During his extensive research for Echoes, Johan discovered a small town off the Oregon coast. Not only did it fit historically into his novels plot of the area surrounding the Columbia River and the Chinook and Clatsop tribes, but it was home to a great and wonderful natural resource. The over two-hundred-and-thirty-five-foot monolith known as Haystack Rock, in Cannon Beach. Johan made it an integral character in his novel. He and Marguerite made many visits to the small coastal town and fell in love with it.
Although not as commercially or historically accomplished as Carmel, it produced no celebrated writers or artist had but it had the same accepting and artistic community feel about it and a history all its own. When Captain William Clark and members from the Lewis and Clark Expedition visited the area south of Tillamook Head in 1806 to find a whale that had washed ashore, he named the local creek Ecola, a derivative of ehkola, the Chinook term for whale. Later, settlers referred to the area as Elk Creek, but in 1846, a cannon from the shipwrecked USS Shark washed ashore near Arch Cape and many began to refer to the area as Cannon Beach. In 1922, the name Cannon Beach was officially adopted as the city’s name. To Johan and Marguerite, Cannon Beach became their new Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Two years later, after the glamor and celebrity of a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist died down, the proceeds and subsequent sales of a New York Times bestselling novel afforded them the extravagance of building their dream home on the shores of Cannon Beach, adjacent to Haystack Rock, kind of like returning to the scene of the crime. It was a fifteen hundred square foot two-story craftsman style house situated on a small wooded lot on the shore just west of South Hemlock Street and was completed in 1964. It was more like a cottage rather than a stick-built house that you would find in the city, built with many locally peeled Douglas fir logs for beams and rafters with hardwood oak floors.
Large floor to ceiling windows looked west onto the shore from the great room that also boasted a large river rock fireplace with a long cedar mantle and an adjacent open kitchen. The upstairs was their master bedroom, bath and office where Johan did his writing, both with panoramic views of Haystack Rock and the Pacific Ocean through the high ceiling windows of the great room. The house was adorned throughout with Native American art, artifacts, furs and hung from the ceiling was a native crafted carved Chinook Long Canoe.
“So, what do you think?” said Johan as they stood, proudly surveying their home, with Haystack Rock in prominent view outside through the massive picture window.
“I don’t know, something is missing,” said Marguerite, shaking her head.
“Are you kidding? Look at this place, what could possibly be missing?” She wrapped her arms around Johan’s neck and gently gave him a very long and passionate kiss and whispered in his ear,
“A nursery.”