Sometime around the first week of June, summer arrived. Suddenly, it was sunny. And it got warm. On the first weekend of summer vacation, we packed the kids into the car along with bathing suits, shovels, pails and lots of sweatshirts, and headed to the beach.

South to Eugene and then west on state Route 126 for a meandering 90-minute drive over the Coast Range, along the Siuslaw River and on to Florence.

On the way we passed: cows (westopped counting them at 100), turn-of-the-century barns, vineyards, Christmas tree farms, rolling meadows, impenetrable forests, a dozen no-streetlight towns and two lumber mills.

Florence was a blast, its frigid surf drawing my son like a light draws a moth. We ate great seafood, browsed the shops and spent a few hours at Sea Lion Caves, watching the huge marine mammals flop around on their rocks.

Oregon has so much to offer us tourists. That's a good thing, because tourists such as my family, as well as people shopping for vacation homes, spend money, which creates jobs in parts of Oregon -- coast, mountains, high desert -- that badly need jobs.

This issue of Oregon Business covers a smattering of clever tourism marketing strategies -- from a culinary tourism initiative to eco-tourism to scenic railroad excursions. These efforts will get a boost from the state's new 1% lodging tax, which will more than double the money Oregon spends on marketing to tourists. The fattened budget is helping to bankroll the new Brand Oregon campaign under the slogan: "Oregon. We Love Dreamers."

As you dream on the road to the Oregon coast, there's just one thing that wakes you with a start: mile upon mile of clear-cut mountain slopes.

A shocking number of clear-cuts. Cutting down a whole lot of trees

in Oregon forests is a sure loser for promoting tourism and attracting new residents -- dreamy or otherwise. In a big square state like ours, getting wherever you're going is half the pleasure, and driving through a ravaged landscape on the way to someplace beautiful can make a person want to turn around and go home.

The vast natural beauty around us, spread across a mind-boggling array of topographies and ecosystems, is our value proposition to the world; it's the one resource that will outlast all others. And it's a resource that those of us who grew up someplace else -- in my case, the industrial wastelands of New Jersey -- know is hard to recreate once you've bulldozed the life out of it.

I'm certain that without shutting down those mills in the little riverside towns along Route 126, there's a way to make the forest healthier, the river cleaner and the ride prettier.

But whether in the end we log more and let property owners do whatever they want with their land, or whether we stay the course of strict land-use planning and sustainable resource management, it shouldn't be hard to agree that Oregon should remain this beautiful forever.

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Copyright 2004 Oregon Business magazine