Inns in the Mist : Beds and Breakfasts with Personality in Two Small Towns on Oregon’s Wind-swept Coast : Newport: Curling Up With A Good Book at the Sylvia Beach Hotel

When my sister moved to the Pacific Northwest last year--one more Southern Californian added to the Oregon-Washington juggernaut--I finally had a great excuse to explore the damp, silver-green central coast of Oregon. In planning my June visit, I envisioned picnicking, beachcombing, maybe whale-watching if nature cooperated. And of course, you can do all those things on the Oregon coast. But I never would have guessed that I would end up spending most of the weekend with a book in my hand, no closer to the beach than the view from a wing chair by a window in an old clapboard house.

That wasn’t the only misperception I started out with. My sister’s new home of Newport (Pop. 8,700) is situated on U.S. 101, about 275 miles north of the California border. Even driving the fastest route, about 900 miles up Interstate 5, then cutting over to the coast on 126 at Eugene, it’s a 16-hour trip. I knew this in my head, but by the time I pulled in to Newport, I knew it in my bones, in my entire musculoskeletal system. Next time I’ll fly to Portland, 116 miles to the northeast, and rent a car.

There were compensations to driving. Oregon 126 hits U.S. 101 at the town of Florence, the northern terminus of Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. From there, the road winds north through Yachats (pronounced YA-hots) and Seal Rock, towns that are not much more than a picturesque skein of shops and motels strung along the coastal highway. I had lost count of the number of shops devoted to gewgaws made of something called myrtlewood when I finally crossed the grand Art Deco-style bridge, built in 1936, that arches over Yaquina Bay, marking the entrance to Newport.

My sister’s first suggestion was to recover from the drive with a walk along Newport’s version of Fisherman’s Wharf and a stop for a pint of Shakespeare stout ($2.75) at the Bay Front Brewery. (If you bring in your own container, the brewery will fill it with one of its nine on-tap Rogue Ales for 13 cents an ounce, or $5 for a quart jar.) Bay Boulevard is more authentic than its San Francisco equivalent, with the deteriorating, waterlogged look and smell of a genuine fishing village. But it seems to be undergoing another kind of deterioration, into the tacky gloss of tourism--nautical-themed restaurant/bars boasting the best clam chowder, gift shops (more myrtlewood, which turns out to be a slow-growing native tree), even a Wax Works and a Ripley’s Believe It or Not. A stern-wheeler and other charter harbor cruises take off from the dock, as do whale-watching boats, from late November to early January and again from mid-March to late April.

Having quickly covered the waterfront, I drove across town to Nye Beach to check into my bed and breakfast inn. Those who have already joined the cavalcade to the Pacific Northwest often point out that the region is populated by literate, book-loving people. Maybe it’s because you can only look out at the descending mist for so long (annual rainfall: 68 inches) before you get the urge to pick up a book. The library of Newport’s Sylvia Beach Hotel is, by design, a perfect place for this sedentary pursuit. The green-and-yellow clapboard hotel, situated on a bluff, is a former resort that was being used as a flophouse when Goody Cable and Sally Ford, childhood friends from Portland, bought it for $144,000, refurbished it and opened it in 1987 as a hotel catering to book-lovers.

“We wanted to be around interesting people, with interesting ideas and opinions,” says Cable, who believes that “people who read are likely to be people who think.” The hotel, she says, “has offered me exactly what I’ve wanted--no TVs, no telephones or radios, just a big library. I’m constantly getting an education from the guests.”

It was Cable who named the hotel after Sylvia Beach, the literary patron who owned the legendary Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris in the ‘20s, and who published James Joyce’s controversial novel “Ulysses.” The top-floor library stretches the length of the hotel’s seaward side (“People are more receptive on the ocean,” Cable says), and reading guests can loll about on a motley collection of overstuffed chairs, sofas and ottomans. Every table and shelf is heaped with books and magazines. Tiny framed photographs peer down from the wall--Oscar Wilde looking suave and cynical, Sylvia Beach looking stern. That kind of crankiness would stand out at her namesake hotel, where the staff is friendly and accessible.

The literary theme extends to the 20 guest rooms; each is named for an author and decorated accordingly, with attention to detail and humor. The bed in the Edgar Allan Poe room, for example, is draped in blood-red velour, and an ax is suspended from the ceiling above, a not-so-gentle reminder of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” A switch will make the ax swing menacingly--”It’s hidden,” Cable says mischievously, “so one person can turn it on and upset the other person.” The crashing waves make an ideal background for rereading “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

The Dr. Seuss room is all bright primary colors, a trundle bed, a drawing table, even a goldfish in a bowl--an allusion to the spoilsport fish in “The Cat in the Hat.” One wall of the Alice Walker room is a mural of an African village. The Agatha Christie room is Victorian chintz--with a bottle marked “Poison” in the medicine cabinet. Each room has a selection of books by the author for whom it’s named and a journal where guests jot their musings.

Goody Cable is also the woman behind “Two Truths and a Lie,” the game we were encouraged to play at dinner that night at the hotel’s Table of Contents restaurant. Over the appetizer, a flaky filo cheese and onion tart, one of the guests at our table tried to hoodwink the others--a family from Salt Lake City--into thinking that he was a football player (lie) instead of an international folk dancer (truth). It felt a little like summer camp, but it broke the ice as we passed around the family-style dinner of Caesar salad, asparagus vinaigrette, poached halibut and rhubarb crisp.

Exhausted from the drive and mellowed from dinner, I was ready to throw myself on the mercy of the small double bed in the Willa Cather room. But a little pushy conversation with the desk clerk revealed a late cancellation for the Colette room. Moving there at the last minute raised the price of my $55-a-night stay to $115, but it also swept me from homespun Midwestern plainness into Gallic splendor. Colette is the Sylvia Beach version of a honeymoon suite, with a fireplace, gauzy white drapes, a wine-colored divan, three-sided ocean view and waves in Sensurround.

Using the same technique with the desk clerk, I ended up staying in four rooms in three nights: Cather to Colette to Poe to Seuss, a dizzying range of literary styles. And each evening I listened to the ocean while paging through books such as “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston and A. Scott Berg’s “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,” ducking into the nearby kitchen for the never-ending supply of coffee and tea and, after 10 p.m., mulled red wine.

After a Saturday breakfast of cinnamon rolls, fresh fruit and omelets, I tore myself away from the Sylvia Beach for a sisterly visit that included a walk to the Yaquina Bay lighthouse in the horizontally slanting rain. We also ventured out on the jetty, watching out for sneaker waves--the kind that can pull you into the surf before you know it. The ultimate “Toto, we aren’t in L.A. anymore” moment came when we went to a market for dinner provisions and the grocery bagger insisted on carrying our purchases to the car.

Saturday night I slept under a pendulum, then shook off the cobwebs of gloom with a drive to wholesome Tillamook, home of the cheese. The 60-mile trip, most of it up U.S. 101, was a journey of superlatives: “the world’s smallest harbor” (six-acre-square Depoe Bay), “the world’s shortest river” (the D River) and, two miles south of Tillamook on Highway 11, what the Tillamook Chamber of Commerce calls the “largest free-standing wooden structures in the world”--two wooden airship hangars, circa World War II, absurdly out of scale with the gently rolling farmland. We didn’t stop for the bus tour that takes you inside the hangars, but forged ahead to the cheese factory.

It was a disappointment. Since my last visit a decade ago, the Tillamook County Creamery Assn.’s factory has turned into the northern Oregon version of Disneyland, the parking lot full of tour buses. Old-fashioned cheese-making, in which curds are bathed in enormous sinks, has been mostly supplanted with an automated system of stainless-steel vats and tubing that doesn’t permit tourists to see much. Workers in white hats entertained us by mechanically shrink-wrapping orange bricks of cheese, but the real action was in the gift shop-deli, where shoppers languished in lengthy lines, hoping to pay for their cheese-and-sausage gift packs before the bus left without them.

With the savvy of a local, my sister suggested we double back to the Blue Heron French Cheese Co., a mile south of the cheese factory on 101. An Angora goat named Pierre guarded the nearly empty parking lot, and, inside, ebullient counter women immediately offered us samples of peppered, herbed and creamy Brie, cranberry catsup and half a dozen kinds of chutney. Over at the wine bar, for just $1 per person, we tasted half a dozen wines from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The knowledgeable patter of the wine master softened us into a spending mood, but we restrained ourselves to one bottle of Chardonnay, three kinds of Brie and crackers.

All day it had been cloudy and gray one minute, glorious sunshine and white clouds the next. But as we started our loop back to Newport on Three Capes Scenic Drive, it was pouring. We had an Oregon-coast-style picnic at Cape Meares State Park: glistening trees, waves crashing on the cliffs, cracker crumbs all over the car. The rain let up long enough for us to dash from the trail head to the lighthouse, built in 1890, and run our hands along the smooth ridges of its hand-ground crystal lens. A 20-mile scenic loop took us past forested coastal campgrounds and dramatic driftwood beaches. Winding past Cape Lookout and Cape Kiwanda, and the small fishing towns of Netarts and Pacific City, we were back at Newport.

My dirty little secret is that this traveler was more than happy to return to her hotel room. Excursions are fine, but I was looking at a 16-hour drive the next day. All I wanted to do was put my feet up and find out more about Max Perkins. Exploration and family obligation be damned, that is how I spent my last night of the trip.

A weekend in Newport wasn’t enough, and this is how I know: I had to steal the book in order to finish it. I’m not sorry, but I intend to send it back. I promise.

GUIDEBOOK

Newport, Oregon

Where to stay: The Sylvia Beach Hotel, 267 N.W. Cliff, Newport, Ore. 97365, (503) 265-5428. Rates: $55 to $115 double occupancy, including breakfast. Dinner (reservations required): $16.50 per person, served at 7 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 6 and 8:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. No smoking, entire building. No pets allowed, children under 10 discouraged.

Other sights:

Tillamook County Creamery Assn. cheese factory, 4175 Highway 101 North, Tillamook, Ore. 97141, (503) 842-4481.

Blue Heron French Cheese Co., 2001 Blue Heron Drive, off Highway 101, Tillamook, Ore. 97141, (503) 842-8281.

For more information: Contact the Oregon Economic Development Dept., Tourism Division, 775 Summer St., Salem, Ore. 97310, (800) 547-7842.