Yaquina City’s PU Press

On the north shore of the Yaquina River, a few miles upstream sits an old abandoned mill. Its docks and buildings slouching under the weight of decades of slow motion attacks from powder post beetles and winter storms. It sits alone except for the occasional seal or two sunning themselves on an old half submerged foat left at the dock. Laying there occasionally grunting their throaty commentaries on life’s condition. Piercing cries of sea gulls shower down on them from above. It has set here this way for decades; a quiet community of slow decay and fond memories. Occasionally though folks have reported that, late at night, other sounds break the silence of the mist-shrouded estuary; a whirring sound, high pitched and hollow, accompanied by a low rhythmic thumping; reminiscent of a Hopi spirit dance. Kyle, who owns the local cranberry bog, tells us that an old Indian legend speaks of departed spirits roaming through the marsh, singing and mourning the ills being done on the earth. One moonlit night several of us down at the Bivalve Bar & Grill decided to investigate these strange goin’s on for ourselves. Grabbing the necessary supplies: beer and ?ashlights, we headed down the river to the mill. Parking our cars on the abandoned spur line of the Oregon Central & Eastern Ry. we approached the darkened mill. We slowly made our way through the old chain link gate, and immediately froze in our tracks. Everything had suddenly changed. It was all the same stuff — buildings, dock, river, but it was different; it was living and not dying. We clearly weren’t in Kansas (er... Newport) any more. We found ourselves in Yaquina City, a Parallel Universe (PU), which was an early competitor with Newport for local municipal supremacy. Now a ghost town, it was once the terminus of the ?rst railroad to reach the Oregon coast, With big dreams of becoming an international shipping hub. It was among the ?rst of the coastal towns with it’s own newspaper, The Yaquina Post. As we entered the old building, our mysterious sound turned out to be the sound of an antique web printing press concealed deep inside the mill. This was the departed spirit of the Yaquina Post. A celestial media mill telepathically sending messages to the news-papers on the other side of the PU. Messages of a simpler time when men feared God and treated their neighbors as they themselves wished to be treated. Sadly, no one today (churched or unchurched) believes in this message any more.
We learned that this is one of many Parallel Universes that exist all over the world. They are parallel but not the same. They’re places where angelic journalists send forth their messages of truth — sanwiched between the world’s lies — battling for the minds of men. Don’t believe it? Well... if you look closely between the lines and photos of your newspaper you will see “ghostly” letters & images. These are implanted and encoded messages to us on this side of the PU. If you defocus your eyes and just stare at the page a feeling of calm will come over you; your mind will begin to read between the lines. All the bad news printed on the page will begin to fade, and soon you will ?nd yourself with a peace that passes human understanding. By de-focusing on the doings of this side of the PU, you will open yourself to the truth and order of its other side. The animal population was simply singing a song or praiseto a free-spirit-press. As we were leaving, those who had been guiding us warned us not to tell anyone about our discovery, on pain of having our identities stolen, and being doomed to talk to “representatives” in India for days trying to reclaim ourselves. Later, settling in back at the Bivalve, we discussed our discovery and the need to maintain balance and avoid paranoia; some of us, though, couldn’t help connecting all this to the UFO sightings reported down the coast a few years ago. Others mentioned energy vortexes. But even the skeptics among us couldn’t resist holding their coasters up to the light, looking for new lines to read between. As we sat and talked into the night, though, we all tried to ignore the soft rhythm of the spirit dancers echoing across the misty estuary.