The Oregon Coast can provide some of the most sublime sunsets and natural beauty on the West Coast.

There’s also a darker side. Stories of loss through tragedies accidental or intentional.

Journalist Lori Tobias knows these well: boat capsizings, cold cases, car crashes, falls, suicide, murder.

Tobias covered the more than 300-mile stretch of coast for The Oregonian in the 2000s and part of the last decade. She tells some of her most compelling stories in her new book, “Storm Beat.”

Tobias’ book is useful in distilling the essence of what it’s like to be a reporter on the coast. Between retellings of stories she wrote are notes on times when she put her head down, worked early, late and made uncomfortable phone calls during peoples’ worst days.

“I have learned over the years that as hard as those calls are to make, as difficult as it is to knock on those doors, frequently people want to talk about the person they lost,” Tobias writes. “They want the world to know why that person was special, loved, and now mourned.”

The beat

When Tobias took the job, she told her editor her goal was to own the coast. And she did.

She told stories like the murder-suicide of a beloved couple in Manzanita, a woman who fed bears in Yachats that led to disturbances at neighbors’ homes, of people on charter boats out for a good time only to encounter tragedy, of a man who drowned during a visit to the Willapa Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Tucked next to some of the darker stories are moments of levity.

Tobias interviewed actress Tippi Hedren, a staunch wildlife conservationist made famous through her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” in Depoe Bay. She also made multiple trips to the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport.

Astoria played a prominent role in Tobias’ reporting life after she got vertigo practicing jumping out of a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter. She also writes of her fear of snakes and missing one on a visit to the Fort to Sea Trail during the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. She recounts extras in “The Ring Two,” which was filmed in Astoria, finding out at a viewing party that the scenes they were in were actually cut. She covered the trial of two women in Astoria who pushed an invalid woman down a ravine in her wheelchair.

Some of the stories she writes about run parallel to Astoria, like when former President Bill Clinton, stumping for his wife, Hillary, visited Newport in 2008 during her first bid for the presidency. He also visited Astoria.

Tobias writes of covering a program fighting hunger and homelessness in Lincoln County.

“I’d been hearing stories about poverty on the coast since moving here,” she writes. “When people think of the coast, they think of the beach and hotels, oceanfront mansions, and all that goes with a tourist destination. Less obvious or perhaps just more comfortably overlooked are the huge numbers of homeless and hungry. It was time for me to write that story.”

After her story ran, calls and emails kept coming in of people wanting to know how to help.

Tobias tells of the odd times emotions would catch up to her and she’d let the tears roll. She tells of missing the privacy afforded by being an everyday person able to go out with friends.

As her time reporting on the coast grew, so too did her relationships with law enforcement and sources. She writes of the care she took in working with sources, like buying someone the newspaper so they could read her story or making follow-up calls to make sure people were alright.

There were times she hated her job. She experienced a sea of complaints: that she ruined a town by spotlighting its offerings, that she used the wrong usage of a word in a story, that she didn’t interview the right people or wrote a story when someone thought she should not have.

Personal life

Tobias saw the ups and downs as the newspaper industry navigated a changing world in revenue. This led to a series of layoffs, furloughs and buyouts at The Oregonian, and, after years of dodging the door, Tobias’ job.

“The world of writing, of books and newspapers, of how we read and where we read, is changing, changing so fast it’s hard to imagine what exactly we’ll be left with,” Tobias writes. “But we will always have our stories, of that much I am sure.”

Tobias grew up in Pennsylvania, later working for The Rocky Mountain News in Colorado before coming to Oregon.

There are spots where her personal stories feel disjointed from the reporting vignettes. There are also instances where a copy editor could have helped.

To be sure, Tobias’ personal life greatly enriches her story and how it informs her work as a reporter: her empathy for those who serve comes from having a brother and father who were in the military. She also loses both parents and her brother over the course of the book.

Reading Tobias is to feel the pace of her beat and the distance of drives taken for stories typically harrowing and seldom sunny.

Tobias concludes, “if many of the mileposts along Highway 101 are defined for me by someone else’s tragedy, so too are they reminders that I am blessed with having the privilege of working in the most amazing setting, a place where life is authentic and the landscape so stunningly beautiful, all these years later, it can still take my breath away.”

Reporters are people, too. They have people they love. Tobias honors her humanity while giving readers the gift of understanding what a reporter does to serve her readers. She provides an unvarnished view of the Oregon Coast. These stories are no less worthy of being told. They must be.