Pacific City is not a city

There is no harbour. The fishing fleet launches off the beach, through the surf, and has done for more than a century.

It started with salmon. The Nestucca River used to be full of them, and the gillnetters took so many that in the 1920s the bay was closed to commercial fishing. The fishermen went to sea instead, from the one stretch of sand on this coast where a headland and a hundred-metre rock take the worst out of the swell.

The boat is a dory, flat on the bottom and about six metres long. Launching one goes like this. A truck backs the trailer fast into the surf, drops the boat between waves and gets out of the way. The crew spin the bow to face the breakers, climb in and go.

Coming home is better. The skipper lines up on the sand, opens the throttle and does not slow down. At the last moment the motor tilts up, and the boat rides a wave onto the beach and slides to a stop. People on the sand are expected to have noticed.

The early dories were pointed at both ends and rowed. Around 1960 someone squared off the stern and hung a motor on it, and by 1968 one in every three new boats licensed in Oregon was a Cape Kiwanda dory. The Dorymen’s Association counts about 250 in the fleet today.

On the third weekend of July the town holds Dory Days, as it has since 1959, and parades the boats through the streets on their trailers. It is the only traffic problem of the year that anybody looks forward to.

Cape Kiwanda is the headland at the north end of the beach. Most of the headlands on this coast are basalt. This one is sandstone, the colour of a digestive biscuit and about as durable.

It belonged to a banker from McMinnville named Barney McPhillips, whose family paid the taxes and let everybody walk on it. In February 1973 Portland General Electric took an option on the land. It had a nuclear power station in mind.

The company drilled, ran its seismic tests and announced in May that the ground was not stable enough. That August the legislature told the state to buy the cape, and it has been a park ever since.

The geologists were right. The cape is still falling into the sea, now and then with somebody standing on it. Between 2009 and 2016 seven people died on its cliffs. Most of them were teenagers, and most had gone past the fence. The fence and the signs are not decoration.

In August 2016 a group of visitors pushed over the Duckbill, a sandstone pedestal that had been on a great many postcards. Someone filmed them doing it. They said a friend had broken a leg on the thing, so they were removing a hazard. The police never found them.

The rock offshore is called Haystack Rock. So is a more famous one about 100 kilometres up the coast at Cannon Beach, which gets the postcards and was in a film about pirate treasure. Oregon has three Haystack Rocks altogether, which suggests a shortage of either names or imagination.

This one is the tallest. It stands about 100 metres out of the water, nearly 30 more than the one at Cannon Beach, and it sits 800 metres offshore, so nobody walks out to it at low tide and it has been left alone. On the charts it is Chief Kiawanda Rock.

Behind the beach is a very large sand dune. People climb it for the view and run down it for no reason at all, which is the correct use of a dune.

A place with no council still gets built by somebody. Here a good deal of it was built by two people.

Jeff Schons and Mary Jones came out from Portland in 1990 to spend a winter in a fishing cabin by the river, and stayed. In 1996 they opened Pelican Brewing on the beach, beside the place where the boats come in. In 1998 they built the Inn at Cape Kiwanda, which had the first hotel rooms in town with a view of the ocean. A camp of Airstream trailers and an RV park followed, and at the end of 2017 a 33-room lodge with a spa, where rooms start at about US$350 a night.

A hotel company from Washington State, Noble House, now part-owns and runs all four of the places to stay.

None of it went before a city council, there being no city. It is how a fishing beach with no mayor came to have a spa.

The county has started charging US$10 a day to park at the cape. The dories still go out at first light, and the brewery still faces the rock. You can sit there with a pint and watch a boat arrive on the beach at full speed, which is more than most cities can offer.