Caught red-muzzled in Cannon Beach suburbia, chewing some poor bastard’s landscaping like it was the last salad bar before the apocalypse. A golden apparition with fur the color of whiskey at sunset, staring dead into the lens with those wide outlaw eyes that say I’ll eat your flowers, your grass, and maybe your sanity while I’m at it.

We weren’t expecting this. My wife and I came chasing the coast, the fog, the salt, the endless thrum of the Pacific hammering away like some deranged drummer in a cosmic jazz band and instead, we stumbled into the raw, unfiltered chaos of the food chain at ground level. No warning, no apologies. Just a creature built by the wilderness, standing there with a stalk of green dangling from its mouth like a half-smoked cigar.

It was one of those moments where the whole trip, sea stacks, gulls, tourist crowds slurping ice cream. Burned away, leaving nothing but the primal confrontation: man, camera, beast. The shutter snapped, and for a heartbeat, I swear the elk knew it was being immortalized, smirking through the foliage like some antlerless trickster god.

This is Cannon Beach stripped of postcards and polished brochures, madness in broad daylight, the wilderness gnawing at the edges of civilization, and us lunatics grinning while it happens.