About the year 2000, I became the editor of a little daily newspaper in Crescent City, Calif., which sits on a lovely stretch of Pacific Ocean coastline just south of the California/Oregon border. When I was there, it wasn't the kind of picuturesque seaside town you sometimes find with boardwalks lined with quaint shops, bistros and galleries. Instead, it was an isolated, hard drinking little town on the ocean side of the Coast Range behind what the locals call the Redwood Curtain. Each fall fishing boat crews waited with anticipation for negotiations to settle the price of crab before steaming out of the harbor to catch as much as they could haul.
I tell you this to explain it was not much of a tourist destination, but, despite that, a large number of people managed to find the place. I discovered most visitors didn't mind the lack of tourist amenities. They just liked being on the coast, looking over the ocean from an eroded bluff or walking the wave line on a pebbled beach. They were happy to be there with their toes at the continent's edge.
Edges. They are intriguing. The end of one thing and the start of something else. Finite in their conclusion and infinite in what lies beyond. A journey's end and perhaps an embarkation point.
Today, at the end of my newspaper career, like those hapless travelers piling up at the coast, I find myself on an edge of sorts. It is not an unhappy place, but it is very unfamiliar. Ultimately, this site is an exploration of that - part reminiscence, part family history, part observation. Maybe some musing? Who knows? With luck, it will help me look beyond my stopping point, here on the edge again.