Timberline Lodge and Oregon State Hospital

June 30, 2009 — One’s a ski lodge; the other’s a mental hospital. Other than that, the two edifices at topic here have enough in common to be a set of matching bookends. For instance, they’re both nationally recognized historic buildings. They’re also both located in the state of Oregon. And, most randomly, they’ve both served as filming locales for classic movies starring Jack Nicholson. I visited them both in the span of an afternoon.

The Timberline Lodge was built on the outskirts of Portland in 1936 so close to the pinnacle of Mount Hood that if it were any closer it would be more see-saw than ski lodge. In fact, the very top of Mount Hood looms just behind the lodge in such a way that it makes me wonder what it’s like to have some sleeping Nordic god back up to one’s property. Since its dedication, which was presided over by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Timberline Lodge has been a haven for all those who love to go down inclined surfaces really fast in the cold.

Then, in the late 1970s, director Stanley Kubrick decided its exterior and setting looked just right to stand in for a place called the Overlook Hotel in a movie he was about to film. That movie was, of course, The Shining, and was based, of course, on the Stephen King book of the same name that told the tale of a snowbound off-season Colorado hotel caretaker who gets all axy on his family.

To either avoid or foment confusion (I don’t care which), I’m going to mention that the story was also made into a mini-series in 1997, although that one was filmed at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, and was bereft of anything close to the features of a good story. The one we care about here is the one that featured the murder of the voice of Hong Kong Phooey.

We visited the Timberline in early May, and although the weather was relatively pleasant, tons of snow still hid the ground. In fact, in some places, the snow slanted up in piles tall enough to reach the asymmetrical roof of the lodge, just like in the scene from the movie where Danny Torrance uses a snowdrift as an impromptu slide to escape from a high-up bathroom window right before Jack Nicholson’s Ed McMahon-with-an-ax impersonation.

In fact, the snow was so deep, and the ground on which the lodge sat so the opposite of flat that we couldn’t even walk around the hotel to better take in the whole thing. As a result, we basically hung around in the parking lot while hoards of snowboarders in plastic boots clunked around us like old-school Cylons.

The interior of the Timberline Lodge looks nothing like the interior of the hotel from the movie, which was actually filmed on elaborate sets in a studio in England. The inside of the hotel in the movie looks large and glamorous in an outdated way. The inside of the actual Timberline Lodge looks, well, like a lodge. Warm wood décor, giant stone fireplaces, cozy atmosphere, that kind of stuff. I probably don’t have to tell you no hedge maze outside, either, just an ancillary day lodge dating from the famed 1980s era of architectural achievement sitting incongruously in front and just across the parking lot from the Timberline.

The area has been a filming location for various other movies as well, although never so centrally and in no movie as famous as The Shining. However, one morbidly notable bit of cinematic trivia that could rock those scissors involves the death of Boris Sagal, best known perhaps for directing Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. During production for a mini-series that he was planning to film in the area, he walked into the still-spinning tail rotor of a helicopter that he’d just exited in the parking lot of the Timberline, cutting himself into the type of ribbons you wouldn’t want wrapped around your birthday presents. Of the 99 ways to die, helicopter propeller deaths rank among the most startling and stranger-than-fictions the axe-to-chest and freezing-in-a-hedge-maze deaths that combine to form the entire body count of The Shining.

Now, switching subjects to the much more pleasant topic of lobotomy, just 60 miles southwest of and a few altitude changes below Mount Hood stands the Oregon State Hospital, a grandiose, sprawling 130-year-old psychiatric institution used as the filming location for the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was based on a Ken Kesey book of the same name that illustrated how much it sucks to be trapped in a loony bin.

Starring in this film was, of course, Jack Nicholson, who can play crazy with the best, and often does so, from the aforementioned The Shining to Tim Burton’s Batman. However, in this movie he branched out a bit and played somebody not crazy pretending to be crazy, an effort that garnered him his first Best Actor Oscar from his peers.

Unlike my irregularly celebrated winter tradition of watching The Shining, I’ve only seen Cuckoo’s Nest once, so I don’t have much film commentary to add here. Basically, I can catch a Nurse Ratched reference when one is made and I know what Jack Nicholson looks like with a lobotomy scar. That’s it.

The fictional sanitarium in the book was set in Oregon, and the movie makers decided to film the movie on location there as well, choosing the impressive-looking Oregon State Hospital in the city of Salem.

Oregon State Hospital was built in 1883 and has the same back story of apparently every other historic asylum. Originally called the Oregon State Insane Asylum, it was built beautifully and massively out of brick and grand intentions before entering a period of inmate mis- and/or mal-treatment. However, instead of collapsing under social stigma, financial ruin, and the ever-present threat of residential development, as did its counterparts across the United States, the Oregon State Hospital instead merely caved to the weight of time, being deemed in 2005 as unsafe for continued use. The edifice is currently being demolished to make way for a more modern healthcare facility, although plans are in place to preserve a portion of the building as a museum dedicated to the history of the facility, including its use in Cuckoo’s Nest.

And that’s because unlike The Shining at the Timberline Lodge, Cuckoo’s Nest actually did film inside the Oregon State Hospital. In fact, the hydrotherapy device that Chief Bromden launches through the window when he titularly flies the titular cuckoo’s nest has been preserved by the hospital and will be included in that aforementioned museum. Snazzy.

As you can probably tell by that sudden and incorrect use of outdated slang, I don’t have much else to say about either the Timberline or Oregon State Hospital. That might be because I mostly just hung out in the parking lots of both of these buildings, but still...it seems like I should have more to offer since I stuffed a mountain, two historic structures, and a pair of classic movies into this article.

Actually, I do. These two sites and those two movies have one more thing in common, which I had forgotten about until I visited IMDb.com to double-check the spelling of “Ratched”: the already referenced Scatman Crothers, number one super guy. That is all.

West Coast Road Trip (Seattle to San Diego)

June 22, 2009 — I don't really consider this video an official OTIS entry. It's more like a trailer for future entries. And it's the most like one of those family vacation slideshows that have slipped into the vast and unfortunately still-frequently-mined realm of comedy cliche. For those of you more rational folk who'd rather me just sum up the days of intense toil, bottles of port, and bags of Twizzlers that I put into this video in a single easily assimilated phrase, it's basically an incomplete overview of the 2400-mile Seattle-to-San-Diego road trip we took in early May that has so far become one of my fondest memories to the point that Alzheimer's will have to pull it from my cold, dead gray matter to get it away from me.

Peter Iredale Shipwreck

June 8, 2009 — I'm not a scuba diver for all the reasons that you're not a scuba diver. It takes too much effort, money, time, education, and equipment for something that, unless you live on a tropical coast, are a biologist with a hit wildlife show, or were cast in one of the three major underwater movies that came out in the late 80s, pays off only infrequently. Also, as much as I like seeing ocean life, there are just much easier ways to do so without risking decompression sickness, air embolisms, and being dropped into a tree by a fire and rescue helicopter.

I don’t see how my envy of scuba divers could be any more evident.

One of the downsides, though, of being a landlubber like myself is that I don’t get to experience shipwrecks, and that is a tragedy. Well, I guess the shipwrecks themselves are technically the tragedy. Not getting to see their deteriorated remains slowly softening in the sopping sand is just a tragedy slightly compounded and an exercise in alliteration.

That’s because there's something uniquely compelling about a shipwreck, with its barnacled, fish-inhabited bulkheads, soullessly empty portholes, and flesh-picked human skeletons swaying in the current, all alone in the murkiness and pressure a thousand miles and fathoms from anything remotely human. It’s enough to make Gordon Lightfoot write a song.

In fact, to me the image of a shipwreck on the bottom of a dark ocean is highly underused as a symbol, and would, for instance, make a much better representation of death than the usual gravestone, Grim Reaper, Joan Rivers headshot, or motorcycle enthusiast. There’s just something so tangibly hopeless, alone, terrifying, and forgotten about a shipwreck. Wait, is that my view on death?

Regardless, when I found out that in Oregon you could see and enter an actual shipwreck, in the actual place that it wrecked, where it has lain in a more-or-less undisturbed and slowly decaying state for more than 100 years, without actually going into the water, I typed it into my West Coast itinerary hard enough to make my computer say “ouch” and then drew stars, arrows, and evil eyeballs around the item on the hardcopy (the last being my standard doodle and pretty irrelevant to the point). It’s the type of oddity that would have immediately gone onto my “Top Ten Oddities I Want to See” list had I not been able to visit it so soon after hearing about it.

The name of this ex-ship is the Peter Iredale. It was built in England in 1890, was christened for its owner, and is pretty much the classic-looking quadruple-masted brute that you’d think of for the term ship during a word association game...or a session of psychiatric analysis, whichever is your personal experience with such activities.

In 1906, just a week before Halloween (despite my phrasing, not the beginning of a ghost story, unfortunately), the ship was arriving at the Oregon Coast from Mexico, where the plan was for it to slip into the Columbia River and continue on to Portland. It was at that inopportune moment that the storm that is pretty much inevitable in every shipwreck story cropped up, and the ship found itself doomed to the proverbial wrong turn at Albuquerque. The good news (for people who value human life over a good story) is that all 27 people aboard were evacuated safely before it ran aground on the coast.

Despite the bad parking job, the ship remained relatively undamaged. However, subsequent attempts to tow it back out into its natural habitat failed, as the ship had sunk intractably and untractorably into the sand. So they gave up. Because sailors do that sometimes, I guess. The beach can often be as harsh a mistress as the sea.

And that’s the understandable part of the story. The rest I kind of don’t get. And, as loathe as I am to write in detail about my ignorance only to have a reader respond with a succinct and sensible answer that will make the next few paragraph obsolete, here I go.

Since that time, the Peter Iredale has just sat there on that beach in Oregon for more than a century, weathering tides, jungle-gym-ing beach goers, uh...weather, and—once during World War II—a Japanese bombing. And I don’t know why.

I mean, I know why the carcass abides. The ship was made from iron and steel, and, although much of it was salvaged for scrap, what was unusable was left beached...and metal likes to stick around like an alcoholic party guest. However, after having its bones picked clean, it seems to me like the rest would have been removed for reasons of safety or aesthetics, or at least as busy work for some bored town council. Remember, this is the same state that dynamited a dead whale.

I mean, sure, a 100-year-old shipwreck is cool now, but at one point it was a six-month-old shipwreck and basically the equivalent of that jalopy your annoying and unsanitary neighbor allows to rust in his front yard. My confusion is further compounded by the fact that other shipwrecks along this part of the coast have been removed at various ranges of expense (for instance, the recent instance of the New Carissa).

Alternatively, since it has become a tourist attraction, I’m confused why the opposite hasn’t happened, that it hasn’t been carefully preserved and even more carefully exploited as one. Granted, part of what makes this oddity cool is the fact that it’s not touristy in a “pay admission, here’s a brochure and a wristband” kind of way. I’m not saying I want it to be that way, just that the fact that attractions get to that point makes complete sense. The fact that the Peter Iredale has not, doesn’t.

Of course, it’s not the only example of its kind along the Oregon coast. This is the Graveyard of the Pacific, after all. Every once in a while, some random shipwreck gets unearthed due to shifting dunes or changing tides. Few, perhaps, as old as the Peter Iredale, though, and certainly none so easily accessible.

But you know what? Sometimes asking why is just a dumb thing to do. I mean, it exists, and it’s worth seeing. The rest is just bad horse teeth.

The Peter Iredale is located in Fort Stevens State Park in Hammond, just above the Goonie-haunted town of Astoria. To get to the ship, just take the road named for it, which ends at a parking lot. The shipwreck is right there. You’ll be able to see it as soon as you step onto the beach, sitting there like the exposed and broken rib cage of a defenestrated burn victim. I’ve had harder times finding parking spots in my own driveway than finding this epic shipwreck.

We visited on a cold, gray, and windy weekday morning, so nobody else was there except a few clam diggers who found holes in the sand more interesting than the thing I had flown the width the country to see. We also hit it at low tide, so it was basically surrounded by sand. Not as cool an effect as seeing it surrounded by the shallow ocean of high tide, but definitely a little bit more worth it since we didn’t have to do any wading to get all tetanusy inside it.

As you can see by every picture in this article, all that’s left of Pete is a bit of the skeleton bow and a few masts, all corroded and barnacled to varying textures and shades of rust. No information or warning signs are staked into the ground around it, no fence or barricade stops you from climbing all over it. As I mentioned already, it’s just there. It does, however, look like any second it’s not going to be, pulled back into the sea or taken apart by that town council I’ve already made fun of, but I have no proof of that other than a Robert Frost poem and general cynicism about things.

In conclusion and to shift this topic back from “odd things” to “I’ve seen,” I'm not a beach person in the usual sense of the term. I find it maddeningly mind-numbing to just seal-bask in the sun, flip through some airport-level literature, moisten myself briefly in the ocean, and then repeat the process to a nice sand-encrusted brown hue. However, if I could find more stuff on beaches like the magnum Peter Iredale, I'd proudly count myself among the bleached, sand-clotted, and melanoma’d.