Oceanside escape

LONG BEACH, Wash. » You could always count on Long Beach, on the Washington coast, for being an old-school beach town. And it’s all still there: the go-cart track. The kitschy Marsh’s Free Museum, home to plaster-cast Jake the Alligator Man. Saltwater taffy in 50 flavors. But on this sandy peninsula just north of the Columbia River jetty, the ocean breeze is shifting. A new generation is bringing a younger vibe to the beach. You’ll find it in some of the renovated hotels and restaurants, an artisan bakery, the new North Jetty craft brewery, even a decades-old cranberry farm now run by the new guard who’ve made it the state’s first certified-organic cranberry operation.

IT’S THE BERRIES

Jared Oakes, 34, grew up next door to the cranberry farm he now manages with his wife, Jessica Tantisook, 28, a transplant from Nashville, Tenn. Oakes said the cranberry industry traditionally has used lots of pesticides to fight insects, such as the intimidatingly named black-headed fireworm, and herbicides to fight bog-loving weeds.

"People said you can’t grow any other way," he said. But as the couple, accompanied by their Australian cattle dog, Yarrow, and pound mutt, Rudder, showed me around a patch of 60-year-old vines adorned with berries like dark-red pearls, they told of using spring flooding to drown pest eggs. Nearby, a helper laboriously weeded by hand.

They named their operation Starvation Alley Farms, after the historic nickname for the road edging the farm where hardworking migrant farmers lived during the Great Depression.

After starting as novices four years ago, the couple soon needed to squeeze more income from their faltering operation. Marketing pure, pucker-inducing cranberry juice — not the sweetened juice cocktail most people know from their supermarket — was their answer.

"We were using a home juicer at first," recalled Tantisook, who earned an MBA with an emphasis in sustainable food systems. "It was a disaster, with really dark juice staining everything. Pulp was all over the place."

But catching the craft-cocktail wave as it swept the Northwest literally saved the farm.

"It was huge," Oakes said. A good number of cocktails use cranberry juice, and Seattle bars quickly embraced an organic, top-quality, pretty-much-local product.

Visitors to Long Beach can buy Starvation Alley juice at the farm’s store/office just off the Bol­stad Avenue beach approach and at several other outlets on the peninsula (you can also find it at the Ballard Farmers Market).

Or sample it in a craft cocktail at Pickled Fish, the oceanfront restaurant atop Long Beach’s Adrift Hotel, a hip and eco-pure lodging co-owned by Oakes’ sister, Tiffany Turner.

The Adrift, where I stayed, opened two years ago after Turner and her husband, Brady Turner, both 35, bought and stripped to its bones the former Edgewater Hotel, on the Sid Snyder Drive beach approach.

The renovated hotel features modern, minimalist decor using reclaimed products. It caters to an active, outdoorsy crowd with amenities such as free cruiser bikes to ride on the beachfront Discovery Trail.

I liked the fall special, offered through November: room discounts along with a free beach bonfire kit, complete with a bottle of wine and all the fixings for s’mores — including Theo chocolate. My wife and I picked up hot dogs to roast and called it dinner our first night (use the promotional code "FALLBONFIRE").

"I’ve grown into the belief that business for good can change the world," Tiffany Turner said of her hotel, where every room comes with a recycling bin (800-561-2456, adrifthotel.com).

How has the old-school business community greeted that ethic?

"When we first started, it was, ‘Aw, those crazy kids!’ But now people are starting to pay attention," Turner said.

A mile and a half down the beach, the mantle has been passed at another area hostelry, Seaview’s venerable Sou’wester Lodge, built in 1892. From 1980, Len and Miriam Atkins owned and managed it with a bohemian flair for more than 30 years until they were both in their 80s. Portlander Thandi Rosenbaum took over in 2012.

Rosenbaum, 41, shares a background with the Atkinses, who came via Israel from South Africa (Thandi means "love" in Zulu). An artist who formerly worked with Portland’s Laika stop-motion animation studio (known for "ParaNorman" and other films), she sees her role as steward of the lodge, which includes a fleet of vintage travel trailers available for guests.

She is bringing change not so much in character as in new roofs.

She has also recently added a pristine sauna/spa complex, and spotlights an artists-in-residence program with special weekly rates for artists who come in winter.

For the future? "We’d like to find a way to pull in local traditions and culture, and we’d like to do that with food," Rosenbaum said. (360-642-2542, souwesterlodge.com)

Brian J. Cantwell, Seattle Times