Randall Sullivan - Graveyard of the Pacific

32:35And so it would have, chances are it would have been wrecked somewhere and probably destroyed. and they were determined to not lose that boat. So the mermaid though, and I think this kind of gave me the real picture for the idea of the wind and the culmination of the surf or the ocean because I think you comment that it's believed to be that the mermaid would seem like in my mind like the low of a wave. In effect, it gets at the bottom of a wave and the force that came on top of it ended up driving it into Peacock Spit. In other words, driving it and sticking the boat in the sand, which it never left.

33:16Yeah, that's essentially what happened to the mermaid. It just happened to be in a trough as a wave came down on it. I mean, generally you're trying to slide up and over the waves as they come in, but they just got positioned. They were being towed. the tow rope broke and they had no, you know, no power themselves. So they were completely at the mercy of the sea. So, so now that we hope you've done a great job. And by the way, the book does a great job on, on this history. So let's get into your journey. Given all that, you know, you, you two men wanted to cross the bar with all this risk present on a trimarine.

34:01Talk to us about that. Well, you know, the real adventure of crossing the bar, we knew, would be to do it in a non-motorized craft, especially in a really light non-motorized craft. A trimaran is essentially a sail kayak. It's about 19 feet long, but only about less than two feet wide. It has one sail, though. And it's a Hobie boat, and it has what's called mirage drive, which is basically pedals that actually do provide some additional acceleration out there. So you have, between the sail and the pedals, some ability to keep in motion and stay in motion. But again, it's non-motorized, so the impact of the waves, especially at the mouth, is something you just hope it will navigate.

35:03But the trimaran also has two—it's not simply a kayak. It has a pair of pontoons. They look fragile because they're about six inches wide each, but they do provide a lot of stability and buoyance. buoyancy. But at the same time, you know, they can and will, and in our case did come apart if they're sufficiently pounded. But anyway, you know, we, my friend Ray said, you know, this would be way easier if we just, you know, went across in jet skis. And I said, yeah, but I don't want it to be easy. And he understood that he understood that, you know, only by, you know, doing something that really challenged us and that involved the actual risk of our lives.

35:52Were we going to feel like we'd actually done something? Yeah, we all grew up as kids with spare the rod and spoil the child. And in many cases, there were unskilled dads applying that edict. And when I say unskilled, meaning not able to separate their own temperament and tempers with that. So talk about Ray and yourself having that same rough relationship with your fathers. And you kind of expound on how maybe cathartic this experience was for you. Well, Ray and I had been friends for more than 20 years. But the friendship was sort of always founded on and anchored by the shared experience we had as boys, essentially of being beaten as boys, and severely in both cases.

36:54And by fathers who were, in a lot of ways, you know, venting their own troubles, their own demons on us. Very different. I mean, my father was a man of great accomplishment and presence and raised not so much. He had inherited wealth that he was squandering, basically. So there were different situations, but we shared that sense. And I think we both understood that you could call it compulsion, I guess, But this need that we had to do difficult and dangerous things was rooted in those childhood experiences, that there was something we got from a sense of mastering, you know, difficult things and dangerous things, surviving them, that provided some sort of relief from, you know, the lingering pain we carried from our childhoods.

37:58And this was, but this time we sort of explicitly bonded with each other around the idea of this is going to be, you know, a catharsis. This is going to be, you know, will we put that all to rest? And so we shared a lot with each other about what had happened. I mean, he told me things about his childhood. I don't think he'd ever told anyone, and I told him things about mine. And that was all part of our preparation for crossing the bar, even as we were studying the bar. I was studying the history of the bar. It all became sort of one project in my mind and in his too. so explain the routes that you did during your practice run because you guys you know work you did stuff inside the bar you were outside the bar at times you know explain that versus what was your final route and i i just so the audience knows there's a great map in the book of of your guys final uh descent through the bar well we were you know we were joined by a third party and uh And Kenny Smith, who is one of the great watermen on the West Coast, can basically navigate any craft.

39:11And he's somebody nobody ever forgets meeting because he's six feet, nine inches tall. And he's a scientist to boot. So he agreed to go across in his own boat. But he helped us decide the path and the time. I initially thought we were going to go by the South Channel next to Clatsop Spit But I think in large part, as scientific and rational as he is Kenny had this sort of irrational terror of Clatsop Spit He had a phobia about it So he insisted that no, you've got to go by the North Channel Next to Cape Disappointment and Peacock Spit And, you know, we relied on his opinion about the best day to do it.

40:04I was soliciting the opinion of others. I had Tom Malloy, who ran the Coast Guard Rescue School. I was checking with him, too, on, you know, what would be the optimal times and conditions. But Kenny had said that, no, we had this perfect opportunity on this day in July, when there'd be a low pressure system just sitting there, the waves would be, the ocean would be relatively calm, the next wave train, as they're called, wouldn't be coming in for like 24 hours. and the wind would be just enough to fill the sail, but not enough to pose a real danger. So it sounded great. And it was until those waves came in much sooner than expected.

40:54I also liked when you guys were launching, everyone at Ilwako is looking at you. And obviously you and Ray are, what, 70 years old at the time? We were 69, about to turn 70. This was part of it. Yeah. Becoming men at 70, right? You weren't deep sea charters. Let me tell you that. Yeah. So everyone's looking at you as you're launching from the boat launch and they're thinking, those guys are going to die. Yeah. Well, I mean, as we were putting the boat together, they kept finding some reason to come by and look at it. And they all said exactly the same thing. You're going to cross the bar in that thing?

41:35so uh so so so you're out there you're in this unusual vehicle uh to say the least uh and and then you see a great white shark i mean what talk to us what that what that felt like or what was going through your mind as you saw that animal well it was more it was sort of that this too because i hadn't even thought about that we actually had did have some concern about the sea lions who were, they'd surfaced near us a couple of times. And they're, these are big animals. I mean, they're like 600 pounds, the bulls, and realized that one of them came up right under us, we'd be in the water. So we were watching out for them and prepared to, you know, try to fend them off with our oars.

42:20Each one of those sea lions eats an average of 2 ,000 pounds of salmon a year, which is astounding to me. Well, I mean, and that's, that's one of the reasons people really think they need to be culled because they have made a huge impact on, on, uh, salmon fisheries and, you know, and they've just kept moving further, you know, I mean, they're, yeah, they're, I mean, they're all, all through the Willamette river at the Bonneville dam. Yeah. By the way, I, I, all these things we've been talking about, whether we're talking about sea lions and salmon runs, it reminds me of a physics equation. Like earlier you said, you know, by, uh, fortifying the South jetty.

42:57It did improve the South jetty. It just ruined the North jetty. Right. In other words, these are adaptive environments. Equal and opposite reaction. So, you know, one theory that wasn't tested in this adaptive environment that we're talking about was, and I found this very peculiar. I wonder if this could ever even get to a political debate, but you talked about in your book that there was a theory running through Congress back in the 30s that peacock spit could just be removed. and that would fix everything. Okay. I mean, how crazy is this? I mean, what was the rationale at the time? And then, I mean, does that even seem plausible or possible?

43:37Well, it's completely implausible. And it was ridiculous to people who actually lived at the coast or near the mouth of the river. And, you know, the Astoria paper said, well, you know, why don't we just move the Cascade mountains, you know, to increase rainfall or, you know, we could just, maybe you should shift Multnomah falls to the West Hills of Portland so more people can enjoy them, it would make as much sense and be as plausible. But they were so unconscious of the physical reality at the mouth of the bar and what getting rid of peacocks would entail that for a while, the main argument was whether WPA workers should be the ones doing it or not.

44:20Sure. until the people who lived here said, there is exactly zero chance you're going to remove Peacock's bed. Yeah. So you talk about your dad's career as a walking boss for Mattson Lines. I think the really interesting part of your book with this was not when you were living, obviously, near Astoria. It was when you moved away to Portland. Explain how much money your dad made relative to other, I'll call it blue-collar oriented jobs like that. But what kind of neighborhood that put you into Portland and thus what kind of culture that dropped you into when you moved? Yeah, well, I was growing up in a small town on the coast, Coos Bay, where most of my friends or classmates, dads, you know, either worked on the docks or were loggers or were fishermen.

45:13It was a very blue-collar and rough world. And my dad was sort of, you know, he was the very top guy. You know, he'd become a walking boss basically is sort of a super foreman. They are the ones in charge of the loading and unloading of ships. And it's usually something that you train for. You work as a longshoreman for many years and, you know, eventually you rise to that position, which is very well paid. He got it when he was in his 20s, which is still the youngest. He's still the youngest person who ever was promoted to walking boss, which is even more remarkable. I mean, I have to, obviously, there's a lot of admiration, I feel, for this man who did terrible things to me.

46:01But he had been on track to be the youngest merchant marine captain and was a first mate by the time he was 26. People were predicting he would be the first person promoted to captain in his 20s since, you know, like the 19th century or the early 20th. My mom made him quit and come ashore. So he started working as a longshoreman and very short order rose to the very top position. The opportunity to go to Portland, which he was being pressured to take by my mother, who wanted the hell out of that little town on the Oregon coast, resulted in us moving to Portland. And what his income was then exactly, I don't know.

46:45The very top ones now make about$400 ,000 a year, the walking buses. And he was the top one of his time. So he was making something commensurate to that. So I, from going from this blue collar community where, you know, everybody was kind of in the lower middle, we moved into a really upscale suburb. And I was going to a high school that the Oregonian described as, you know, Portland's country club high school. You know, and suddenly at a place where everybody else's dad was going to work in suits and ties. But my dad was still going to work in Frisco jeans and Pendleton shirts, but he was making more than most of those executives.

47:24Which, by the way, nowadays Pendleton shirts, they cost a lot. I mean, those are nice shirts. But Randall, now that you describe this, I'm almost sure that your dad knew my dad. And let me tell you, one of the ways I know is kind of humorous. There's two things my dad hated, and you brought this out great in the book. One was wind. as a ship pilot or a boat skipper, dad just hated the wind, right? He always, he'd just cuss at it when we'd get out to go across the bar. The second thing is he just hated it when the longshoreman went out on strike. Oh, my dad would go into this, he'd go into this big diatrap, right?

48:02Because that was cutting off his ability to do his thing, right? And of course they, you know, they're just doing their own economic interest. But that makes me sure that now that I stop and think about, they had to have known each other because one was at the top of the food chain with the one that interacted, you know, at the time my dad had to be a half an hour at the ship before the ship left. There had to be constantly interaction, you know, with the longshoremen finishing up what they were doing, et cetera, et cetera. It's crazy. So it wasn't that large a group of people in those days. I think there was 35 Portland ship pilots, right?

48:41My dad came in in 66. By the way, just so you know, on your note, when I was reading your book, Randall, my mom has told me that dad, since, you know, my grandfather was a Columbia River ship pilot and made good money outside of that at times, that my dad kind of lived on Snob Hill. So when you were explaining your Tony neighborhood in Portland, I was like, oh, I can hear my mother echoing through some of your story. But that's Snob Hill in Washougal. We're not talking about Snob Hill in Portland. We're talking about that's a little nicer. My dad never moved out of Washougal. So so let's jump to Flavel.

49:17It was the first real hero of the bar pilots. And for our listeners that were dealing with the bar pilots at the mouth of the river, you used the General Warren's demise as a picture to describe his heroism. Well, the General Warren was what made Flavel a public hero. He was already widely admired as the best pilot ever on the bar. He knew the mouth of the river like no one else. But he had, in the case of the General Warren, you know, it was a cumbersome ship that in those days, I mean, it's strange to think of what the cargo was. There were lots of people, but there were more live hogs and lumber and many other goods.

50:03And so he had actually taken the ship into the Columbia and out across the mouth where he put off as you normally would. But a storm just happened to come up. It was, you know, the immediacy of it was totally startling to the people at the time. And it was an intense cold front. You know, the weather couldn't be predicted. This is, you know, in the 19th century like it can now. So, you know, suddenly they're in the teeth of this, you know, hurricane winds, but also ice, you know, it's filled with icy rain and even snow. and the ship is in real trouble right away. I mean, the main mast is stripped off by the wind and they watch it catapulting across the water.

50:58It was that bad. But they did have a way to communicate with shore. They still had a system of that. And so he sent to shore that he needed Flavel. He wanted only one pilot to come back and that was Flavel. So Flavel is brought out by his ship, his pilot boat, and comes aboard, even though it's very dangerous to do so. But then he has to tell the captain that, you know, we're not going to be able to go in across the bar until the storm subsides. The captain can't accept it, and the passengers are all terrified. Everyone is pushing him to, you know, no, no, bring us in, please. He resists as long as he can and finally says, OK, we'll try.

51:49And they don't get very far before the ship starts to literally come apart. And the captain decides that the only way to save the ship and the cargo is to run it aground. Flavel tries to argue against that, says, you know, just, you know, let me I can keep this thing afloat if you let me. But the captain insisted on running it aground. And so now they were in real trouble. Nobody had any way to get there or even to know the distress they were in. They had one lifeboat left. All the others had been disintegrated by the storm. So who's going to get in that lifeboat and go across the bar? They were able to assemble, I think it was 11 people.

52:36They were passengers and crew who were willing to get in the lifeboat, but only a flabble commanded it. And as he's getting in, the captain calls, okay, okay, don't, no, come back, come back. But by then he's already pushed off. And he says, look, I will return if I live. That's all I can promise. Amazingly, he got the boat and all aboard into shore Found the captain of another ship Convinced him to let him borrow his whale boat Take that back out with the crew And see if he could help save the General Warren But by the time he made it, the General Warren had disintegrated completely And all he found were pieces of it and the dead in the water And on the shore Flavreau was also involved with the Great Republic's rescue in 1879.

53:30It ran into problems as well. Can you explain those problems? But can you also teach our listeners about, you know, the really interesting payload it had? Yeah, well, the Great Republic had a very complex payload. But, I mean, probably of greatest interest to people would be it had a lot of gold and silver from the Comstock mine and from the U.S. Mint. And so it was that alone was worth what today would probably be hundreds of millions of dollars. But I don't think I don't think that was the main focus. It was saving the people. But it really ran into trouble because they used a pilot who was Flavel and the ship's owners.

54:16And he even though he was warned to that he was getting too close to Sand Island. And Sand Island is this big sand island that was created by the dredging and that was done in the North Channel, mostly, of the Columbia. But even though it was relatively calm weather, he got too close. And when a gust pushed it up against, it was enough to heave a hole in the side. And so the ship began to take on water And eventually they managed to get all of the people off They didn't all survive But many horses drowned too that were on that ship But Flavel came back and managed to Well, he did his best, I would say to salvage the ship and the goods aboard.

55:12He wasn't entirely successful in that, but it was considered a pretty heroic effort. He'd done, just before that, he'd had another bit of public heroism where he went out to try to take the crew off another boat that had foundered, another ship that had foundered. And he did that. He saved everyone aboard by basically loading them all into lifeboats and chaining the lifeboats together and keeping them from taking them back and forth over the waves at the mouth of the channel through the night long enough for a ship to get there and take them aboard. And that was considered a very heroic deed too.

55:54Yeah, because the interesting part is back to the vastness. I think this is where your story reminded me of the power and the vastness of the Columbia River. The Comstock mine is in Virginia City, Nevada. Um, it's nowhere near the Columbia river. Um, but yet at the same time, that was the easiest way to get something like that out to port and out to, you know, uh, you know, much, uh, you know, vaster network across the world. Um, so the bar pilots association, uh, was tasked with crossing the bar with commercial ships and you give some of the history of who oversaw that association, what that association was, et cetera.

56:32Obviously we have the, you can Google online Columbia river Bar Pilots Association, and that's a trade organization just like the Columbia River Ship Pilots. Yeah, the law of the United States is that when a ship comes within 25 miles of the coast of the United States, it has to have a local pilot on it. So you also talked about how they boarded those ships. Why did it take so long for them to quit boarding the ships on what you called, and I love this, idiot sticks versus versus using a helicopter like they do today? Well, I mean, helicopters just didn't have the quality of helicopters. And I don't know if it was that nobody had thought of it, really.

57:14But helicopters were generally had a military purpose. They weren't used in in many industrial settings. I think it was believed that, they couldn't handle the winds out there. But in fact, ones of sufficient size could. But until that time, yeah, they had basically the pilot boat, which was a fair-sized vessel and well-made, although still it was dangerous to be aboard it too. But basically these guys would have to climb into a rowboat, and the idiot sticks were the oars they used to get from the pilot boat to the main ship, and then they had to climb up on ropes. Rope ladders, yeah. And they still often do get on and off ships on those rope ladders.

58:13Even though they're not often dropped on the deck directly. They aren't taken out. Often the boat will go out, they'll be on a raft or something, and the helicopter will pick them up, lift them up. But they usually come down off the boat on those ropes still. As recently as probably 1990, Captain Robert Morrison, a good friend of our family, he fell from the ship onto the deck of the pilot boat. And as a retirement gift was given that hunk of the steel plate was severely dented by him landing 20 feet at 250 pounds on that. And it sat in his backyard when I went to visit him. In talking about the outcome of the investigation from the sinking of the Iowa, you said something intriguing to us.

59:10Quote, what the words misjudged and failed should evoke in me, I decided after repeating them any number of times, was a firm conviction that the mouth of the Columbia River should never, under any circumstances, be approached without a sense of deference. And then I will add, I've been across the bar a hundred times, and until a few charters in the most recent years, I was always with a master mate and pilot crossing the bar. And they would many times not go out if there were small craft warnings, but yet amateurs would. So in our world, we call this stock market failure. Yeah, the idea that most people don't do well in the stock market.

59:49I thought a lot about this analogously. Crossing the bar is like taking risk in stocks. And so our question is, isn't your boat just explaining a great history of Columbia River bar failure? Yeah, the downside risk. Because no one talks about the people that survive, right? It's the failures. The failures are the more interesting stories, no doubt. But I mean, although, I mean, there were successful rescues at times. But yeah, I mean, the stories of, you know, these men at sea trying desperately to survive and often not doing so. You know, that's the drama. We always think about it like, you know, everybody's got that uncle that failed in the stock market, lost their entire net worth.

1:00:31OK. And that's the bar history has the story of everyone's uncle who died there or the ship that died. You know, I mean, so we found it just incredibly interesting. And this and this continues, because even today, you know, we were talking about there's there's in every year, there's three or four people that die on the bar just from doing something they shouldn't have been doing. So to keep going with that logic, teach our listeners what happened as recently as 2006 to Captain Kevin Murray when he attempted to climb down from a log boat to get onto the Chinook Tug. Well, he mistimed his descent, which is very easy to do out there.

1:01:08The waves are unpredictable. and in the fraction of a second between his release from that ladder he was climbing down to drop onto the boat, the boat moved enough that he went straight into the water and spent a long time there. It's actually amazing that he survived that. It's crazy. With Captain Murray, was he the gentleman that they found 75 miles away, his body? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he basically, his beacon made him survive was he decided that he would just shoot the one light he had, the flashlight he had, straight up into the sky in the hopes that maybe somebody would see it. And a helicopter going by did see it, and they managed to drop him a rope.

1:02:02You know, you mentioned a log boat here. I must mention to you that when Mount St. Helens blew up, my dad was on a log ship in Longview and within 15 minutes of the mountain blow up was completely submerged in mud as that contributing system. Right. The Toodle River to the Kellis River to the Columbia River, adding to your original geography of the of the river. So on your journey, you mentioned something that I, after crossing the bar, I can think about it and I can see it in picture. But you mentioned a standing wave. Explain what a standing wave is at the Columbia River Bar. Well, there is a standing wave.

1:02:46I thought it was something sort of mythic, but it is a place, that point, where the tension between the outgoing river, the current of the Columbia River, the powerful current of the Columbia River, and the incoming tide of the Pacific Ocean meet, and there is enough sort of an equilibrium of tension. And the water just sort of seems to stop just in this one spot. And it's the high point of the bar. And you get this sense when you're there that you're like sitting on top of a small mountain of water and you're not going anywhere anymore, except maybe sliding sideways slightly. It's a terrifying and exhilarating experience.

1:03:37so there's a lot of shipwrecks and much of your and ray story that we didn't talk about today which like i said earlier i mean there's crazy stories that you dug up really and i just love and again it reminds me when you go to the maritime museum there and they have the little map where you can turn on the light of a boat and you hit a boat you know you could hit like for the you know um for like william and ann and it would light up the map of where that went down and you You have a good picture of many of the shipwrecks you talk about. But what did we not talk about today that you think needs to be mentioned from your book?

1:04:11Well, we didn't talk about the relationship of the native people to the mouth of the river and how they – I mean, the very first bar pilot was Chief Concomly, a one-eyed clatsop chief who pretty kindly greeted the first European visitors. and he guided nearly every ship that came in or out across the bar for quite some time. Of course, he didn't do it strictly as an act of beneficence. He was a businessman. He used the leverage he got from being the favorite of the European ship captains to give him power over the rest of the tribes' upriver, trading power. He would get goods at a price far below what he would trade them to the tribes upriver.

1:05:08But so there's that. And sort of the end of a whole way of life that happened when the Europeans arrived. Sure. I mean, the story of the first Spanish sailors who drifted ashore. and they were actually adopted into the tribe, but no one knew that they were marking the beginning of the end of that way of life. Other than chartering a fishing trip, how would you recommend our listeners experience? If they read your book and then want to experience the Columbia River Bar, besides going on a fishing trip in a large charter boat, what other ways are there to experience this? Well, you know, an exhilarating but somewhat risky way to do it is to go on jet skis.

1:05:55And that is done, you know, with some regularity. And it's, you know, if you've got a powerful motor, you know, you can, you know, it makes it a lot easier to get over the bar. And they do. So, you know, you're going to do a, you know, sort of a jarring hop, skip and jump across in a jet ski. but it gives you that full immersion experience of what it is to be on that water. And again, I would only suggest it for someone who is really physically fit and is willing to accept a certain amount of risk. Because if, for instance, your jet ski's motor should die, you'd be in some real trouble. And that water's cold.

1:06:41Yeah, by the way, you're not talking to a couple of gentlemen that I think are going to do that. But if any of our listeners do, we would love to hear that. I'm sure Randall would love to hear that he's out there, you know, getting people excited about taking fun risks. Under the other heading of a more jarring experience here recently, we got one other question for you. So you are a member of the Writers Guild of America, and we're shareholders in Warner Brothers Discovery. What's your take on the writers and actors' strike and where it may settle? Well, you know, this is a case where the writers and actors really see this as existential.

1:07:18I'm a somewhat detached party from that. I haven't been working actively as a screenwriter in years, but I do derive, I have derived a significant part of my income from my things being developed into, for film and television. I had something that looked like it was almost certainly going to get made right before the strike. So I do feel very personally invested in that. But with the advent of streaming, writers, the producers, especially Netflix, sort of began creating what are called writers' rooms. And individual writers would be run through there very quickly, so they couldn't get any sort of a sustaining job like you used to have if you worked in television.

1:08:04The residuals are not like they used to be in television. So for the bottom 90 % of writers, especially in television, it was becoming a tough gig. The very top, the showrunners are still making out because they give a piece of the show and they're not only really well paid, but they've got an ownership stake. So that, you know, less than 10 % of Writers Guild members, you know, have been doing very well, but the rest, it's been getting worse and worse and worse. They're concerned, naturally, about how AI might affect their futures. and the actors are too with the idea that they would do some work and it would be then manipulated or used or reused by an artificial intelligence program and they wouldn't get paid for it and wouldn't have any control over it or ownership of it.

1:09:04So those are issues that I think they're pretty desperate to get resolved and I think that's why it's gone on so long. and the producers have their side in it too. I mean, their issues of cost and share value and all of that. But I think both the writers and actors were willing to push it this time because they realized that it's their last chance, really, to protect themselves against this continuing erosion of their earning power. It's not Carl Reiner writing for the Dick Van Dyke show anymore. No, it's not at all. I mean, these guys who are just shuffled through, and women, you know, people who are shuffled through the writers' rooms, you know, they're being paid what probably sounds like a pretty good day wage.

1:09:55But, you know, they're only getting a little bit of, it's only a few days of work. And they're out really quickly, which is by design. It's kept, it just makes it cheaper to make the shows. but you know it's coming at the expense of the writers mainly and the actors also because the actors you know have traditionally depended on residuals to sustain them when they're not working and residuals are terrible now yeah and we've been really interested to think about that in light of to your point um this was different in a pre-streaming world what will this look like in a you know streaming or post-streaming world uh as we know it and as we also think a lot about you know, past post TV, we think the theatrical release is a very important format.

1:10:42And obviously, some people thought that was a dead format, too. So let's see, I just want to say, Randall, a I'd yet to run across a book that told just such a great history of the bar. Fantastic. You did such a good job of starting with the history of obviously the tribes and how rich they were. I love that. I love your connection to, you know, what was John Jacob ambassador and then bring it all the way forward. You know, just kind of the trajectory of the development, you know, of that area. So we really appreciate you joining us today. The Graveyard of the Pacific explains a haunting history of the Columbia River Bar through Randall Sullivan and Ray Thomas's personal journey across the bar.

1:11:20His book is the best experience to understand this without risking your life. If you enjoyed this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to A Book with Legs. Give us a review. Tell others about the books and great authors like Randall that we have the opportunity to understand the world with. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com. That's podcast at smeedcap.com. You can also send your suggestions to us on Twitter. Our handle is at smeedcap. Thank you for joining us for A Book with Legs podcast. We look forward to the next episode.

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