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あらすじ・解説
I haven’t yet said this, but my intention with this and the previous three recordings was a hopscotch survey of Pacific Coast soundscapes. To recollect now, these have been Yoakam Point on the Oregon Coast, Copalis Ghost Forest on the Washington Coast, Keahou on the Big Island of Hawaii and now Preston Island in Crescent City, on the Northern California Coast.This reflection on Preston Island leads me to ponder sites along the lower Columbia River at length, for reasons which will soon reveal themselves.Preston Island is weird. For starters, it’s not what anyone would call an island. You can walk right out onto its strange rocky surface from the mainland. The view from the island is breathtaking though, and I thought it made a better album cover than the island itself: The island is relatively flat, but also boulder-strewn and cracked. When I visited, it was foggy, and I felt like I was on the surface of another planet. Something about it seemed unnatural:It all clicked when I found this historical photo:Preston Island was carted off. It was mined down to a nub. Let’s get our bearings. Here’s an 1880’s Crescent City map, and a modern satellite photo. (I guess cardinal north pointing up wasn’t yet the rule.)On the map you’ll see Preston Island clearly drawn as a landmass, and Hall’s Bluff, appearing much less prominently than it does today. I outlined the locations on the satellite image. Here, all the rock contained in those geographical features was mined and dumped in the ocean in to create the jetty you see on the upper right of the satellite image. They really moved mountains.This is what Preston Island used to look like, and here it is today, courtesy of Google Street View:Our soundwalk takes us from West 6th Street in Crescent City over to the beach and up over what’s now called Half Butte, about where an old photo of Hall’s Bluff (aka Lover’s Rock) was taken in 1876. Look at the tiny figures on top for a sense of scale:The massive Halls Bluff /Lover’s Rock headland, was also carted off to build the jetty. It’s harder to match the original photo vantage point with Street View, but it’s also just completely gone. Ironically, half of Pebble Beach Drive along Half Butte has buckled and subsided. It looks like it could wash out in the next storm surge. The road here is closed indefinitely. But let’s get back to Preston Island, that weird scab-land of a place. Let’s take a closer look at it, because it gives our soundwalk such unique character about 17 minutes in. At a glance, it seems lifeless. A green hue, coming from chalky veins in the rock, adds to the otherworldliness of the landscape.Tide pools form on the perimeter, among the cracks and fissures in the rock substrate. It’s here that I place my recording hat down and the soundscape is instantly transformed. The skitter of crabs and the capillary clicking sounds of tiny shellfish erupt to fill the high frequencies, while the surf sound is attenuated by the topography of the rocks.It’s another world. A 2021 article in the Bandon Western World states, “Preston Island has a long history in Crescent City. Originally Preston Peak, the area was a sacred site for the Tolowa Nation.” It is not well known, but the Tolowa were the subject of the most persistent and possibly worst massacres of Native Americans in the USA, starting in 1853, in the Crescent City area. Now, I couldn’t corroborate the name “Preston Peak”, but I have to admit I was not surprised to hear that a sacred place to Native Americans was destroyed. There have been others.Pillar RockConsider Pillar Rock (briefly “Pilot Rock”) in the Columbia River. Once a monolith upwards of 75 feet tall, it was dynamited and flattened at the 25 foot level to install a navigation light:The Chinookan name for the monolith was Talapus. A cannery built nearby in 1877 used a likeness similar to Talapus for its canned salmon label, Pillar Rock brand. The rock was dynamited by 1922 when, according to the shipping news, a red navigation light was established. Like Talapus, the spring Chinook fishery in the Columbia was a diminished remnant of what it once was when Pillar Rock Cannery suspended operations in 1947.In a surprising epilogue Pillar Rock is still an actively used trade mark today, in 2025. The company now fishes the waters of Alaska for wild Sockeye to fill the modern day tins.It’s remarkable how Euro-Americans changed the landscape and practically wiped out the fishery, but the brand is the thing that perseveres. What does it say about us that this is the way things are?Let’s consider the intriguing story of Mount Coffin, up the Columbia River about 40 river miles.Mount CoffinThe geological feature that was first described to the historical record by Lieutenant William R. Broughton in 1792, and given the name “Mount Coffin”, was a prominent Chinookan canoe burial ground. It would have appeared much the same a half century later, when Charles...