It rained the way it only rains at the mouth of the Columbia, sideways and from below, so that an umbrella was a kind of joke you told yourself on the way to the car. That was Tuesday, the twelfth of October, 1982. I know the date because it was twenty years to the day since the Columbus Day Storm, and every man who sat down at my counter that morning wanted to tell me where he'd been in '62 when the wind took the roof off the Safeway or put a Sitka spruce through his brother-in-law's Buick.
I'd been nineteen in '62, three weeks into a job I'd only meant to keep for the winter, and I had spent that storm under a booth table at the Sandbar Cafe with a coffee pot in my lap because I was afraid to set it down. I was still at the Sandbar in 1982. I'd been there so long I could tell you by the sound of a man's boots on the mat whether he wanted the menu or just the coffee.
The Sandbar sat on Marine Drive in Astoria, Oregon, on the river side, propped up on old pilings like most of the waterfront, so that on a big tide you could feel the floor breathe a little under your shoes. It had been a net loft before it was a cafe, and Toivo Huhta, who owned it and cooked in it, had never seen any reason to hide that. There were still iron hooks in the ceiling beams, painted over in a green that Irja, his wife, called sea foam and everybody else called hospital. There were fourteen stools at the counter, chrome and red, and seven booths down the window wall, and from every one of those booths you could look out across the gray water to the bridge, four miles of it, swooping up at our end high enough for the freighters to pass under and then running low and flat across the river to Washington like somebody had gotten tired of building it halfway. On a clear day it was the most beautiful thing in Clatsop County. On a day like that Tuesday you could see the first two piers of it, and then nothing, just rain and the idea of a bridge.
By ten in the morning the breakfast rush, such as it was in 1982, had come and gone. Bumble Bee had closed the big cannery in 1980, and the plywood mill in Warrenton had cut its second shift in the spring, and the gillnetters were talking about the fish counts the way people talk about a relative in the hospital. On the little Zenith television Irja kept on a shelf by the register, the morning news out of Portland had said the national unemployment rate was over ten percent for the first time since before the war, and Eino Saari,