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May 9, 2026 — A summer of weekend reporting for The Astorian and the Seaside Signal taught me a few rules. Don't stay in the field so long that the writing becomes a midnight scramble. Expect the plan to change. Trust people faster. And leave a little room for joy.
Weekend shifts on the North Oregon coast are a different animal from weekday deadlines. There is no assignment editor feeding a queue of stories. One hour you are at a festival, the next you are standing outside a house that a car just hit. The only constant is unpredictability.
The biggest lesson is that when a stranger agrees to talk, they are handing over something fragile. Whether it is a Garlic Festival mascot or a Jeep owner with watery eyes, the story belongs to them. My job is to react in real time, as a human, and get the details right. That is something a future AI may be able to fake, but it still would not have the same pulse.
I tend to fall in love with whatever story I am working on at the moment. When that one is complete, I find another one to love. Almost everybody has something worth hearing if you give them a free-enough space to tell it.
At the 44th annual Northwest GARRRRlic Festival in Ocean Park, the crowds filled Roy E. Sheldon Park for the pirate-themed celebration. The people inside the mascot costumes were Mickey and Tracy Mauer, also known as Mr. and Mrs. Garlic. It was never part of a master plan.
Mickey told me it started when he saw the old garlic suits hanging at the Ocean Park Chamber of Commerce. Someone said no one wanted to wear them anymore. He said he and his wife would do it. Tracy found out the way many spouses find out: Mickey came home and said, "Honey, guess what."
Five years later, they still work the festival in their bulbous costumes, taking selfies and moving through the crowd with a surprisingly good sense of comic timing. The best detail was not garlic at all. A batch of garlic scratch-and-sniff stickers had been stolen from their mailbox, so they had to order whatever stickers could arrive in time. That weekend they were passing out onion scents with labels like "Dirt" and "Bad Breath." The garlic festival mascots, handing out onion stickers, because a mail thief took the garlic. Mickey, who is a private investigator in daily life, may or may not have opened a case. I hope he did.
The summer festival circuit is a small world. You see the same characters at the Clam Festival, the garlic festival, and the Rod Run. One of them is a Captain Jack Sparrow impersonator with an impressive attention to his craft. I tried to interview him earlier in the summer and he refused, politely, because he was staying in character.
At the garlic festival I walked up and said I was not going to try to interview him. He looked toward the sky, reached into a coin purse, and handed me a business card that read "At ye service." That was the most theatrical business card of the entire season.
At the Rigs and Reggae festival on Pier 39, I started talking with a man who had an unmistakable British accent. When I asked where he was from, he said Iceland. I took out my notebook and let him go for about five minutes. Then he could not hold it in.
"I'm just messing with you!" he shouted, then laughed like it was the best joke of the summer. He gave me a fake name first, laughed again, and finally explained that he was Babba Gi from Ealing, a little west of London. He lived full time in a Sprinter van with an impressive amount of personal detail. He was wearing striped linen pants, smoking a style of cigar I had not smelled in years, and he had rigged a small light display inside the van. Everyone who entered had to answer a question: "What's your favorite color?" I said green and watched from outside as the van glowed green.
That is a completely normal Saturday for a weekend reporter.
At the Wheels and Waves car show at the old Seaside High School, I was in the middle of a separate story about a vintage car when several men said the same thing. "That sounded like a car going way too fast." I silently rolled my eyes. A loud bang answered them. "That was definitely a car crash."
A crowd formed and moved toward the sound. I followed and found a car in front of a house. The feature I had been writing was now a breaking-news item. This is the weekend beat in a single scene: one minute you are photographing chrome and hood ornaments, the next you are calling the office because emergency crews are on scene.
The most welcoming group I met all summer was the Astoria Pinball League. I walked in with a camera and a press badge, expecting to be a disruption. Instead, they let me wander, asked about my story, and kept playing. They were genuinely passionate about pinball and about each other.
When I took the group photo, they applauded. That had never happened to me before, and it is a small example of what a strong community can do to an outsider: it can make them feel like part of the room.
Jeeps Go Topless Days was not on my original to-do list. I went to the Bolstad Beach approach in Long Beach to photograph fishermen and ended up in a traffic jam full of open-top Jeeps. My Subaru was the least cool vehicle in sight. I parked nearby and walked into a scene I did not expect: grown adults getting emotional about what a vehicle means to them.
Some talked about freedom. Some talked about friendships made through the event. Many said it was about belonging to a group that understands them. The decorated Jeeps ranged from rubber-ducky themes to full skeleton crews. But the real story was never the Jeep. The real story was the way it connected people.
Car shows quickly became one of my favorite assignments. The reasons are simple: the owners are standing next to a stationary object, the object photographs well, and the stories are everywhere. A couple with a third-generation 1991 Chevy Camaro convertible at the Rod Run summed it up. They bought it in the late 1990s and had been driving it to the same event for decades. The teal paint made the 1990s look brand new, and the car had been in the family for multiple generations.
A vintage car is a prop. The engine is a story starter, not the story. The people are the story.
Weekend reporting taught me that local journalism is not just about pressing record. It is about showing up to places where people are already being themselves. The best interviews happen when the other person feels allowed to be surprising. Some are funny. Some are sad. Some end with a car into the side of a home.
The summer also reminded me why community newspapers matter. The Astorian and the Seaside Signal are built on this kind of coverage: small moments, big feelings, and a steady effort to reflect the North Coast back to itself. So if you see a reporter at a festival, introduce yourself. You might end up on the front page, or in someone's wallet for decades.
