This Space for Rent

An incident on the trail

We went down to the coast on Saturday, to avoid the friday "it'slabordayandwe'vegottogettothecoastrightnow!!!" rush, and, aside from the perpetual traffic jam in Seaside, manage to completely avoid it. But on saturday we encountered traffic problems of a completely different sort; we were walking down a path alongside the Necanicum River and were apparently not going quite fast enough, so we were passed, at a dead run, by a fellow vacationer.

This is not exactly what I'd call a wild deer; we were walking towards the ocean, as was the deer, and when we abruptly stopped (and I started scrounging in my purse for the Pentax) it simply sped up and went into the passing lane to get around us. It only stopped when it had gotten around us and realized that another group of vacationers was walking towards it on the same path, and that that other group of vacationers included an unleashed dog. That was finally enough to encourage it to abandon its normal plans and to head up over the top of the sanddunes and into the scrub forest that occupies the backdunes around Gearhart.