Joan Didion, philosopher-in-chief of the American west, once observed that the Pacific coast was a place “in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work out here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Paul McDonough’s 1970s photographs from that coast, collected in a new book, Headed West, seem to share in that unease. In this picture, from a small resort town in Oregon, the cars on the beach, long noses toward the salt air of the ocean, look impatient to go further; the great American road trip has run out of road. In the foreground, their younger occupants are acting on instincts to make their mark here, however temporary, building castles in the sand to rival that great lump of rock rising out of the sea, and echoing the covered-wagon generations before them who staked unlikely claims to frontier land at the end of the Oregon trail...READ MORE