was necessary for curing the meat they would take with them on their return trip up the Columbia River and back over the Rocky Mountains. (The expedition had run out of salt just before arriving at the Pacific Ocean in November.)

We know from expedition records that a fire was kept burning under these kettles of sea water twenty-four hours a day. When a kettle would boil dry the men would scrape the salt off the sides and bottom of it, save that salt in another container, put more sea water in the kettle, and set it over the fire again. It took from January 2 until February 20, 1806, to extract the four bushels of salt that were needed.

On January 5, soon after the salt-makers had begun to produce the salt, they brought a sample of it back to Fort Clatsop. Capt. Lewis wrote about it in his journal for that day:

"We found it excellent, fine, strong, & white. This was a great treat to myself and most of the party....I say most of the party, for my friend Capt. Clark declares it to be a mear matter of indifference with him whether he uses it or not; for myself I must confess I felt a considerable inconvenience from the want of it."

The sign beside this salt works says:

"This actual site was established by a committee of the Oregon Historical Society in 1900, on the testimony of Jenny Michel of Seaside whose Clatsop Indian father remembered seeing the white men boiling water and had pointed out this place to her when she was a young girl. She was born in this vicinity about 1816 and died in 1905."

I was very pleased that I got to see this site. The Lewis and Clark expedition is of great interest to me, and I regret that I missed seeing another one of their sites a little further south on the Oregon coast. The Clatsop Indians told the expedition that a great whale had washed up on the beach (near where present-day Cannon Beach is located), and Clark and others set out on foot to go there and see it. Sacagawea was in that group. Lewis journaled,

"The Indian woman was very impotunate to be permited to go, and was therefore indulged; she observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either....."

Clark returned to Fort Clatsop with three hundred pounds (136 kilograms) of whale blubber he’d been able to buy from the Indians, who had already stripped the carcas by the time he and the others arrived at the scene on the beach. (The whale blubber was a welcome change in diet from the expedition’s diet of mostly elk.) Lewis’ journal entry for that day stated,

"Small as the store is, we prize it highly, and thank the hand of providence for directing the whale to us, and think him much more kind to us than he was to jonah, having sent this monster to be swallowed by us in stead of swallowing of us as jona’s did."

Here at Fort Clatsop, near present-day Astoria, Oregon, the Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter of 1805-6. They arrived at the site on December 7, 1805, choosing to build their fort on a small hill near the Netul River--the Clatsop Indian name for it. Today it is known as Lewis and Clark River. It flows into Young’s Bay on the wide Columbia River, just a few miles from the mouth of the Columbia. The fort measured fifty feet by fifty feet (15.2 meters by 15.2 meters). (Thirty-three people lived here, including Sacagawea and her baby son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.) What you see in the first picture is a replica of that original fort, built to the dimensions described and sketched in one of Clark’s journals. The fort was named after the Clatsop Indians in the area, who helped the Expedition members that winter. The Indians would bring dried fish and roots to the fort and barter for goods that the Expedition had brought along for just such trade.

The students in the pictures are eighth graders from St. Mary’s School in Stayton, Oregon. They were at the fort for the entire day, learning how the Expedition members lived there. The students made candles and learned how elk hide was tanned and stitched into clothes. They learned that antlers could be cut into round slices that served very well as buttons. They also learned how to strike flint with steel to produce sparks that would ignite a char cloth. They could then use the char cloth to get a small fire smoldering in a tinder box. But first they had to create their own tinder by scraping wood to get shavings off it for their tinder box. The girls in the first picture are serving on sentry duty, as all members of the Expedition had to do. The students in the second picture are learning how to write with quill pens by candle-lantern light, in the quarters that Lewis and Clark shared.

The 106 days that the Expedition spent at this fort were long and tedious. The cold rain was nearly constant. Elk meat was all they had to eat, for the most part, and sometimes it was spoiled because in that wet climate they couldn’t get it smoked properly. Their clothing made out of animal skins rotted because it was so often wet. They were nearly always cold, in spite of the fact that there was a fireplace in each of the rooms of the fort. Their quarters were infested with fleas. But, in spite of the difficulties, they at least survived the winter without starving or freezing to death. While they were there they made four bushels of salt and they tanned enough hides to have one new set of buckskins apiece and nearly 350 pairs of moccasins to share as needed on the way home.

On the afternoon of March 23, 1806, the expedition members loaded their canoes and, according to Clark,

"...left Fort Clatsop on our homeward bound journey. at this place we had wintered and remained from the 7th of Dec. 1805 to this day and have lived as well as we had any right to expect."

Here, where the Ecola River flows into the Pacific Ocean, was the place that Sacajawea first saw the ocean, and where she and some of the rest of the expedition members saw a whale--or at least its skeleton.

On January 5, 1806, some of the men working at the salt works brought whale blubber back to Fort Clatsop. It had been given to them by the Indians, who told them that a whale had died on the beach further south down the coast and was being butchered there for its meat and blubber. Clark, who tasted some of the blubber after it was cooked, realized what a welcome addition this would be to the diet of the expedition members. He wrote in his journal:

"It was white & not unlike the fat of Poork, tho' the texture was more spongey and somewhat coarser. I found it very pallitable and tender. It resembled the beaver or the dog in flavour."

He set out with Sacajawea and a group of about fourteen of the men to see the whale. Lewis wrote in his journal on January 8:

"Charbono and his Indian woman were also of the party; the Indian woman was very impo[r]tunate to be permited to go, and was therefore indulged; she observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either."

By the time the party got to this beach, several miles from Fort Clatsop, all there was to see of the whale was its 105-foot (32-meter) skeleton. The Indians were rendering the whale meat with hot stones in wood troughs. Clark was able to purchase (with trade goods) three hundred pounds (136 kilos) of blubber and some oil. He named the river Ecola (meaning whale).

My attachment to this scene was being here with my grandson Connor three years earlier, when he was just a baby. How he wanted to crawl right into that ocean from the beach that day! We held his hands so that he could "walk" in it, because he wasn't yet walking on his own. He wanted more, more, more!

The big rock in the background is named Haystack Rock, and it's one of the world's largest monoliths. The word monolith comes from the Greek language; monos means single, and lithos means stone.

The first time I saw the ocean I was sixteen years old, about the age that Sacajawea was that day that she saw it. I sat on the beach this day and imagined I was Sacajawea, experiencing the adventure of that day. I only wished I could also see a whale.

The Indians along the Columbia River and the nearby coast lived in plank-slab longhouses like this. This one was built in 1944 in Ft. Stevens State Park, near the mouth of the Columbia River, as a representation of an original longhouse. It is situated approximately where a similar structure was marked on pre-Civil War maps. We know from Lewis and Clark's journals the floor plan of these houses; the journals also contain detailed descriptions of the outside and inside of a longhouse. This one matches their descriptions and drawings.

The surrounding forests provided plentiful resources for the native people. They used cedar trees to obtain material for clothing, tools, dugout canoes, and houses like this one. The Clatsop group of native people lived in an area reaching from this point, at the mouth of the Columbia River, south to the vicinity of present-day Seaside, Oregon.

Lewis described the houses as being twenty feet (6.1 meters) wide and up to sixty feet (18.3 meters) long. The center of the floor was lowered, and cooking fires were kept there. The occupants slept on the boards along the side walls, up off the ground. They had wooden bowls and spoons to eat with and woven baskets to store food. There were often carved figures inside the houses, as there is in this one, and Lewis and Clark recorded that the figures were for decoration and not for worshiping.

You can see that I was visiting this house on a sunny day. But days without rain are the exception along this part of the coast. I would assume that when the native people lived in these houses their roofs would have been better covered to keep out rain. Also, the cracks in the side walls would surely have been filled in with some kind of material. I didn't find out why the door was so low. The Clatsops were a peaceful group, with no enemies, so the low doors were not likely for defense purposes. I certainly had to bend down to get into the house, however. It was lots of fun to explore this house all on my own.

This tall column sits on top of a hill overlooking Astoria, Oregon, and the Columbia River. Inside the Astoria Column are 164 steps winding up a spiral staircase to the top platform. Yes, I made it all the way to the top! From that platform I took the second picture looking out over the Columbia River and past that to the ocean at the far left of the picture. The farthest land you can see is Cape Disappointment, on which Lewis and Clark and some of the men from the Corps of Discovery stood to see the ocean. Sacajawea didn't go with them that day. The name Disappointment was given to the point of land by an earlier visitor, English explorer Captain John Meares. Lewis and Clark knew of his trip and had copies of maps he and other naval explorers had drawn of the mouth of the Columbia, so the name Disappointment was already known to our overland explorers. It was a disappointment to Meares that he missed the right tide and wind to get his ship through the shallow sea covering the sandbar at the mouth of the Columbia, so he couldn't bring his ship into the estuary to explore further. The westernmost campsite of the Corps of Discovery, on the northern shore of the Columbia estuary, is in the bay behind the point of land you can see on the right side of the picture.

Just to the left of this scene, out of the picture, is Young's Bay, on the Oregon side of the Columbia River. Lewis and Clark and company paddled into that bay and up the Netul River (now known as the Lewis and Clark River) to find the site where they built Fort Clatsop.

The Astoria Column was built in 1926 to honor four important men: Captain Robert Gray (the American captain who in 1792 was able to cross the bar and get his sailing ship "Columbia" into the river, naming the river after his ship), Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and John Jacob Astor (the head of the fur trading company that built Fort Astoria in 1811 at this site). The outside of the column is covered with a spiral pictorial frieze telling the history of the Columbia River basin, beginning with the early Native Americans who lived here for so many hundreds and hundreds of years before these four men so profoundly changed the Native Americans' lives and the future of this part of the United States. The story continues as it spirals upward through the stories of Gray, Lewis and Clark, and Astor. Near the top is the part depicting the Oregon Trail pioneers arriving from 1837 to 1848. The topmost section of the spiral shows the arrival of the railroad in 1893. All these scenes were created by scratching designs into layers of colored cement, scratching down to the layer desired for the color or outline of the pictures. The technique is called sgraffito; the artist who created this monumental and beautiful work was Attilio Pusterla, from Italy.

As a footnote, Astoria was the site for filming many of the scenes in the movie "Kindergarten Cop." After I left this tower and drove back down the hill into the town, I found the school, the motel, and the house which were used as scenes in the movie. Also, parts of "Free Willy" were filmed here in Astoria, and that movie shows this very column in one of its scenes.