When David Cottrell was about three, his father drove him down a short road toward the beach in their home town of North Cove.
It was the early 1960s. The Cottrells owned and lived on a cranberry farm on this part of the south Washington coast. The small, unincorporated settlement, founded in 1884, sat along an embayment behind Cape Shoalwater, a claw-like spit that curled into the north end of Willapa Bay, where an estuary opens into the Pacific.
At the end of the road, there it was. A big white building, part of an abandoned coast guard station, half over the bank’s edge, cracked open, in the water. The structure was the latest casualty of coastal erosion that was devouring the town.
That night, Cottrell couldn’t sleep. And the sense of the
