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Text and Photographs by K.B. DIXON

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Camp 18 Restaurant and Logging Museum is located, not coincidentally, at mile-marker 18 on U.S. Highway 26. Together with the Sunset Jerky Store (which squats near mile-marker 48), it is an orienting landmark on any trip to Oregon’s north coast.

For many the restaurant is the main attraction. A massive log cabin filled with elk antlers and chainsaw carvings, it offers a bang-for-your-buck cuisine (what the management calls “logger style meals”)—things like country slab ham, bunkhouse omelets, and cinnamon rolls the size of Frisbees.

For me, the main attraction is the open-air logging museum. I’ve always been fascinated by the strange beauty of ruination. I have a strong visceral response to entropical processes: to peeling paint, rusting steel, and crumbling concrete—a visceral response that alludes to metaphysical rather than sociological subjects—to loss, decay, and the passing of time as opposed to deprivation and injustice. Here at Camp 18 there is a festival of ruination. It is spread out over acres. Displays of dilapidated hardware and vintage logging equipment are piled everywhere. Mammoth, prehistoric-looking machines are mired in bogs of their own dissolution—things called steam donkeys and compound gear yarders. These machines that once ruled the woods have been carved by time’s chisel into large pieces of industrial sculpture. They are the collapsed travelers from an antique land half-sunk and shattered—the sort of things that will have visiting English majors reciting what they can remember of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.

All photographs below are from 2022.

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Restaurant

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Big Wheel

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Boiler

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Cables

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Flag

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Bronze

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Spokes

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Doorway

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Sunset Tree Farm

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Water Tower

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Truck

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Water Tower 2

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Steel Tracks

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Railcar