Via Appia

I spent much of last week on the east side of the mountains. It was a long and somewhat difficult week, and so I chose to take the slow way home, along the Historic Columbia River Highway - the old Highway 30 - from The Dalles to the little town of Mosier.This road is an artifact from the pre-freeway era; narrow and winding. It runs through some of the prettiest country in Oregon, the lower slopes of the Columbia River Gorge.It is an extraordinarily pleasant drive on a sunny day. But I can see why it was bypassed by the extraordinarily unpleasant, ugly, boring I-84; anything larger than a milk float would have to creep through the many tight, off-camber turns that make the road so pretty to dawdle along.The early spring blooms were emerging, and the contrast between the rich purples and yellows and the gray basalt drew my eye. I was pleased by the contrast between the springtime at the base of the high south wall and the lingering winter at the top.I think that sometimes we are deceived by the artifacts of the past. We compare the speed and size of our creations with those of earlier times and think of the people who built them as pastoral romantics, living a more picturesque life at an intentionally slower pace.And that gets a certain type of person all soppy and nostalgic for that that life at that pace.I don't think those vanished people were that much different from us. I think they wanted as much as they could as quickly as they could get it; I don't think they enjoyed a long, slow trip from Portland to Pendleton any more than we do.I think that if they could have built a road that was ugly but swift, they would have.But they couldn't, and so they built the one they left behind. And it's a very lovely road. But I think it leads us astray.I think it's a very human trait to assume that we the living are living in the most frantic, most hectic, most confusing, most dangerous times ever. And to look behind us and get a little weepy about the Good Old Days. And forget that to those people, their times were the most frantic, most hectic, most confusing, most dangerous times ever.And given things like the Black Death and the Mongol invasions, they might well have been correct.But now that those times are safely encased in the amber of memory they simply look peaceful and pretty like a small winding backroad on a slow, sleepy, languid sunny day.

Look Away

The electronic yelping of the alarm brings me to full wakefulness in seconds.

But it takes minutes for me to remember where I am; the darkness around me is without feature, and for a moment all I understand is that the bed is not my own, and I am briefly panicked by the strangeness of the place I am in.Slowly light seeps into the darkness. I remember that I am in the Sandpiper Motor Inn in the small Oregon coastal town of Port Orford. I am the road to a job in the far southwest of Oregon.

It is well before sunrise on a Thursday morning. My head is clothy from bad sleep and my ass still sore from the five-hour drive the preceding afternoon and evening. And I have to be back on the road in less than an hour; I still have almost an hour to drive to my work.I'm here to look over the property of someone whose home - some sort of home, possibly a rental property or a summer house - has been damaged by some sort of landslide the previous weekend. It's business as usual for me; this sort of natural hazard is much of how I make my living.

For the homeowner it's a disaster, a nightmare.

For me, it's a living.

Sometimes we make our bread from the heartbreak of others.

In some ways Oregon reminds me of some parts of the Third World I've visited more than many of the other United States.

We have only one real "metropolis" here; you're either in the capital - in Portland - or you might as well be in Siberia. The further you get from Pioneer Square in Portland the poorer and more neglected much of the land becomes.

By the time you get to the furthest parts of the state; the stony deserts of Malheur County, the high dry hills of the Wallowas and the valley of the Snake River, and the rainforest serpentine mountains of Curry County, my destination today, you're either in the most spectacular of untrammeled wild places or the nastiest sorts of rural squalor.You can celebrate that or detest it; here in Oregon you cannot escape it.

The sky above Port Orford is still dark, but with the vague lightening that heralds the pre-dawn. A soldier would call it the barest edge of Before Morning Nautical Twilight, BMNT. The streets of Port Orford are quiet and still wet with the heavy coastal dewfall.The thing I always notice about the south Oregon coast is old.

Everything seems old, the places, and the people, because southwestern Oregon has very little for a young man or woman to stay for. There is no industry so a living is farming, logging, or fishing, the same triad that the first white people to these lands lived off.

But the land is mostly too hilly or too stony to farm, the valley floors too small to crop efficiently. Much of southwestern Oregon is underlain by the green serpentine rock that softens into a thin, meager soil that grows little and that sickly.

The timber is largely played out, or locked up in big corporate lands. The fishing gets poorer every season.

Little other than retirement or tourism - both pastimes for the old or the bored - still makes you a living down here. Mind you, the coastal tribes' casinos seem to be busy. I'm not sure if that falls under retirement or recreation. The number of fat recreational vehicles in the parking lots suggest the former. The Mill Casino; Land of the Lost Social Security check.

All the morning trade in the little coffeehouse is drawing Social Security for damn sure, other than the barista and I, and she seems less concerned about that than I am.

Her coffee is hot and caffeinated and that's really all that you can say for it. The smoked salmon in the cream cheese spread is rich bur sadly, it's probably from Norway. The great local runs fished out almost half a century ago.

I stop to snap a picture of the sunrise over Battle Rock. More than twenty years ago I stopped here on a sunny summer day, the first moment I put a foot on the ground of the place I have called home since then. There was an errant gray whale arcing from the shallow water of the bay, and the woman who was then my wife was charmed by the dark hills, the gunmetal ocean, and the great sea animal that seemed as old as both of them.I drink my coffee, and think of those times and these, and watch the sky pale to the southwest.

It's still barely dawn as I drive down the coast southwards through the rind of Coos County. Highway 101 is empty, the sky slowly paling above me but both the western horizon and the hills of the Coast Range to the east dark with lingering night.

I've never driven the Coast Highway at night without feeling the ocean over my western shoulder. Its not so much a genuine sensation as much as the thought of that immense, restless thing beginning there and extending so far away. Although I know where it is and what it is the Pacific Ocean always feels like it's looming far over my head in the night sky; not fearsome, really, but vast, endlessly vast, and in its great size a trifle frightening like a half-anticipated shiver at listening to a well-known ghost story.The little town of Ophir isn't really a town at all but an idea, the notion of a settlement now occupied by nothing but some sort of ramshackle store. Which appears to be closed and to have been closed for some time.I spend the morning doing what I love; studying the geology and landforms of a new place, trying to read the riddle in the rocks, the soils, the slopes, and the works of man that have so violently collided with them.The homeowner is unlikely to be pleased.

But I couldn't be happier. This is why I do what I do, this is why I love what I do - because it sets my mind, and my hands, and my knowledge against the bones of the Earth. I fell like I could sink into the soil and rock beneath my boots and hear the song the moving tectonic plates sing to each other as they pass, too faint for human ears, too slow for human lives, too huge for human strength.

About midday I get back in the truck to find something to eat and a cell tower in Gold Beach. I spent several weeks there back in the late 1990s, working on an ODOT contract. The little town has come up somewhat since then, when it was a hardscrabble coastal town in a very hard country. The stores look a little more prosperous, the people a little less straightened.But the Verizion cell service is out. Again. The locals accept this without so much as a real cuss word; the problem must not be that unusual. The illusion of connection with the settled parts of Oregon is so convincing that it comes as a shock to realize just how isolated this distal end of Curry County really is.

On the way back to my worksite I round a corner and, for just a moment, I tap the brake in fear that one of the local housecats has misjudged its moment to cross the road.But just for a moment. Because there is nothing domesticated in the muscular angularity of the animal that jolts to a stop along the road edge. The stilty hindquarters points up the stub where the long kitty-tail should be. The way it moves is pure wilderness in motion; after that initial moment's confusion even I, who have never seen a wild bobcat, couldn't confuse this a animal with the familiar indoors pussnums.

The bobcat shoots my truck a look that says without words that it has no use for me or my ugly human thing, and then it is gone.

By the time I finish up my reconnaissance the winter shadows are getting long. The little valley is already shaded, and the welcome February sunshine lingers only on the topmost slopes. I slowly drive north again, through the non-town of Ophir and back to the coast highway, heading for home.Humbug Mountain challenges the slow wintertime rollers of the North Pacific like a spiked fist slammed down on the coast, her forests fierce with the twisted krummholz fashioned by the storms of January and March.Deep in the shadowed side the ridiculous gimcrack thunder lizards of Prehistoric Gardens are frozen in their glass-eyed roars; who the hell really visits this curiosity, I wonder, other than in a spirit of giddy mockery?But well before you encounter this silly faux-fierce sideshow you've unknowingly passed by the real terror of the coastal mountains basking peacefully in the afternoon sun; the Arizona Inn landslide, one of the largest of all Oregon's coastal mass movements, 32 acres of massively complex interleaved failure that has moved Highway 101 at times as much as 25 feet seawards and down.Too large to go around, too immense to control, the engineers and geologists of Oregon have installed miles of drains to dewater this monster and slow its inevitable creep towards the sea that relentlessly gnaws away at its toe.

There is no victory against this landslide. All we can do is hope to slow its motion, to postpone for another day the tearing and shearing of the coast highway. And in that, perhaps, is enough of a triumph. Gravity and geology have not been tamed. They will never be a house pet. But perhaps its enough to have sent them back into the dark woods to await another day.The long coast road spools out ahead of me, five hours or more. There is chowder and dark beer waiting for me in Newport, and a silent house where my beloveds sleep at the end of the drive.And above the vermillion sky the bright unfixed point of Saturn shines down on the unstill Pacific and the darkening purple of the dreaming hills beyond.

There and Back Again

U.S. Highway 26 was almost free of snow on the high saddle at Government Camp.That's not usual for early January, and it wasn't what I was expecting.

I had made a special journey out to the office in Beaverton to pick up the big Chevy lift-gate pickup because it had the snow tires on. For all that the big bastard drives like a barge in a heavy surf I didn't want to drive over the Big Hill in my usual little Ford Ranger which, in contrast, skitters and slides like a Gresham hootchie-mama's CFM pumps over a patch of black ice when the roads turn slick.

But the snow didn't even start until well past Rhododendron, and all up the western slope of the Cascades I could see rock and soil exposed along the roadcuts, and even inside the woodline beyond only a dusting of snow lingered in the shadow, a reminder of the warm and cloudless days we'd enjoyed in November and December.

So I rumbled along with the steel-spiked tires doing God-knows-what to the poor bare pavement all the way over the crenulations of the Cascade crest; past the big shoulder of Mount Hood at Government Camp and the thinly-visited ski areas there with their skeletal chairlifts creaking and swaying emptily up and down in untenanted procession, past the junction where 26 begins its long descent and Highway 35 turns north and east to the valley of the Hood River, and then up over the Blue Box and Wapinita passes that guard the gate to the Deschutes River plateau.

I've driven this way many, many times. I've driven it in the height of summer when the forests are lush and green all about me, in autumn down corridors of vinemaple red as lust, red as jealousy, in the winter through a covered way of snowbanks stratified by the glacial passage of the plows, in spring with rain slashing the mists that blow through the deep firs and dark hemlocks like smoke from some unquenchable fire.

I've always loved the moment when, like an unexpected special effect in some nature film the hunter-green of the Cascades forest pales, the trees shrinking and thinning, until suddenly you're driving through the gray-green sage short through with golden lodgepole pine and field-gray juniper.

It's the rainshadow desert of the Cascades, and it never fails to delight me. Vistas are suddenly measured in miles instead of feet and inches, landmarks are mountains and valleys instead of individual trees. The poverty of the Warm Springs reservation is invisible in the barren deserts and rangelands between the climopause and the canyon of the Deschutes River so the pleasant illusion of unspoiled wild lands can beguile the traveler until the long descent through the eons and the conquest begins.Warm Springs is the usual huddle of neglect and indifference; the dilapidated prison-camp huts of a Stalag for a civilization. I note that the Tribes are building a new casino along the highway; clearly the Grande Ronde's big money-spinner on the road from Portland to Lincoln City is proving to be too much for the old Kah-nee-tah - too far off the highway, too much work for lazy, greedy white-eyes to travel off the main road to lose their pension checks. The shiny new walls and gleaming metal eaves seem to sneer at the dumpy houses nearby.

Even the Rez has its winners and losers.It's been some time since I was in Madras. The old farm town is the usual curious mixture of death and rebirth; big new Safeway and Sonic drive-in north of town, but in the old downtown newly-empty windows. The Salvadorian place has failed; too bad, I liked their food. I note that the China Palace, home to chow mein that would embarrass the Safeway just up the road, is still here. No accounting for Chinese in a land where the only Chinese are working in the restaurant; it's just lucky there's no fucking Panda Express.

Somehow the road between Madras and Redmond manages to combine the worst of Eastern Oregon driving; never interesting enough to keep you alert, never straight and simple enough to make drowsiness safe. The short winter day is ending as I loop around central Redmond, noting that the parking lot of the ginormous new WalMart "superstore" is full to bursting. The mere existence of that WalMart always irks the shit out of me (not because of any special WalMart evil; my feeling is that Americans have every opportunity to take their trade elsewhere and don't - I never shop there if I have any alternative - so the success of these places is our own choice) because I know that the old WalMart south of town still stands empty and will for decades. The Bentonville bastards preferred to pave over a perfectly good farm field rather than re-use their old site. The good people of Redmond have chosen to enrich them, and that's their choice. But I can't forget, or forgive, that cold, empty expanse of wasted asphalt and now-worthless concrete sliding into the early night ahead of me.The black bean beef at Cindy's is savory and good, and my travel-read has taken an unexpected turn for the better; you never know with Prachett whether you're getting twee-but-challenging or just-fucking-twee and this one is turning out to be T-B-C.

The oolong tea is smoky, and the Sunday evening service is prompt and friendly. The takeaway box has a smiley face and the legend "Have a Nice Day" embossed on it.

I mean to call my family, but after reading several chapters and deciding to close my eyes "just for a moment" I fall soundly asleep in the hard Motel 6 bed and wake, confused and still wearing my reading glasses, at midnight.

I'm a little surprised that my left hip isn't acting up; I haven't taken a painkiller and shake it a bit experimentally but it refuses to attack. I find myself asleep again in mid-shake.

I am walking along a broad porch in a sunny white house. Fine sand scuffs beneath my bare feet, and I can feel rather than see the iron heat of the tropic sun on my skin. Far away surf booms and sighs.

Ahead of me is a high, white room where a woman lies on a white chaise-lounge. Her dark hair is unbound and sprawls across the white pillow, and the hot wind stirs her white chemise. Her lips are red as lust, red as jealousy.

I sit down beside her and a white wave of tenderness sways over me. I lift her hand, and press my lips to her palm; the center is soft and warm, but the pads at the heel and the base of her fingers are slightly rough with work. She opens her eyes, and the red lips curve up in a slow smile, and her long feet point and her toes spread as she arches her back.

The brangling of the phone wakes me to chill darkness.

It's only after I step into the shower I realize that there are no towels in the room. The terrycloth "bathmat" is rough and barely big enough to cover a Congressman's probity. The feeling of being not-quite-dry-under-my-clothes surfaces unpleasant memories from Army days.

There always seems to be a man sitting alone in a Shari's drinking bad coffee and staring at a computer.

The one in Redmond is short, and blonde, and his machine is a white Macintosh. A brief glimpse at the screen suggests that he is looking at some sort of spreadsheet, and the irked expression he's giving it suggests that it is not telling him something he enjoys hearing. He sits and sips and looks irked all through the time it takes me to order and finish my breakfast. He's still sitting there as I leave. He may still be sitting there for all I know.The work site is located in a semi-derelict strip mall wedged between a busy Fred Meyer store and the mess of streets that complicates the south side of Redmond. The pavement is deteriorating, the siding looks faded, and the little computer repair business that was going in Unit C has closed.

We're doing "open pit" infiltration tests in the sparse landscape planter between the east side of the parking lot and Canal Boulevard, and there's something rather sad about the scraggle of juniper and pines that have grown up around the perimeter of the lot. Someone took the time to carefully arrange roughly similar blocks of vesicular basalt around the edge of the low-growing junipers but time and neglect have displaced many of them; they now straggle and weave like a New Year's conga line in a Forties movie, raffish and half-dressed, careless knowing that no one watching it cares.Unlike the restless lands to the west the bones of Earth lie shallow here, and the unfruitful rock and sere, sandy soils are unwilling to accept water more than grudgingly. I suspect that the client will not be pleased with our results.

Although the day turns warm as the sun transits overhead the hour after sunrise feels colder than the pre-dawn dark. I've always wondered why, or whether it's just the effect of having less insulation; since losing weight everything feels colder now. I need some hot coffee so trudge across the street to the Starbucks kiosk in the grocery store.

I'm in line behind a little knot of high-school girls; it's a cliche but we might as well be two different species - homo geezerensis and homo juvenalis or something like that. I'm filthy and layered against the cold, they are barely dressed warmly enough for their classroom and spend much of their time fiddling with their cell phones. The barista is moving speedily to prepare their choices, all of which seem to require multiple pumps of this and cups of that. She seems to be relieved that I want no more than a cup of drip coffee. We agree that it's a nice day. The coffee tastes of earth, and sun, and I warm my hands around the thin paper cup. I smile at the girls who look back at me with neutrally not-unfriendly expressions.

Different species meeting at the waterhole; not in the same herd, not predator-and-prey, not competitors...so different from each other that there is no real connection between them at all.

When I was in grade school one of the janitors in my elementary school had a short leg. I remember being fascinated by his shoe, which had a sole that must have been two inches thick, and his deliberate way of walking so deliberate that seemed like a parody of walking, with each foot planted firmly as if each step required thoughtful care. I realize now that what seemed like deliberation was probably nothing more than pain.

It occurs to me that I can't remember the last time I ran fleet and careless, unencumbered by pain, untroubled by dysfunction.

Walking back to my work I think perhaps I should find someone to make stacked soles for my right shoe, now that my right leg is like his was forty-something years ago.

Someone working in the insurance office across the drive aisle has called our Seattle office to complain that I am parked in one of "their" stalls, Seattle has called my engineer in Portland, my engineer has called me. I move the Barge, noting that of the five parking spaces on that side of their building only two had been occupied all morning, one of them with the Barge. Territorial instinct? Boredom? Why bother?

On the way back north another engineer calls. Can I go to John Day and look at a site where someone wants to raise their earth dam. I can; it's two hours east but not impossible on a sunny day not long past noon. But we don't have access, and the engineer is calling but has not had a reply. I dawdle slowly back to Madras, checking in, wait in the parking lot outside the handsome new Safeway. No reply. The sun is lowering, and I make a last call. Still nothing. Sometimes it's like that - first there's some work, then there isn't, or there might not be, or there's no way of knowing. The effect of not being privy to the business decisions that drive the technical work I do is that sometimes technical choices are made for reasons I will never know. It's a lot like being a private soldier in that way.

The late afternoon roads across the passes are wet with meltwater. Another warm day, a little less snowpack, another inch closer to a drought-summer; a worry for a distant day.

I am pleased that I was able to cross back over the Big Hill before nightfall; the sheeting runoff will be nasty in a couple of hours as night and cold turn it into black ice.A single sunray glides across Cathedral Rock, high up the south face of Mount Hood, gilding the white with gold, then orange, then red; red as lust, red as jealousy.

Then to purple, and then on into the dark.

Home from the Hill II Electric Boogaloo

The house is silent except for the rattle of rain on the barrel-lid outside the front window.

Portland has resumed it's autumnal grays and browns, albeit with the lingering savannah-yellow color of the late summer lawns. You should know that a green lawn in Portland is reserved for the enclaves of the feckless Well-To-Do; a sturdily hip urban Stumptowner takes pride in his or her sere expanse of waterless yard as evidence of an unshaken commitment to conservation in the Mediterranean climate of northwest Oregon. Let Laurelhurst and Bridlemile remain green through September; in North Portland and Sellwood we stand condescendingly amid our own miniature African veldt, humorlessly proud of our own superior ecology.I'm home again from a week working out of town.There really is something to be said for a home; not just a living space, but a well-loved surrounding that enfolds people, objects, and activities that define the place you are most defined by.

Or perhaps it is a facet of maturity. I spent most of my young adulthood in a search for the exotic. I find that on the descending branch of adulthood I enjoy the familiar as much or more than the novel.The wild land of the Olympic Peninsula is a stark magnificence. There is no gentleness, no softness there; the deep tangle of forest and brutal vertiginous mountains glower rather than beckon. Even as a place for work they are a beautiful surrounding, and I enjoyed my time there this week, seeing new places and doing new things.But it is now, in the quiet gray of dawn, with my family asleep behind me, that I find my heart at peace and my soul content.

Grass and Wind

Spent two days on the east side of the Cascades last week - what in Oregon we call the "dry side" because of the change you encounter crossing the barrier of the mountains. The air dries and warms as it crosses the Cascade Range, and the east side is desert as the west is forest.I drove from The Dalles among the Columbia River south to Redmond in the middle of what geologists call the "High Lava Plain", a route I haven't taken for a while. What's interesting about the trip is the change that occurs as you drive south from the great river valley.

From the river south you ascend through hills like steps, each on higher than the next and cut by sharp valleys that seem trivial after the passageway of the River of the West. But these drainageways are the life of the hill country, providing water and shelter from the cold winds that scour the Columbia Valley in the winter. The roads wind up the valley sides and the ranch houses and small settlements huddle in the draws as far below the high, cold ridgetops as possible.Life thins here, as the hills rise away from the river. There doesn't seem like much to hold a man. The grass is thin, the trees stunted. The soil has a thin, pale look and crumbles from the friable road embankments like the volcanic ash from which it formed. Even the burying grounds look empty, hunched under their forlorn canopy of ragged winter trees, their dead held only tenuously in the ground, even now unwilling to remain in this lonely place.Finally you overtop Tygh Ridge and look south across the plain that extends south the whole way down to nearly the California border, the dun ridges enclosing the dark greens and emeralds of the farmlands in the valleys. Once across Tygh Valley the road runs over the broad arch of grassland that spans the desert between the Tygh and Deschutes Rivers before descending into the little town of Maupin.

Maupin is an absurdity, a tiny clutch of houses huddled down in a bend of the Deschutes with a bridge where the old ferry used to span the river. It probably served as a place for the early white settlers to bring their produce to be sent down the river to The Dalles and then on to Portland, it was the ferry crossing between the Columbia towns and the central Oregon centers like Bend and Madras, but it serves no such purpose today. What vitality it has it combs out of the summer visitors who use it as a entry for playing in the water; rafting, fishing, kayaking - the Deschutes has become a playground of a river. And Maupin is where they come to find a way into the playground. In the winter it has a faintly silly but seedy, untenanted sort of air, like an unemployed balloon man or an out-of-work clown. I have no regrets leaving Maupin behind.Once you climb out of the Deschutes valley you realize that your surroundings have changed again. The grass prairie has given way to sagebrush and juniper. I have heard that these plants and especially the sage that most people, even most Oregonians, think of as the very symbol of Western wild lands were once much less common than today. I don't know if this is true, but what I have heard is that much of the High Desert was once grasslands, and that a combination of overgrazing and the plow disturbed the land enough to allow the sage to take hold. It certainly has south of the Deschutes; the land is gray-green with it, and the air is spicy with its scent.Once you have crossed into the sagebrush sea the last human permanence disappears. The desert has swallowed you up, as it has everyone who has passed this way since the northern Paiute were lords of the desert and their peregrinations were the only human passage through this place.Even now, the single houses, the scattered power transformers, the miles of wire fence, seem to perch on the edge of the wild as if a single cold winter night will cause them to take flight and return the land to the emptiness and the wind and the lonely song of the horned larks that rise and wheel above the sagebrush, announcing their presence to the vacant sky.