Oysterville, WA – April 5, 2021

[Martin Hash]

My dad hadn’t been to Oysterville on the Long Beach peninsula is Southern Washington since he went there with us thirty years ago, when the kids were still young. We’d gone to go camping but didn’t realize how busy all the campsites would be. Luckily, we were less than 2 hours from home so just returned to our own beds for the night but the trip seemed unfulfilled. For the past 3 decades, I’d mentioned Fort Canby, how it was built to defend the Columbia river from the British who were siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War, but nobody had ever heard that story before; after a while, I thought maybe I’d misconstrued my memory of the place. That’s where we stopped first, on Cape Disappointment, named for self-referential reasons. Now my dad walks with a cane, and I wasn’t sure if he could make the climb, so I went on ahead and waved him up, but first I read the information sign: yep, I was right, it wasn’t a flawed memory, Fort Canby is Civil War era, here on the West Coast, and that’s cool.

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The restaurant my dad remembered in Oysterville, situated next to the ocean, surrounded by huge piles of oyster shells, was closed but it looked just the same, and the port-a-potties were open so that relieved the “disappointment” somewhat, so-to-speak. But close-by Ilwaco was full of seafood restaurants, and we stopped at the most local seeming, “The Crab Pot.” They had bubbling seawater tanks filled with live lobsters, crabs, clams, and of course, oysters. We didn’t even need menus: a dozen raw oysters on the half shell each, along with a cup of fresh crab meat. Gwynne got the ultra-fresh clam chowder. It was delayed by a few decades but my dad finally got to fully check-off Oysterville.

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