I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles

Everyone loves a view.  A vista.  A perspective of a familiar scene from a different point of view - usually higher than where you are used to seeing things from.

This is the Astoria Column.  The name says it all.  It's in Astoria, and it's a column.  So how can a column be interesting?  Especially one that is not holding anything up?   One that is just standing there, all alone in the middle of a patch of grass, doing nothing but being tall?

Well the Astoria Column is interesting for at least two reasons. One is for the beautiful murals painted in a spiral around its exterior.   They tell the story of Astoria in pictures.

The other is that you can get to the top of this column.  You can go inside and climb the 164 step spiral staircase (go ahead, admit it, you love a spiral staircase.  Everyone does.)  and emerge at the top onto a little open air observation deck.  If you are lucky, and I mean really lucky - this is the Oregon coast after all - you will do it on a warm, clear day and when you get there you will be able to see 360 degrees of forever.  

To the west is the horizon where the ocean meets the sky.  The place where you can still see the ledge where people must certainly drop off because the earth simply cannot be round.  

To the south you see the exotic formations of the coast range.   And today, its so warm, you these formations remind you of Hawaii.

To the north, is the Columbia River where its 4 mile wide mouth meets the Pacific, and beyond, starting somewhere in the middle along a watery but invisible boundary, an entirely different state begins.

To the east, the Columbia River dominates - leading all the way across the state forming its northern border.  

GroveAtopia's best and most accessible views are from the top of Mt. David.  It's our community backyard, rising 880 feet above where most of us live.  Every GroveAtopian knows and loves Mt. David and despite the fact that it has always been privately owned nearly GroveAtopian has been to the top.

Every time I climb it I am re-amazed and how just the slightest rise makes all the difference. Being even just a few hundred feet up gives you a perspective of where we live that gives you pause.  You simply didn't know those hills over there, and that mountain over there were so close.  And look at all the hills and knolls that surround us.  You didn't really understand where we sit on our little southern piece of the great Willamette Valley until you saw it from this perspective.

A long time ago GroveAtopia had its own Astoria Column of sorts.  It was an oil well.  It sat at the top of Mt. David.   As the story goes, a certain Reverend Olson came to town in the 1920s and convinced a lot of prominent GroveAtopians that there was oil atop Mt. David.  Many of them invested a lot of money in his oil well, only to have him build the derrick, dig the hole, and skip town with all the money.

But the hole is still there.  And the story still lingers.  We could re-build the oil well and this time, instead of drilling for oil, or pretending to, we could build a viewing platform at top of the oil derrick, which would sit atop its original sight on Mt. David.

Go ahead and imagine it.  You know the view from there is divine.  And you know others who haven't seen it would agree,  if only the derrick and the viewing platform were actually there so they could really see it, because everyone loves a view.