Even the origin of the word Moclips is contested. According to historian Edmond S. Meany, the name comes from a Quinault word describing a place where girls were sent as they approached puberty -- a site of cultural significance, a threshold between childhood and adulthood at the edge of the continent. Linguist William Bright offered a different, less ceremonial reading: the Quinault word simply meant "large stream," a reference to the Moclips River that empties into the Pacific here. Both interpretations carry weight, and neither has definitively won. The community sits five miles south of Point Grenville -- called Point Haynisisoos by the Quinault -- and is bordered to the north by the Quinault Indian Reservation. Whatever the name originally meant, it belonged to this coast long before the railroad arrived.

Steve Grover homesteaded near Moclips in 1862, but the town did not truly begin until the Northern Pacific Railway completed a line to the coast in 1905. That same year, Dr. Edward Lycan built the first Moclips Beach Hotel -- a two-story, 150-room beachside resort designed to capitalize on the new rail connection. It burned down within months of opening. Lycan, undeterred, built again. The second hotel was grander in every dimension: three stories tall, a full city block long, with 270 rooms, 2,000 feet of covered veranda, and views of the Pacific reportedly just twelve feet from the hotel grounds. Moclips boomed around it. Restaurants, a candy store, a theater, canneries, and the M.R. Smith Lumber and Shingle Mill all sprang up. Four schools served children from Taholah to Ocean Shores, their class schedules built around the clamming tides -- when the clams could be dug, school waited.

In 1911, a series of violent storms struck the North Beach coast and began washing Moclips away. The Moclips Beach Hotel -- Lycan's enormous second creation -- was battered into pieces. By December 1913, another storm took out the middle wing. In January 1914, what remained collapsed. The ocean had dismantled the building methodically, storm by storm, over three years. Fires destroyed much of what the waves spared along the beachfront. In 1948, decades after the resort era had ended, a hilltop welding accident ignited more homes and businesses. Moclips seemed to attract destruction the way other towns attract industry. During World War II, the U.S. Navy and Air Force established a presence in neighboring Pacific Beach -- the military still maintains recreational property along the bluffs there -- but the wartime activity brought no lasting revival to Moclips itself.

Today, 211 people live in the Moclips CDP, which includes the residential area of Sunset Beach. Washington State Route 109 passes through on its way to Taholah, nine miles north, and Hoquiam, thirty-one miles to the southeast. The town preserves its naturally wooded areas to block the Pacific winds, and deer move through the forest that has reclaimed what was once a bustling resort strip. Two of the original school buildings still stand. But Moclips has an unlikely footnote in music history. According to Michael Azerrad's biography of Nirvana, a young Kurt Cobain and his pre-Nirvana band Fecal Matter once opened for the Melvins at a Moclips beach bar called The Spot Tavern. Seattle-based Band of Horses later set their song "NW Apt." in Moclips. The town that the ocean tried to erase keeps surfacing in unexpected places -- in songs, in stories, in the name that scholars still argue about.