Hi! If you didn’t know, I’ve been hard at work chipping away at my newest video game essay, this one being on Life is Strange and its geography. When it's complete I’m thinking of hosting it on this site. I’m something like two thirds done, so in other words I’m deep in the throes of rewrites and edits. I thought I’d post an excerpt from it about a town called Bayocean, Oregon: The Resort That Killed Itself.
Before Life is Strange, before video games, and before my family (Or most white settlers for that matter) lived in the region, early West Coast developers were having something of an identity crisis. Everybody wanted to be like the East Coast, although removed by 3,000 miles of mountain and forest. One expression of this desire was the founding of Bayocean, a truly uninspired name for an uninspired goal: To make some money. The plan? To create the Atlantic City of the West. The foundations? On the famously rugged Oregon coast, very different from the humid, flat beaches of the East. Great idea, right?
Right from the beginning it appeared a fraught project. Things kicked off in 1906, and for the first decade, Bayocean was heavily battered by waves which made development difficult. At this time the town was only accessible by boat. The visionaries of Bayocean, the Potter family, had their work cut out for them. So, to aid development, the landscape of the spit was heavily altered. By the 1920s, the developers had managed to build a jetty to control the waters, pave a road leading off the peninsula, and build a town to host thousands of people. Key parts of Bayocean included its heated wave pool, its dance hall, and its many hotels. For all these developments, the optimistic town of Bayocean would pay the price.
It didn’t take long for the side effects of the jetty to begin. The altered currents accelerated erosion on the beach, quickly washing the sand out from under Bayocean. I must imagine that living in the town was dreadful, seeing everything you knew washing away. In hindsight, it seemed like a slow, decade-spanning decline, but in the scale of the ocean it happened in the blink of an eye: Those heavy winter storms which batter our coastlines were strengthened by the encroaching water, and practically engulfed the town. These storms came every few years… 1932… 1939… 1942… 1948… Eating away at Bayocean’s economy… Its infrastructure… Its homes… But it was the 1952 storm which put the final nail in the coffin-- The wrath of nature, provoked by human interference, overpowered the peninsula itself and turned it into an island. It was a floating (Or sinking?) ghost town. The last building washed away to the power of the continuing storms in 1971, and Bayocean was history.