In Which I Try to Talk About Weed But Get Distracted by the Weather

Last week while I was in a hotel in California...

Wait. I should explain that I wasn't supposed to be anywhere near California. But I had to get from Colorado to Oregon, and on the morning I was set to drive the freeway going west was closed due to ice and blowing snow. Closed all day, the gates shut. The Wyoming traffic cameras showed what looked like a perfectly untouched white meadow, no visible pavement as far as the eye could see. Colorado was equally awful. There was no way west.

Meanwhile on the national news, weathermen were warning about a vicious storm that might hit New York and surrounding areas, but fortunately hadn't made it past the Midwest yet and had a good chance of swinging down south or into Canada or somewhere else unimportant. While the West was getting hammered by blizzards, the edge of the weather map ended near Missouri.

This is always the case. Sometimes they show a map of the whole country, but the West is where the weatherman stands, even while swirling red and blue graphics rage behind him. Like this:


Or this:


Or even (what the heck?) this:


Do you know how annoying this is? I find myself weaving back and forth in front of the television as if I can peer around the weatherman's head. Oh! I got a glimpse of my town behind his ear!

The rest of the world complains about the US being too US-centric, but we in the West know that this is not true. The US is New York-centric. If the weather gets bad enough to kill more than a few people, we might get a mention. Ah well. He with the national network gets the national coverage.

(But we were just a little ticked off that NBC chose to interview a woman whose morning coffee didn't percolate while we over here were having avalanches and closed roads across five states. Vent. Vent.)

Since I couldn't drive straight west, I had to swoop down south through New Mexico and Arizona, coming up the backbone of California to get to Oregon.

Thusly did I find myself in hotel in California, and late in the night was standing at the sink when I detected a strange smell coming through the air vents. It was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Kind of sweet...Where had I smelled that before? It made me think of fairgrounds, for some reason. Shopping in Boulder...stores with Free Tibet bumper stickers and tie-dyed dresses...and incense...and mandalas...

That's when I realized that I was smelling marijuana. Okay, so I'm not terribly quick on the draw. This should tell you something about how often I've actually been around it before. I'm a big believer in getting my highs from life. Better highs. Like, I don't know...staying up until 4am listening to Wagner and deliriously writing Latin poetry. Whatever.

Because it was the time of night when my imagination likes to take off, I had an overwhelming desire to find which room the smoke was coming from. Not by walking the halls (dull!) but by scaling the building from the outside, via the balconies, crawling all around like a midnight vigilante. Then kick the window in and make a citizen's arrest. I could be a hero.

But medical marijuana is legal in California, and with my luck my "criminal" would be a 70-yr old woman lighting up for her rheumatism. Also, I reasoned with myself, I'm kind of against the over-criminalization of marijuana, what with all the other directions we could be pointing our police forces. And yet...I would never have the moxy to kick down the door of anything more severe, like a meth lab or a kitten-juggling ring. Arg, what a catch-22! How am I supposed to start my career as a citizen crusader if my level of crimes are the same petty crimes being over-criminalized?

I am aspiring, but meek. I'm going to go put some firmly worded notes on double-parked cars now.

The kicker to this story is the name of the city where I was staying- Weed, California. Seriously. The irony didn't even dawn on me until the next morning. This led to a whole series of jokes about how Weed got its suspicious name. Is that really fog hanging over the valley? What happens if you go to the Bank of Weed, or try to check something out of the Weed Library? Then there's the hypothetical Weed Airport, where one might reasonably assume you can catch a flight on Weed Air. Your pilot gets on the intercom to say, "Duuudes....this plane is huuuge!" You never go anywhere, of course. The plane sits on the tarmac while everyone looks out the windows saying, "Whoaaa..."

Fly Weed Air
"For when you don't care."

Wyoming Mirage

I am moving slowly these days. Such is the summertime.

Here is the picture I wanted to attach to my post about driving the West. Heat shimmering off the highway makes the pavement bleed into the sky, but an approaching semi truck affirms the road's substantiveness.

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Is It Wyoming Yet?

Ah, the glorious experience of waking up in the backseat of my car at 5 in the morning, when the first blue haunt of sunlight is beginning to lighten the broad flatlands of Idaho's southwest. I crawl up into the driver's seat and pop open a bottle of Starbucks frappuccino, roll out of the dark and sleeping streets of the town which I came to, also in the darkness, and drive back to the freeway on-ramp. Now the horizon has turned pale, and... was that a sign for I-84 East I just passed? Is this... is this road going up and over the interstate? Is this road siphoning me onto I-84 West???

Getting onto the freeway in the wrong direction at 5 in the morning, when the next exit is 15 miles and 15 minutes away? That's a very special feeling.

But I finally got turned back towards the east and got to watch the sun rise over the most boring stretch between Oregon and Colorado (apologies to the competing boring stretches of Utah and Wyoming): the road between Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho. Bleh.

Day one of my two day drive is Oregon, all Oregon, with just a little piece of Idaho thrown in at the end for fun. If you look at the map, you can easily see that Oregon is not geographically as large as Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming put together, but the road is 55 mph all the way. It starts in the wet coastal forest, goes up and over the coastal range into the fertile Willamette Valley, and then climbs up again into the Cascades, where the forests are dry and peopled (treed?) by lodgepole pines. After dropping down the other side of the mountains, trees disappear and are replaced by sagebrush, and it is the sagebrush that continues to dominate the scenery until Colorado.

I used to think of Utah as being the most desolate place in the country, but I have changed my opinion substantially. It has mountains, at least, and although they are mostly the tough and jagged kind, all rock and no majesty, they fit in well to the rest of the stark landscape. The word for northern Utah is "salt." White salt flats stretching off in the distance, shimmering in the sun, the Great Salt Lake putting out fingers of bitter water towards the freeway, salt marshes prickling with sharp grass. The rocks are reds and browns and coppers - the plant life, too - and crop up in fantastic formations such as the Devil's Slide, a steep narrow chute that dives from a mountain to the road. (The exit for it always sneaks up on me around a sharp bend in the freeway, but it was closed this time for construction, so I did not have to veer to catch it.)

But by the Devil's Slide I feel like I've been driving...well...far longer than I should have been driving. Where the heck is Wyoming? Wyoming is the home stretch, welcomed this time of year but grueling in the winter, when black ice covers the road and powder snow is blown across it in a sideways blizzard so dense that you cannot tell the difference between the pavement and the sagebrush. Wyoming is beautiful in its own way. Fawn colors, khaki, beige, every shade of tan man ever thought up a name for, rolls away from the road, and the road itself turns into a sky-colored mirage. The freeway is marked by giant red gates every 100 miles or so that say "Road Closed - Return to..." fill in the blank to be the nearest town of any great size. This is so that when snow drifts close off the freeway in the wintertime, they can divert traffic before we go plowing into oblivion.

Wyoming is also the land of Little America. If you do not know what Little America is, you will by the time you get there. There are signs - "Little America, 200 miles. 50 cent Cones!" and "Little America, 175 miles. Kids stay for free!" and "Little America, 150 miles, Are We There Yet?" etcetera to the point where you, the driver, with nothing else to occupy your attention except the occasional fireworks stand, start to wonder, "What is this mysteriously wonderful Little America?!" (Answer: a tricked-up gas station.)

Wyoming at last breaks its hold just a little south of Laramie, where a big old timey wooden sign proclaims, "Welcome to Colorful Colorado!" and immediately stands of green bushy ponderosa pines spring up, and the deer frolic, and grand snow-capped peaks burst out of the ground. And there you are. The Rockies.

(Finally! And now maybe I can part ways with Bosco for longer than a day? Sorry Bosco!)
*
*

Like Balls on a Roulette Wheel We Are Flung

Surfacing for air: a decompression.

Twenty one hours alone on the road is a long time to decompress. The first three hours are pure excitement. The next three become something akin to work, as in "I should be getting paid to do this." After that, the miles begin to creep backwards. Every minute I glance down at the odometer, but the number stays the same. There are still 1100 miles to go. It is a fierce and solid number, and there is nothing I can do about it. I pull off to the side of the road to take a break, but the miles are still there. The CD in my player has run out and everything my radio finds seems jarring on the ears - I spend two minutes listening to static on the AM thinking that it is the sound of applause about to die out - and then I turn off the radio and howl at the road like a wild woman (something you can only do when you're alone), but the miles are still there to drive.

After that there is nothing but time to think about things, and I have a very noisy mind. Big questions become small and manageable; little ones well up to take their place. Sometimes I sing my thoughts out loud, and sometimes I talk them, and sometimes I talk to God... but I don't talk to God too often, because when I talk to him, when I really talk to him, I get tears in my eyes. I think it is that the conversation is too honest, that it cuts down through the masks to the heart of me and who I am, what I am trying to be, real and raw. Often painful.

But you can't cry while you're driving. So no... I don't talk to God too often.

Sometimes, sometimes... when my thoughts are on repeat play and the fault lines on the pavement are hammering away a steady beat, then I finally find the rhythm of the road. The car stops moving. Instead, the land moves around me. If I am on a winding two lane highway, the ribbon of pavement seems to whip beneath me like a high pressure water hose. But if I am on the freeway, it becomes more like a video game. There are cars to pass and cars passing me. I weave and dodge with the cruise control on, focusing on the two possibilities - Are they gaining on me or am I gaining on them? Never tap the foot on the brake, that is the goal of this game. Every vehicle I encounter takes on its own personality by its shape, its color, and the way it moves. Is it timid? Does it reek with machismo? Polite, clever, lawbreaking? And yet I never see the faces on the other side of the glass.

The radio catches a moment of European electronic techno, and suddenly I picture myself in a different place entirely, under the water, laying back on the sand watching the fish swim above me. Scuba divers hardly ever stay put in one place. Generally you don't want to touch anything around you, lest you kill it or it kills you, or sometimes the only thing beneath you is a deep swallowing darkness, a silent enemy. But when there is sand - try this if you get the chance - you can lay back and look up at the fish, their silhouettes black against the bending light of the surface. Watch them pause and circle, flick their tails and be gone, one after another. Watch as the bubbles rise up from your regulator, flat on the bottom and round on the top, big and small, wavering up in a delicate dance to the surface, when the only sound around you is the hiss and blurb of your breath and the constant snapping of the shrimp hidden beneath the rocks. I don't know why techno made me think of this.

But I am back on the road, drinking milk out of a quart carton. The scenery is blearily monotonous, and in my boredom I notice even the slightest things. There is a dead creature on the side of the road lying on its back, all reddish fur with four paws sticking straight in the air like a cartoon. It looks wombat-ish, but I'm pretty sure eastern Oregon doesn't have wombats. Miles later I pass a dead cow lying on the other side of a barb wire fence like a fallen fiberglass statue, its legs sticking out from its side. The heat makes the dead things bloat. And then up on the hill, a large metal horse in mid-lunge, and beyond it a corral for the wild horses caught by the BLM, and I think about the times I have seen horses running in the wild. Not this time, though. Not this drive. Only hawks and pronghorn antelope to keep me company, and the rolling sagebrush looking the same for every mile, and Cheerios in odd places in the car, and now an empty quart of milk.

Twenty one hours alone on the road is a long time to decompress.
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*

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

I have not been in a writing mood lately, or at least not one that produces blog posts. Actually, I seem to have fallen into an irritating frame of mind, perhaps one that plagues all new bloggers a few months into the game. It compels me to take every random thought, every witty self-aside, and say, "I should blog about that!" I suppose it's good to have a net catching some of these things, but thank goodness for self control. Otherwise, the world would be subjected to my innumerably strange "shower thoughts." (i.e. Thoughts whilst in the shower, which seem much wittier there than when they appear in actual text.)

So while my brain is occupied with other things, I thought I would share a few pictures from TSO's visit, which you can also read about here and here. (His version.) Mine will be shorter because, as I said, I have no current blogging abilities.

Cape Disappointment, a grand place to start a trip, waking up to a morning stroll on the beach. I love low perspective, so I put my camera near the sand and captured the North Head lighthouse. Alas, my poor camera was to suffer many near-sand experiences in the next few days.

The wind off the Pacific is relentless in these parts, so it's not uncommon to see little driftwood structures built to block it. (Hard to start a fire otherwise, y'see.) This one was surprisingly elaborate. I suspect whoever built it had a lot of hands or a lot of time. And look! They left a wee little man hiding inside!

The Astoria Column, a tower depicting the history of the mouth to the Columbia, is difficult to photograph. It's difficult to see, period. The art and text scrolls around from the bottom up. TSO and I walked around a few times to read the bottom half, but it was a dizzying way to try to get a bit of history. Much better was the view from the top and the myriad of tourist shirt colors that we watched from above - hot pink, blazing blue, all the colors of the acid rainbow. I was not excused. I chose to wear one of my eye-hurting "Aloha" shirts, cattle brand of the tourist. But since I was technically touring, I couldn't care less. (Plus, it would make me more locatable in a storm, so there was that safety aspect.) Here is part of the Column in detail, with "Before the White Man Came" on the bottom and the entrance of Robert Gray's ship "Columbia" into the river's mouth.

Indian Beach, Ecola State Park (I keep wanting to call it "Ebola State Park") where we walked up a cliffside trail to gaze out on the lighthouse "Terrible Tilly," so named, I have since learned, because of the challenge it posed to keepers. The waves eventually battered the original Fresnel lens to pieces and now the lighthouse sits dead, quite literally. It is privately owned, converted into a resting place for the ashes of the deceased. The photo is stock. (We saw it without the waves.)

And here is good ol' Cannon Beach, cooperating by finally giving us some sun (the fog had been trailing us all day,) not much wind, and balmy, BALMY 53 degree water. Balmy, I say. It was brisk and delightful, one of those sorts of wades that makes you feel good all over, like you're really alive. It was in no way cold or unpleasant. We could have spent all day wading out to sea, deeper and deeper, the cormorant bones swirling at our toes, until the steep green sides of Japan rose up to meet us. (We would have come dripping out of the water like Godzilla.) Wading the Pacific is much like biting into a lemon at a dinner party, only prettier.


Hey, here's a fun side note. A university team has recently been running scale models on what would happen if a tsunami were to hit this particular area. The fault line sits very close to the shore, so there wouldn't be much warning when the big one started to come. In their scale model, all of the little scale buildings are pretty much blasted to smithereens. It's left them scratching their heads, going "Think, think, think," since, of course, sooner or later such a tsunami will actually happen. The current idea is to try to built vertical towers that people could run to, towers which would supposedly survive the initial blow and still stand above water line. Aren't disaster scenarios fun to think about?

Anyway, I got tired of taking "pretty" pictures.
And then we were back to my home turf, Land of Many Large Sand Dunes. We flung ourselves off the highest dunes just like I did back in my school days (TSO has a video on his blog). Unlike my school days, I felt the effect of the diving for many days afterwards. What happened to my youthful springiness? I would post the video of my own dune dive, but I was purposefully flailing around like a rag doll, which I realize, in retrospect, is a bit embarrassing to watch, unlike TSO's mighty heroics. Hmm. I, too, ended up with sand in my ears/hair/nose which continued to shake out over the next week. Someday I'm going to try diving in a plastic bag, just to see if I can sand-proof myself.

The wind was extremely vicious at the top of the dunes, so much so that I in my bare legs could hardly stand the pain of being sandblasted. We were diving on the leeward side where the sand was the softest, which meant that on each climb back up there came a point just near the crest of the dune where the wind would blast sand directly into your face, and as you were already disoriented from the tumble down, you would have to clamp your eyes shut and grope around for the top of the dune, trying not to overshoot and go falling down the opposite side. (I'm speaking of my own experience here. I don't know why I'm talking in second person.) We had been dodging ATVs while we hiked - they tend to come tearing out from nowhere if you don't pay attention - but after my last dive a group of them came to the top of the dune. One fellow pulled right up to us, took off his helmet, and said, "Wow! Did you do that on purpose? I can't believe you guys are doing that! That rocks!" Or something like that. It's hard to impress hotdogging ATVers, so I took it as a nice feather in my cap. (Since the real feather in my cap had been blown all the way down to California at this point.)

A picture of dune trekking. Sepia tone is oh so a'pretty.

After this day of much blowing sand, my camera suffered greatly, to the extent that even now I am still shaking sand out of it. For a short while the lens ominously refused to open, but I think it worked that out with itself. In case any of you camera-loving folks are wagging your fingers at me, I have to say that my beloved camera was never anywhere close to the actual sand, and that all the sand it accumulated was entirely airborne. If you want to photograph the dunes without such repercussions, you may want to look into getting a bio-hazard suit.

(And again with the second person! I must not be getting enough iron in my diet.)

The next day it was back up to PDX, City of Roses, where we wandered around the rose test garden just to make sure. (The garden is literally a place where they test new variety of roses, destroying forever the ones that don't pass muster.) I have now decided that my mythical future dream garden must include a few roses. Maybe even a black one. That would be all cool and Gothic, wouldn't it?

Thanks to TSO's eyes we were able to find our way downtown. (My reading abilities are still hampered by my recent bought with infection.) We wandered around downtown borderline "lost," enjoying all the wonderful sights and sounds and posters for scandalous things. (Portland is no city of vicars.) Total elapsed time to hear an inappropriate remark from a creepy stranger - 3 minutes. Yeah... I'm not such a big fan of cities, but they have their place, I s'pose. We strolled down the waterfront park until we found ourselves in the neighborhood of Voodoo Doughnuts, and this time I discovered the delights of A) vanilla doughnut topped with marshmallow and Tang powder, and B)devil's food doughnut topped with Coco Puffs. Maddeningly delicious. Afterwards we were sucked into the inescapable pull of Powell's City of Books, one of the largest independent bookstores in the world, a Twilight Zone realm where three hours feels like ten minutes. We entered through the main doors, glanced at each other, and said, "See ya!" The rooms at Powell's are all sorted by color, each color denoting a different subject, and I gleefully trotted between the Green Room and the Rose Room and the Orange Room (and the all-important Purple Room, where the bathrooms are) trying desperately not to fill my arms and empty my bank account. It would be fun to work there, except I think I would end up tipping over one of the bookshelves and just rolling around in the resulting pile of books like a buffalo in a dust wallow. Still, a girl can dream.

The river park gave me the chance to catch this nifty pic of the "Made in Oregon" sign, a PDX landmark. The words "Old Town" hang underneath. I played around with the graphics (chrome!!) to give myself a few jollies. I still remember that sign from times waaay back when I was a little kid riding in the car through Portland, and how they used to (and still do) put a red nose on the deer for Christmas. The deer is the symbol of White Stag Sportswear, what used to be one of Oregon's prominent companies before the time of Nike and Columbia. Guess who owns it now?

(Answer: Wal-Maaaaart... and it's now made in Chinaaaa... Cruel irony.)

The longer I type, the more my urge to blog is resurrected. Interesting. But it's late and I must away, and so suffice to say it was a grand trip and good fun to play the tourist game. Anyone else care to come visit?

I just have to add...

Dear...heaven...and...earth.... Could Blogger possibly make it any harder to work with pictures if it tried???!? I feel like I deserve an award every time I finish smashing a photo in the HTML. Criminelly, that's all I have to say about that.

Making the Most of a Day

I sat down with a cup of cinnamon hazelnut fudge mocha to read a book I recently purchased, but realized after the first sentence that I did not want to read, but write. And so I picked up my little cup of sugar-coma and moved into the office.

Yesterday I assuaged another trip to the eye doctor - the typical "Your eye is looking better" relief combined with the "but it may never heal completely" panic - by following the appointment with a Grand N Glorious Adventure in Coos Bay, biggest city on the Oregon Coast. Using only the phone book map, I plotted a novel route through the city, basing it mostly on street names that I liked and roads that looked, by their location, as though they might be less travelled.

First I stopped for supplies, since the hearty traveller should always be prepared for the inevitable getting-lost-for-many-hours part of the adventure. My watering hole was a sushi bar that I had never tried. I ordered up one of their "featured" rolls - crab/salmon/spinach - and a hand roll of eel, which turned out to be essentially an ice cream cone of seaweed jammed with a fistfull of eel, chunks of eel sticking out all over the place. Good eel, or "Wonderf-eel" as I call it, is the most delicious substance known to man. Bad eel, or "Dreadf-eel", I suppose, is the equivalent of a mash of cat food and substitute egg product. (You know. That liquid "egg" in boxes. Where does that stuff even come from?) This ice cream cone a'bustin' with eel was in a strange middle-ground. I'll call it "Acceptab-eel."

En route to my plotted destination I found myself in the dreaded territory of the DMV, where horrors of age circa 16 came rushing back to me. I have not driven this part of town since that time, and felt a little vindicated that now, as a well-travelled adult, those roads still don't make any sense. They include such beauties as no stop intersections, one stop four-way intersections (that don't indicate who has the right of way), and ghostly all-way stop intersections where apparently everyone knows to stop but there are only two actual signs (meaning that I sat for a long time trying to figure out why the "right of way" traffic was stopping.) Yes, the Coos Bay DMV region is a vortex of traffic nightmares, a sort of "Twilight Zone" where the stop signs come and go like shapes in the fog. It is the equivalent of placing a pilot's school in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.

But nevermind that. My ultimate goal was Shore Acres, a botanical garden farther south that was once the private estate of some rich fellow, I forget his name. He picked the most beautiful coastal cliffs he could find to build his house, and then donated the land to the state upon his death. The original grand house burned or fell off the cliff into the sea, I forget which. Now the park consists of a beautiful garden, the caretaker's house, and a series of cliff-top trails. In all the time I have lived here, I have never visited the park other than for the holiday light show, when the gardens are decorated with fantastic light displays.

The first thing that struck me on seeing it in daylight for the first time was how precariously the entire park sits atop the cliffs. It is supposed to be one of the best places in the state for watching giant waves break, and this is much due to the fact that below the observation area, the cliff cuts in, scooped out by the violent wave action, so that you are staring straight down at the jagged rocks below. I took a walk along the cliff top trail and chuckled at a sign which read "Stay in Front of Sign," which was quite clever, since about an inch behind where the sign post met the ground was nothing but air and a two hundred foot drop. In parts of the trail, the fence leaned outward towards the sea, the waves below pounding and pounding and calling "Fall in! Fall in!" like the voice of a temptress. Ah shoot, I should have taken some good precarious pictures, but my camera's batteries were dying.


The sea lions were out of sight on the rocks, but their voices were loud, carrying above the waves, the crows, and the seagulls. I leaned back on a rock wall and ate a donut, listening to the deep hoarse voice of the bulls punctuate the constant "Oor! Oor!" of the cows. That sound, ringing and melodic, continued to follow me throughout my visit, whether I was in forest or garden, a background noise much like the wind in the treetops, only more belchy.

I took a stroll in the woods, stopping to watch a Douglas tree squirrel who sat brazenly a few feet from my head, munching a pine cone with one eye turned towards me. The light in the forest was dim, and the whole of it was bathed in a mist, whether from the fog or a light rain, or perhaps even the spray of the waves being carried up by the wind. The weather is nothing like when you were here, TSO. It's gone all cold and gray like autumn, long pants weather. Melancholy weather. Hot chocolate and fires weather. I do love it.


The botanical garden itself was still covered in blooms, although their bright colors were muted by the gray light. Everything was dripping, the grass, the statues, the fountain in the middle, and fat drops of water made the roses bend down. I hopped the wet hedges to smell roses with names like "Sheila's Perfume" and "Just Joey." The only other people in the garden were elderly couples, husbands and wives holding hands and stopping to gaze together at a flower, shuffling around at an easy pace, the most pleasant little scenes to watch.


"This is good for the soul," I thought. Dripping flowers and old people bundled up against the chill and the sound of sea lions barking over the top of everything. Chicken soup for the soul, I would say, but that line's already been taken.

The Lonliest Road

Mmm... Don't you just want to go drive it?

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Keep on driving until they run out of names...

Pictures from my road trip, by the way. More to come.