The mill is silent now, and still. When International Paper
succumbed to the slump in logging a few years ago and shut the
doors on a plant that had once employed 650 in Gardiner and
neighboring Reedsport, commerce in the coastal Oregon
communities took a body blow. The pain of the mill closure was
compounded by catches of coho salmon that had been dwindling for
a decade. As loggers knocked the mud off their caulk boots for
the last time and fishermen let their commercial licenses lapse,
families drifted away. Schools lost students. Today, Reedsport’s
many boarded-up storefronts signal a community in distress. The
town sits back from the open ocean, snug against the sheltering
hills of the Coast Range and wrapped inside the arc of sand that
forms Winchester Bay. But out beyond the bay, past the bar,
churns the constant, unceasing movement of what could someday
stanch the decline of this place: Pacific Ocean waves. That’s
because a team of Oregon State University researchers has been
inventing devices for crea