Snow Joke

Walmart Parking Lot
Montrose CO


Snow.

It looks so decorative in the campground, and sprinkled on the hoodoos at Bryce Canyon.

I really have been lucky with the weather ever since I left the soggy western shore of Washington. No rain harder than a mist, and no snow actually falling from the sky.

I did notice as I drove into Colorado Sunday that starting around Fruita the stock tanks were still frozen over in the middle of the afternoon. A few even had that gritty battleship gray color that indicates you could drive on them, assuming you didn't mind where you ended up. But the sun was shining in a clear blue sky, the road and the fields were dry, and what did I care?

When I came into Montrose it was getting dark. I stopped at a Chinese Buffet on Main Street to fill up. About 6 o'clock I contemplated a KOA in town, but yielded to my usual irrational dislike of commercial places and drove east on Hwy 50 toward Gunnison. My ultimate object is Lake City, and thence to Creede, and then the Spa at Pagosa Springs.

Seven miles out of town I came to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

When I drove up the hill in the dark, the sky was clear and shot with stars. The road was dry. The campground had a couple of sites that weren't crusty with last week's snow. I settled into one of them, surprised to find I could get 3 or 4 TV stations up there. The 10 pm forecast was for a couple of inches of snow in the Grand Junction area.

Allll riiight. More picturesque Christmas decoration to accompany me as I turned toward home.

About 6 am I woke up for some reason. The wind was shaking the trailer, and a fine layer of white stuff had covered the road. No stars, no moon. I got up and made some coffee, watched the flakes flutter against the windows. I even got out and took a picture. After the sun came up the snowfall intensified, so I got ready to leave before it got deep. Got to use that danged snow scraper I've been carrying around uselessly for 2 years.

No problem getting out of the park. There were only a couple of inches on the road yet, and visibility was pretty good.

I did discover that my old strap on chains didn't fit the new tires I put on last year.

What the hell. I stuck it in 4 low and headed down the hill.

When I went past the entrance booth I quickly entered a zone of light fog and heavy swirling flakes. I could see the road, but not far down it. The lower I got, the thicker it was, with drifts maybe a foot deep at the edges of the road. Getting deeper. The road began to twist and turn, descending steeply. I just crawled at a medium walk down the mountain, but more and more aware of the 7000 pounds behind me. I could feel the tires skid now and then when I touched the brakes. I was being pushed faster than I wanted to go.

And I began to think I had found myself a full fledged snow storm.

Touch and go. Touch and go. Very slow, very slow. I got within a couple of miles of the highway, favoring the inside of the curves, barely moving. Then I came to a stop. There was a yellow sign ahead with a big black S on it. I could see most of the snaking road directly below, about a 4 or 5% grade, 30-50 foot dropoffs on both sides and far below a 90 degree turn to the left, with a deep ditch waiting.

There was no damn way.

I was already stopped. Leaving the truck running, I put the gearshift in park, stomped the emergency brake as far down as it would go, put on my coat, and went around to the passenger side of the truck to get the chocks out of the bed. While I was digging in the snow back there to find them, I felt the truck move. What the hell. I was standing on the rear wheel, and it was certainly not rolling. It moved again. I jumped off, chocks flying. The weight of the trailer was pushing the truck down the hill.

And it was beginning to pick up speed.

It was then I found out I can still move pretty fast when I need to. I outran it quickly, clear around the front, briefly thinking it would be really stupid to die here, run over by my own truck.

The humor of the situation escaped me just then. And it didn't slow me down. The whole rig was heading for the ditch at an increasingly rapid pace.

Somehow I managed to get the door open and get in. Gingerly I touched the brakes. Jack-knife. Tried to turn the wheel, but that had almost no effect. By this time the whole rig was moving sideways, like the slow-motion wreck it was about to become, remorselessly approaching the dropoff at an angle.

I couldn't even jump out at that point, since the truck was headed that way. It would just mush me.

I took my hands off the wheel and kept lightly touching the brake, felt it slow a little, stopped when it started to jack-knife some more, then touched it again. Gradually I came to a miraculous stop with the back of the truck about 2 feet from the edge.

Very carefully I got out and walked back to where the chocks had been flung. The truck had traveled perhaps it's own length and a little more. All the time the emergency brake was on and the transmission in park. I chocked the wheels.

I was blocking the whole road. Screw it.

Whew. Right about then I really, really needed to pee. While I was about that chore I had a revelation. Those tires had 80 psi in them, rigidly inflated for hauling the trailer on dry pavement. Hell, they were like skis. I let them down to 30 pounds, unchocked and straightened the wheels to run down hill, put the truck back in 1st gear, and very lightly let off the brake.

The truck shuddered, -chk-chk-chk-chk-chk-, and started down hill, which was alarming, but gradually it straightened out, and then I was able again to pump the brakes lightly to bring it slowly to a stop in what seemed to be the right lane.

Whew again. That was enough for me. This was as good as it was going to get.

This all may seem a long-winded way to convey events that probably only took 3 or 4 minutes from start to finish, but it sure seemed a lot longer. I chocked the trailer, dropped it right there in the road, turned off the propane, left a note on the window with my phone number and the time, and went on down the hill in the truck alone. No problem.

When I got to the Walmart in Montrose, I spent $160 on chains for all 4 tires. Nothing like experience to make you believe in overkill. As it was, I got the last two sets they had stocked in my size.

Of course when I got back to the trailer, two hours after I left it, a snowplow had been by. It was just his first pass, and he left a good deal of snow on the road. But I probably didn't need the chains at that point. I put them on anyhow, back tires only, hooked up, and crawled all the way down the rest of the way to the highway in 4 low, first gear.

All's well that ends well.

Next time I'll have the chains. Hell, next time I'll know a 2 inch forecast means a foot or more right in front of me. I really do have quite a lot of experience driving in the mountains, and off road, and not a little in the snow. But this is the first time I have driven down a steep hill in the snow, on a serpentine road, and been pushed by a 7000 pound 5th wheel at the same time.

It looks like BTID luck again. Better Than I Deserve. My mood improved after a seafood chimichanga at Amelia's in Montrose. Not to mention a couple of Margaritas.

I am staying tonight at the Walmart, and hoping for a clear road tomorrow. It's still snowing and 32 degrees at 6 pm.

Wish me luck.


Bob

Traveler's Luck

I've had the most amazing run of luck lately. So good it's got me worried. I might run out. And I'm not counting surviving a heart attack and making it to PNWCO. I don't know what to make of this. It's just Better Than I Deserve.

I stopped for the night at the campground in Capitol Reef National Park. Early next frosty morn I picked up my camera to put it in the truck, but I forgot my keys. So I laid the camera up on my tool box and went back for them. Then I got hooked up, dumped my tanks, and drove northeast through a quantity of beautiful open desert to Hanksville, where I had lunch at Blondie's. Along the way I stopped at a mountain turnout, where a sign informed me that if I had a mind to, I might fit the entire state of Connecticut into the space right before me.

I could believe it.

After lunch I filled up next door with gas and proceeded north up Hwy. 24 to the cutoff to Valley of Goblins State Park. The "Goblins" are sandstone towers which have been weathered down, first by water and later by wind, into squat eerie homunculi. First guy to see this and tell about it called the place "Valley of Mushrooms". Which is also apt.

I reached into the back seat for my camera. No camera. Then I remembered. Nope, not in the back of the truck either.

I had driven perhaps 75 miles, twisting and turning through a mostly empty landscape. Without any real hope, I started back. This camera cost me upwards of $800 several years ago. I had to go through the motions. Besides, there were maybe 50 pictures still in it.

It was 7 miles back to Hwy 24. Just as I was coming up on the intersection, I saw a County water truck apparently broken down on the side of the road. The driver was standing out front. He waved me down.

"What's up?"

"Did you lose something?"

"My camera."

He snapped his fingers. "We got it. The other water hauler - Jeannette - saw it fall off your truck. She couldn't catch you, but she radioed me about it. I been waitin' here a while."

Amazing. I got directions, thanked him, and headed back. About five miles down the road I met a supervisor waving at me from a pickup truck. He handed it off. I gave him 20 bucks to give Jeannette. Even if the thing was broken, she'd saved me half a day of fruitless looking.

"No problem. Compliments of Emery County Road Crew." He didn't want to take the money, but I pretty much forced it on him. Then I went back to the state park and took some pictures.

This thing must've flown off the back of my truck while taking a turn at a speed of maybe 20 mph. The bag was scratched up a bit, but the camera was unmarked and worked fine.

BTID.


Bob

The Shadow of the Valley

Lake Skinner
California


I'm sitting here stuffed completely full of turkey and pie, looking at a map of California. There are several ways back to Texas from here. And that's where I'm going, by December 16th. A friend of mine is having surgery.

I could go south, pass by the Salton Sea, and on to Phoenix. Or I could go north, through Las Vegas, and on to the Canyonlands, and a corner of Colorado beyond. A little out of the way, but an easy road with things to see along it. Just get on Interstate 15 and set the cruise control. Nothing to it.

So I did. And it was easy, through San Bernardino, then up the cliff and on to Victorville, the land drying out, turning to caliche before my eyes. Then Barstow... Barstow? That sounds familiar....

Good Lord. Death Valley. I'm right outside Death Valley.

That brings back ill-met memories. I was there. In early March, around my birthday. 1978.

And I had ample reason to reflect upon the name before I left.

I drove out from Texas in a rattling old teal green Chevy pickup, drinking beer and throwing the cans in the passenger footwell. Those were the days. I had a Honda motorcycle strapped down back in the bed. A small bore twin cylinder road bike. Maybe 450cc. And maybe carrying just the tiniest chip on my shoulder.

Rollin, rollin, rollin. Though my head is swollen.

It was the first vacation I'd had since recovering from a slipped disc in my neck. Amazingly, the accident and my recovery made me cocky rather than cautious. Like I was one tough hombre, dude. The weather was alternately springlike and iffy all the way out, some sun but mostly windy and cold across West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

I stopped in Las Vegas for the first time. Yes, Mr. Giddings. Of course, Mr. Giddings. We'll be happy to cash your check. In fact we'll cash your whole checking account.

Won a pile of chips at blackjack and pissed it all away. Stayed up all night. While I was still flush, one of the prettier dealers told me about a hot spring out in the desert nearby. Mostly broke by morning, I couldn't remember her name, even if she used her real one, but I drove out into the desert and somehow found it. A little windblown and grubby place, attached to a cheap motel. But I soaked in there for 2 or 3 hours.

What was the name of that place? Somewhere north, I think. Probably not there anymore. It was barely there then.

That part is a blur. But I remember driving on to Barstow and getting a room. Then early the next morning I left the truck in the parking lot of a grocery store and rode back to Baker on the bike, then up through Shoshone to Furnace Creek. All the way there the sun was shining.

I was feeling pretty smug about -finally- doing something irrepressibly cool. I blew down the back roads all afternoon, trailing alkali dust like clouds of glory.

Then it started to rain. Hard. In Death Valley.

Thoroughly surprised and sodden, I set up the tent and spent a rather frosty and self-critical night in one of the campgrounds. I woke up numb to an overcast sky, and decided I'd had enough adventure for a while. But I didn't want to go back the easy way I came and just see the same old stuff.

How boring.

Consulting a map, I saw that it was possible to make a big circle west and back to Barstow. Great idea. All I had to do was glide up over some low passes beyond Stovepipe Wells. One of them was called Emigrant Pass. I remember the name because the sound of it brought back a little of that romantic devil-may-care sense of adventure I had started with.

And I was doing pretty good until it started sleeting.

The windshield on the bike quickly covered over with an opaque slushy built-up rime of ice. Colder and colder. The wind blasted past the windshield. I drove with my head weaving back and forth around the sides, putting together a kind of strobing, uncertain, intermittent notion of the road ahead.

Meanwhile I was hugging the motor with my legs for the least vanishing hint of warmth. When my boots began burning at the ankle I'd go a little bowlegged for a bit, then cozy up again. I had to stop at the tops of hills to clean off the glacier goggles I was using for eye protection, and maybe try to get some feeling back in my fingers. My gloves eventually froze into a talon-like immobile curve, clinging to the handlebars by themselves.

Then, between two passes, the throttle cable broke. I coasted gently to a stop and looked around. Not a soul for miles, either way, and the sky looked lumpy and troubled, black as hell. Come to think of it, I would have paid dearly for a roaring fire right about then, supernatural or not.

It was a situation little improved by cursing. The wind came on in battering gusts down the mountain, flinging small stinging shards before it, sharp as regret.

Tears went solid in the crinkles of my eyes.

After a little uncomfortable investigation I found I could just keep going by running up the idle adjustment on the carburetor as far as it would go, then popping the clutch and piddling along at maybe 10 miles an hour, nursing the middle gears. I'd slow down to almost nothing going up a hill, then scream down the other side at 30, even 35 mph.

Wahoo.

Obstinately clinging to the unnecessary pain of life, I rode and rode, on and on, for what seemed like hours.

What else could I do? Something came to mind. But even at the best of times, which this was not, I don't bend in the right places to kick my own ass.

I lived. Just in case you were wondering. This is not a posthumous note, found on my dessicated, coyote-gnawed body the following spring. But I had some blue, blue, blue fingers by the time I checked into the motel in Trona.

What I remember well is that it took both hands to turn the knob on the front door. The little bit of remaining articulation I could summon up was at the elbows. I stumbled through the door and leaned back against it, trying to straighten up. My coat crackled and shed thin plates of melting ice on the welcome mat.

The lady seemed taken aback, as though not sure she wanted to deal with me. Then, with infinite gratitude, I saw the pity in her eyes. It probably also helped that I had cash.

Jesus. Maybe I should go up there, check it out. I weighed the proposition. On the one hand, ahead of me was Las Vegas, City of Lights and Sin. On the other, Death Valley. The name says it all.

Las Vegas it is.

I blew through Baker like it wasn't there.


Bob

Cities

Malibu Creek State Park
California


I don't have much good to say about cities.

But hang on, I may get onto something else. If you've been hanging around here very long, you already know that what's at the top of the page may not be what's at the bottom.

Cities are a problem for RVers. No place to park. Traffic lights programmed by quick change artists. Curved streets with cars parked on both sides, gradually narrowing into a nice little trap. Unmarked dead ends. O yeah. O yeah.

I remember wanting to take a left turn in Portland once. They made me drive a couple of miles and cross a bridge before it was legal.

My advice is to find a nearby park and ditch the trailer. That's what I did, both in San Francisco and here in LA. In the City by the Bay, I stayed in Samuel P. Taylor State Park, a lingering southern patch of redwoods near Lagunitas. From there it's a straight shot down Francis Drake Blvd. to 101 in Greenbrae, where I hoped to catch the ferry. Unfortunately it was a Sunday, and the ferry was on half rations.

I also noticed a big sign in the parking lot that said NO RVS, which made me feel put out.

In the end I just drove across the Golden Gate, pulled off on Marina Blvd, and parked on the street in front of a Safeway. There was quite a lot of street parking, though not for RVs. I was told you could park a Motorhome at the Palace of Fine Arts for free, but I can't vouch for that. Anyway, it was a short walk across Old Fort Mason to the Maritime Museum and Fisherman's Wharf.

I did all the usual tourist stuff. Ate seafood, rode the cable cars, gawked at all them taaall buildings. Gee whiz. Visited various museums up and down Market, including the Asian museum in the old Library.

They have an impressive City Hall building here. It looks like something you wouldn't want to fight.

I was surprised at the mild weather, and pissed that I was carrying a coat around. Then it started pouring rain, and the coat got soaked. So much for providence. I finally took a cab back to the truck.

San Francisco is a wonderful place. And I was glad to get out of there.

In LA I had the same plan, and found a pretty good site at Malibu Creek State Park. It's a bit of the old coastal hills preserved in the midst of all the concrete, about halfway between 101 and Malibu on Las Virgines Road. You could do worse. You can get around to Downtown and Pasadena and Venice Beach about as well from here as anywhere. It's quiet, and no more expensive than any other state park.

I did the Getty and the Simon and the County Museum of Art, just because I might not be back this way soon. Seen from the aerie of the Getty, Los Angeles is either an inspiring or a godawful hellish sight. On an inversion day, it looks like a preliminary drawing for Blade Runner.

But from the street level, LA is just like any other city. There's just a lot more of it. The brown cloud isn't so noticeable. Neighborhoods blend into strip malls into warehouse districts into neighborhoods again. On and on, people living out their lives. It ain't all bad.

And Venice beach is a passle of entertainment. Don't miss it.

For all people cuss the freeways, in the middle of the day you can get around pretty easily here, even pulling a trailer. Just stay out of the left lane if you don't want to get run over. Of course, in the morning, and again in the evening, it doesn't matter what lane you're in.

But my real business here was to pick up some mail and visit with my stepson and his wife. They're thinking about having kids, and I tried to make a case for the affirmative. Then I shut my mouth before anything I had to say became the kiss of death for the project.

What's the old acronym? Dinks. Double Income, No Kids. That's them.

When I was his age, my life was pretty full, too, and I didn't see any need for kids. But then, as my thirties wore on, everyone I knew was towing little versions of themselves to soccer games and school plays, and suddenly it seemed like just the thing to do.

Funny how it's built into you. Phases and stages. Unfortunately not everyone is synchronized perfectly.

So much for cities. Time to get back to the beach.

I wonder if San Diego is still burning?


Bob

Mirkwood

Malibu Creek State Park
California


"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway."

--- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit.


Time got strange on me as I drove down through the Land of Nod - er, California. Part of it was just adopting a slower pace. I didn't want to go rushing headlong into the embrace of those massive fires down south. Part was less rational, as I entered into a sort of introspective gloom made manifest in flora - the fabled Redwood Groves, still lingering under a legislative spell here in the north, protected by a mumble of words from the inevitable axe.

It's hard to believe their overwhelming eternal presence is mere illusion, the product of whimsy and luck. Somehow a few patches have never run into a man with a chainsaw. These giant living creatures, hundreds of years old, may yet find themselves abruptly sold by the square foot and turned into someone's suburban summer deck. People are like that. If I was a tree, I wouldn't trust'em.

Run away. Run away! Oh.

I tried to take a picture of one that was 28 feet through, and 260 feet high. It was like trying to get a good likeness of a man by taking a picture of his shins. Useless. Mostly you can't get far enough away, and when you can, it just looks like a tree. Redwoods have to be experienced, not photographed.

They are romantic places, of course, these dark dim dripping groves, like living green caverns raised above the earth, but for me they are not comfortable to camp in. No direct sunlight in the day, and an absolute abyss of blackness at night, filled with bumps and shudders and creaks when the wind blows. And there's no clear line between growth and decay, here in the damp hush, in the thick noise-deadening wet mush of mould and mushrooms underfoot.

These glens remind me of Tolkien's Mirkwood, where great trees moved slowly about on deep business of their own, at best ignoring and at worst inimical to the nattering apes that passed below.

It gets depressing, being ignored like that.

I spent a couple of weeks in these woods altogether, three or four days at a time, in Jedediah Smith Park, Humboldt Park, Redwoods Park, Samuel Taylor Park, moving slowly south from the Oregon border to the outskirts of San Francisco. I began to feel like a Redwoods zombie, with a dark slow wit crumbly with toadstools, more rough bark than bite, plucked from the dark loam untimely.

Like an Ent.

The sunshine and long sightlines of the coast were the proper cure for that. I couldn't get enough of the beach, and resorted to narrow county roads to stay where I could eyeball it. One particularly deserted and problematic patch was along Hwy 211 from Ferndale to Redway. Lots of switchbacks and bumps. I'm not sure a Motorhome would have made it, but the 5th wheel had no real trouble, or so I believed.

The land along 211 is cattle country. Where the road is away from the beach you can't get to the ocean without crossing a fence, but a good deal of the time the road is right along the bluff, and the water a short unencumbered walk away. I stayed in a couple of turnouts. Maybe 3 cars came by in the early evening. The ocean rocked and whispered at my open window all night long.

The Behemoth is starting to shake herself to pieces. Coming into Fort Bragg, right after passing a wreck, I heard something metallic dragging on the road behind me. It was one of the cross members that support the floor joists. I pulled over into a turnout, broke the final bit of weld holding it on, and limped into town.

Next morning I found Wally's Weld-All. For $107 he replaced the thin angle iron with something twice as thick and strong, and also reinforced another piece that was coming loose. The hidden price of buying a cheap trailer is eternal vigilance.

This is just my kind of luck. Happens all the time. Things fall apart, but the cure is not far away.

A week later, near Santa Cruz, I had another one of those fateful moments. I'd been holed up in Butano State Park reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. After two days and 800 pages or so, I decided to move on. It was crisp in the morning, so I had my catalytic heater going. Those things are so quiet, it's easy to forget about them.

Easy for me, anyhow.

I stopped on the side of the road across from a cafe called Whale City to check in with the NG and get off some emails. I'd forgotten my AC power brick for the laptop, so I went back to get it out of the trailer. When I opened the door, there was a bottle of wine rolling around on the floor. I'd forgotten to hook up the bungee cord on the door to the wine rack that sits underneath the dinette. So that's 3 things I forgot, merely because what passes for my mind these days was still back in Middle Earth.

If you are going to forget things, be sure to make it an odd number.

For, as luck would have it, here's the interesting thing I was not aware of: When that cabinet door is wide open, it contacts the front of the catalytic heater. The front of it was charred black, and the handle was hot, hot, hot. Another hour down the road, and I might have been towing a nascent conflagration. Maybe right about the time I was pulling into a gas station. Or parked next to a grassy hill.

BTID Luck again. Better Than I Deserve. The last thing I need is to be the cause of ANOTHER billion dollars worth of firestorm in California. Wonder if absent-mindedness is a legal defense against arson? Not if I was on the jury. I'd have to put myself away.

I wasn't stopped that far from Lompoc Prison. Hell of a place to spend my golden years.

I had been wanting to yank that dinette anyway, planning to put in a couple of chairs. Just moved the date up.

Dumb luck is better than wisdom. Just in case you are ever offered the choice.


Bob

Guess Who and the Ghost Road

Malibu Creek State Park
California

I'm not sure where Big Sur begins and ends. My guess would be from Monterey to Morrow Bay. It may be one of those places not subject to ordinary measurement, like the road to Katmandu. But while you are there it is a delightful drive you will not want to end.

Don't get me wrong. Hwy 1 is a real road. It's narrow and twisty and potholed in places, a whiteknuckle nightmare if you happen to meet an elderly RVer with his eyes on the ocean. And you will.

But that's just it. The ocean is RIGHT THERE, over a hundred miles of sand and rocks and sunsets, thundering waves and flying spray. This is not a languid lake grown large. This is the old man himself, and you better behave.

My God. It's just gorgeous.

I spent the nights in turnouts. There a number of state parks along the way, but they don't seem to have been built for trailers. You will see innumerable signs that say "Do not enter if the combined length of trailer and tow vehicle is more than 5 feet". I may be a little off, but its something like that. Whatever it is, they mean it.

Doesn't matter. Wide and airy turnouts are plentiful. Traffic dies down at night. Just lower the roadside blinds and turn your soul to the ocean. Let the breeze blow right through you.

This is what you did all that driving for.

Cell phone service is spotty when you're not in Kansas anymore. But somewhere along the road the thing started working, and I got through to Guess Who, one of the regulars on the newsgroup. We agreed to meet for a late lunch at a taco stand in Atascadero. Of course I didn't know exactly where I was, or where Atascadero was, and as it turned out I was many hours away.

Hwy 1 is not a road for making time, and it's probably a crime to try. But there's another appointment I have made, for the 16th, in LA, to pick up a check being sent from a retirement account, and try to sweet talk my stepson and his bride into having kids. Can't be late for that.

Gotta go, gotta go.

I passed by a pile of bodies Okay. For this I had to at least slow down. They turned out to be sea lions, or else some sort of large seals. I'm a creature of the middle continent, what do I know? Well, I do know they were plumb tuckered out. Perhaps a hundred of them lay in hills and drifts along a sandy cove, entirely alive but oblivious to people who stopped and took their pictures.

I would have liked to find out more, but hey, I'm late for an appointment in Atascadero.

Gotta go, gotta go.

I passed by many a likely turnout, but pressed on. Then there was San Simeon, off to the left. Nope, no time for that.

Why do I make appointments? Do you have to wear a leisure suit to finally accept your leisure?

San Simeon. I had an eerie experience there, the only time I took the tour. I think it was around 1976. Early spring.

I was driving up the coast road from LA for the first time, and literally blundered onto the Castle around 2 in the afternoon. I knew nothing about it. Hadn't even heard of it.

I paid for one of the tours, and wandered around a good bit on my own, getting thoroughly marinated in the ambiance and history, the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the gardens, the guest residences, studying the old photographs, etc. In general I just acted like I owned the place. I didn't get away until they chased me out for outstaying my welcome, just before dark.

Fingers of fog were creeping up the valley from the sea as I descended. A huge orange sun was squatting down there, dimly, at the edge of the world.

I headed north through the thickening soup, and the first station I found on the AM radio in my geriatric Chevy was some kind of an oldies station that specialized in big band music. Mood music. Perfect.

I rolled down the window and sang along. It may have gone something like this:

"It's funny, how you loved me,
Then forgot so suddenly...
It's funny, to everyone but me.


How can I do, what my head tells me to,
When my heart tells me how much I care?
It's funny, to everyone but me."


Sometimes I actually sing pretty good. But only when no one is listening.

Maybe 5, 10 miles up the coast, an old car poured smoothly toward me out of the fog. An apparition. It was right out of the '20s. It had those big round bleary yellow headlamps, like goggles floating above the fenders. And a tall narrow grill. It was in amazing condition.

Swooooosh. Right on by. Rickety tick. Moving along. "Alllll Riiiiight," I thought, "This is really cool."

Artie Shaw followed Benny Goodman followed Harry James on the radio. It was great, just rolling down that smoothly winding road at 30 miles an hour, elbow out the window, listening to old songs in the gathering dark. You could hear the ocean even when you couldn't see it. And off on the right, the pale light of a witchy three-quarter moon began to glow through the fog along the cliffs.

Another old car came into view. I couldn't see it well enough to get the make. Some old thing, but running pretty darn good, just floating up and down the humps on that narrow road.

It didn't slow down when I did, but I still got a good look in passing. A Chevy, I think. From the '30s. Some guy in a hat. I waved, but he went on like I wasn't there.

"Man. This is getting better and better."

Then there was another. And another. And another. A whole string of them spread out along the road, one after the other, all of a certain age, gliding by on my left like a long dream in the fog.

And all, I swear, in showroom shape.

Right about then I felt a strong impulse to change the station on the radio. You know, just to check. But half way there my hand got kind of heavy, and fell back. I couldn't quite make myself do it.

It was too perfect. The bubble would burst. I really didn't want to know. Not just yet.

But then, a few minutes later, here came three more of those creepy cars. Okay. That's enough. Feeling a little silly on the one hand, and not a little nervous on the other, I reached out and spun quickly up the dial until I reached a rock station.

There. A little more static than I'd like, but definitely not big band. Whew. I never was so glad to hear Buddy Holly.

Wait a minute. Buddy Holly?

I never did figure out what was going on that night along that lonely stretch of California coast, but I didn't see any more of those old cars. It was a long way, but when I finally made it to the next town, I stopped and got out and had a cup of coffee and talked to the waitress for a while.

It was 1976 again.


And now it's 2003, and there's the cutoff for Atascadero.

Don Lampson, aka Guess Who?, probably had been waiting a couple of hours. But we quickly got past that and into a pile of tacos. He's a retired prison guard, and in his youth something of an apprentice lumberjack. We swapped lies, damn lies, exaggerations and maybe even a couple of potential legends.

We didn't go all the way, though. We never got into statistics.

He offered me his driveway for a camping spot, for a few days. I was severely tempted. I'd like to hear him play the guitar. But nooooo, gotta go, gotta go, gotta go. Gotta get down to LA. Gotta get that check, meet the family, tote that barge, lift that bale.

Gotta go, gotta go.

What the hell am I doing?


Bob, who is supposed to be retired.

Mendocino and the Mountain Spotted Beaver

Manchester State Park
California


Did I mention that I just really enjoy driving along the beach? Both California and Oregon deserve credit for preserving these old cliffside routes after IH5 took most of the traffic. In Oregon a whole tourist industry has grown up along 101. In California, Hwy 1 has benefitted from what appears to be benign neglect.

When I drove down into Mendocino, I really didn't know what I was getting into. I remembered the name from the label on a wine bottle. I expected a vineyard or two, maybe an old cannery.

It's a pretty little town with way too many cars parked in it, perched on a small peninsula jutting out into the sea. Hold that. It's not a real town. It's kind of an outdoor theme park and shopping mall. Every old building has been turned into some sort of chi-chi shop, with overpriced merchandise that no one living within a hundred miles of here could have any use for. Certainly not a wandering hobo of an Rver like myself.

I saw a nice coffee table for $7500, some so-so art for even more. Cocktail dresses hung in a window. Restaurants had hand-written menus in the window, the sort where price is not mentioned. There may be a grocery store in town. I didn't see it. But there's plenty pricy coffee and croissants in every block.

Who knows if anyone actually lives there? Maybe at 10 pm a chain link fence pops out of the ground around the manicured perimeter, and the whole place is abandoned to rent-a-cops carrying thermos jugs and flashlights in their holsters, doggedly making the rounds, rattling doors.

What you've got to remember is that this place is pretty isolated up here on the rural north coast. But it seems to be dedicated to vacationing urban types who live to shop.

I put the question to a clerk in the bookstore.

"What do people do for a living around here?"

"Living?"

"Well, you know. Real people. I don't know the area. I just blew into town, but I can't help but notice there's tons more cars than houses here."

"Oh, this is nothing. You should see it in summer. You couldn't park within miles of here. You can't walk down the sidewalk without turning sideways."

"But why do people come? Just to see each other?"

She looked at me blankly. "Why, to shop, of course. Is that all you want? A paper?"

"That's it." I smiled. "You want paper or plastic?"

"Whatever."

Perversely, I made her wait while I fished around in my pockets for coins. Nickels and pennies. She could barely contain her disgust. It was great.

And there you have it. Mendocino, the little Mall by the Sea. It is a pretty place. And you can buy most anything you don't need. Good luck with anything else.

Whoever thought of this was a frigging genius. In the middle of nowhere, and packed with shoppers. All it lacks is a casino.


It was not far south of the Mall that I ran into the perfect coastal state park. Nearly empty. Behind the KOA. Manchester State Park. "No checks." No host. Okay, I'll wait till someone comes round with change. I settled in among the Cypress trees, and walked to the beach. Two days later someone knocked on my door. They took a check after all.

When I say Manchester Park was perfect, I mean perfect for me. Quiet, lonesome, a long view across meadows of coastal grass bending in the wind. A great place to rest up and recover from the rigors of the Mall. When I arrived, there were perhaps 7 or 8 RVs in some 40 sites. Everyone had a circle to himself. After a couple of days all but one besides myself disappeared, and a fellow in a parks hat came out and started setting up signs in each site: "Closed for Environmental Protection. Do not Cross." I asked him what it meant.

"There's an endangered species moving in here. The park is closing. You're going to be the last one to occupy that site."

"Which one is it this time?"

"The Mountain Spotted Beaver."

"I thought beavers stayed in streams and lakes."

"Well, it's really not a beaver. They just call it that. It's a kind of rodent."

"They're scarce, are they?"

"Well. They're all up and down the coast. But in every area they're a little different, and considered a separate species."

"So they're gonna close down an entire State Park to make way for a rat?" I was amazed.

"A rodent. The plan is to move the campsites away from the beach, maybe half a mile."

"The KOA's going to love that. Won't it be horribly expensive? I though California was running out of money?"

He shrugged his shoulders, and moved on round the circle with his signs.

This was interesting. I sat up late by the fire, thinking about it. Listening for movement in the grass. For anything.

I'm only a visitor here. But I thought it my duty to hunker down a while, giving up my wandering ways to stand in as California's last lonely outpost in the Kingdom of the Spotted Mountain Rat. It seemed the least I could do. In all that time I saw crowds of deer and quail and gulls and park rangers and even what looked like a lone coyote in the distance. But nary a beaver. They must be sly boogers.

On my last day I got to talking to the camp host, who had been gone days moonlighting as a roofer. Let's call him Howard. He and his 5 boys were living in and out of a 23 foot trailer. The youngest was 4. I asked him if he was going to lose his position when they closed the park. He just laughed.

"The bird lady has been trying to close this place for 9 years. It's still here. They'll move those signs out come summer."

"Bird lady?"

"Yeah. She even wanted to uproot all these nice cypress trees. Been here forever, but she said they weren't "native". Then the rangers got together and got them declared historical monuments. That put a cork in her."

It turns out he was shooting the bull one day with an old ranger, and found out how the spotted beaver and gophers and other rodents had been exterminated decades ago in the park.

"They'd let propane down the holes and set it off. Sometimes the earth lifted up an inch or two over a considerable area."

Then one day a while back he saw someone four-wheeling out in the open field, headed for the beach. He called the rangers. Definitely a no-no. Several of them showed up quickly, hoping to get the 4wheelers out of the park before the bird lady showed up and smothered them all in paperwork. When they followed it down to the beach, they saw a bunch of guys roaming around down there with metal detectors, talking into lapel mikes.

It was the FBI. Turns out the beach and park were right under the flight path of the Space Shuttle as it was breaking up. They were looking for fallen parts throughout a hundred mile swath cutting clear across California.

The FBI guy said there was two ways this could go. The rangers could help, or he could shut them down. He didn't want a bunch of looky-looky civilians running around the area, so he'd rather have cooperation. That was okay with the rangers.

But right in the middle of all this, Bird Lady showed up hot and bothered, worried about the rats. She poked her bony finger right in the middle of the FBI guy's tie and proceeded to tell him what he could and couldn't do on 'her' stretch of coastline. The FBI guy took about a minute of this, then put her nose down in the sand and handcuffed her. Then he raised her up by her hair and told her to shut up and listen. In a minute he was going to take the cuffs off. She was going to leave, quietly, and he didn't want to see her anywhere around there for 60 days. If he did she was going to jail for interfering with an investigation.

She left.

"And sure enough we didn't see her for 60 days." Howard tried unsuccessfully to remain sober and stone-faced.

This whole thing got me to thinking about environmental laws, and how I felt about them. As usual, I'm caught in the middle. I don't want to ever, ever contribute to the extinction of any species of animal. Especially not just so I can camp on a particular stretch of beach. I'm willing to put up with considerable inconvenience and some curtailment of my freedom to try and prevent anything like that from happening.

I don't much hold with blowing up gophers, for that matter.

But any environmental plan that attempts to exclude man from nature posits a world as artificial as a cracking tower or a microwave oven. Man as a species is part of nature, and has been living and dead for as long as any of the species these laws seek to protect.

If man is not there, it is not natural.

So here I am in my accustomed place, caught between extremes, trying to camp on the border between. We moderates always try to have our cake and eat it too.

Why not? What else you gonna do with cake, anyway?

Feed it to the spotted mountain rats?


Bob

Following the River

Cape Blanco State Park
Oregon


"The past is not dead. It is not even past." - Willam Faulkner


Last time we spoke, I was still raw and bitter about a speeding ticket, and advocating a retaliatory emigration to the stars. That'd show 'em.

I've come back to earth since, somewhat. Like Lucy, I've gotta lotta 'splaining to do. Perhaps I should start with the very next days. That will illustrate the profound organization and rigorous planning that go into my travels. Yeah.

I spent Monday climbing the ridge between the Williamette and North Umpqua rivers. The logging roads up there, while admirably paved, seem to have changed numbers since Streets and Trips 2001 came out. I got thoroughly lost, or as much as you can when you are dragging your home around with you. I camped at last on a bluff high above Diamond Lake, with Mt. Bailey in the near distance.

Tuesday morning I again took up the quest for a road up and over, trending eastward until finally I came down into Poole Creek, and hit Hwy 138 not far from Diamond Lake. Hmmm. Toketee Falls. Has a ring to it. My plan had been to proceed on to Crater Lake, and then to Klamath. But what would it hurt to drive down the canyon a dozen miles and see the falls?

Well, the falls were gated off, and well away from the road. Perhaps if I went just a little farther, I'd get a Verizon signal, and be able to catch up on my email. Yeah.

And so it went. The canyon of the Umpqua is deceptively steep. You can coast just about all the way into Roseburg. Fifty miles. So I did. The serpentine road wound down through a sometime tunnel of red and yellow leaves, but always beside the widening river.

See what I mean? Rigid organization. Admirable discipline. That's me. But if the mighty Umpqua couldn't stop, or even slow down, who was I to resist the gravity of the situation?

Pave a road with good intentions, and it'll give you a smooth ride for a while. I stopped short of the usual destination, though, and came to rest at Cape Blanco State Park. The campground is on a steep bluff which separates the meandering mouths of the Elk and Sixes rivers. There is a fine lighthouse, and access to a wide beach. It has electricity to each site, and is open year round. All in all, a fine place to lay up for 3 or 4 days.

On one of my walks I wandered a couple of miles down the beach to the Elk river, where a bunch of crazed fishermen were gathered with their trucks and 4 wheelers, waiting impatiently for the chinook to come in and run their gauntlet. They were being coy about it.

"Tell you what, fellas. You catch a big one and I'll take a picture of it."

"You're late. They were thick in here Sunday. Even Roy's dog caught one. Chased it right out of the water."

"So where are they?"

He looked at me disgustedly. "They come when they want to. But right there might be part of the problem." He gestured off shore, where a group of gillnetters were trolling pretty close in front of the river's mouth.

His partner grunted, and spat tobacco into the river. "They was out there Sunday, and that didn't keep 'em the hell away."

"True." They shut up for a while, and cast. I wanted them to keep talking. I was hoping to catch something here, even if they didn't.

"So, did there used to be a lot more of them?"

"Oh, hell yes." I waited a beat, but he seemed reluctant to elaborate.

"What do you think happened to them?"

"Happened to them? Everything. Long nets. Birds. Seals. Little bit of everything. Nothing's like it used to be. I can remember, hunting geese up on Sixes, when the salmon were so thick we stopped shooting to kick 'em back in the water. Thirty pounds of fish would come right up on the bank at you. Damn nuisance. We came to hunt, but the fish wouldn't leave us alone."

I related a story someone told me about how not so long ago, a little north of here, a truckload of timber was only one tree.

"Happened all the time. Hell, I remember when the Johnson boys got stuck at a bridge, and had to split one with dynamite. Then they still had two full loads. Half-tree loads."

These were fishermen, used to sharing stories about the ones that got away. And when so much seems to have gotten away, almost any story might be true.

But what the hell. We're Americans, all of us. As a matter of faith, we face forward, believing the best times are ever ahead, on and on and on. Got to be. Time is a river that gathers as it flows, and never finds the sea.

That's the lesson this land taught us, down in our bones, as we spread out over it, arriving at last in this very place, here on the edge of things.

I left them there on the beach, casting into empty water, waiting for the fish that used to come.

Bob

The Promised Land

A not-so-flat spot
above Diamond Lake
Oregon


After I got a ticket for speeding in Oakridge, I went into the store and bought a 6 pack of Alaskan Amber. Then I drove slowly back out of town, past the speed trap, and turned south toward the Hills Creek Reservoir. I planned to get high before dark, but that cop had me talking to myself. So when I reached the dam and saw a level place to park, I pulled over, pulled out a folding chair, cracked open a beer, and gave him a piece of my mind.

By the time I'd finished, everything I said seemed pretty weak. My main complaint was that the amount of the fine seemed disproportionate to the offense. So. I slowed down a half minute too late. Ah hell, it still sounds weak. I was going too fast. Tomorrow I'll probably go too fast again. Sometimes, unexpectedly, randomly, you get caught. And then you've got to pay if you want to play.

Being sensible just wears me out. By the time I got all the way to sensible it was getting dark. I noticed that I had a cell signal for a change, after a week or more beyond the lost Verizon. The trailer's level. Surely nobody's gonna want to get out on this dam on a Saturday night.

No signs saying I can't camp here. Guess I will.

I finally got through to Verizon on the Web. Bad news. $644 has been taken out of my checking account to pay for roaming in Canada. Stupid of me to sign up for Auto Debit. I canceled the feature right then.

Thing is, I was real careful about this. I remember walking into the Radio Shack in Lander, Wyoming, and asking about this Canada Calling plan. I told the guy I wanted no part of it if there were roaming charges. I got burned on that long ago, and once was enough. I'd rather put the cell phones away, and use pay phones and libraries.

He said for ten bucks a month it just extended the terms of my present contract to Canada. National Singlerate would have no roaming. I asked him to confirm that with Verizon, and he called whatever number they had given him. Right in front of me he asked if there was roaming on my plan.

"No roaming in Canada. Okay. Thank you." He looked up at me expectantly.

Hell of a deal. "Sign me up."

Now I've got all these charges. Problem is, you can't ever get anybody at Verizon who actually knows anything. And you wouldn't be able to tell if you accidentally did. I called up from Jasper with a question, and had a lady supervisor insist that I couldn't put in a data call from Canada, even after I told her I'd been doing so for weeks. She wouldn't back down. I hung up.

I have no doubt it's going to take a meeting with some Verizon honcho to settle this, and that means one of their bigger offices. Maybe in LA.

What a day. 9pm. Maybe if I go to sleep, nothing else untoward will happen. Sometimes I envy that goose. You know, the one they say wakes up in a new world every morning.

Around midnight I woke up when headlights splashed across the blinds. I heard the crunch of gravel under tires, doors slammed, steps right outside my window. Crap. Surely it's not that cop again. Whoever they were, they went on by, and then I heard the murmur of voices up by my truck. They stayed there. I couldn't make out what they were saying.

Sigh. I threw off the covers, put on my clothes, and grabbed the big flashlight. They were right up by my front bumper. Civilians. What the hell.

"Whazzup?"

"We came out to the dam to watch the aurora."

"Aurora?"

"Yeah, they said on TV that sunspots might cause an aurora."

Dang. I'd like to see that. The three of us stood around a while, waiting for something to happen. Finally I asked them to hold it down and went back to bed. But I couldn't sleep. After a while I heard them leave. Still couldn't sleep. At last, after one o'clock in the morning, I got up and made some tea. When it was ready, I bundled up again and went outside.

Quite a contrast. One minute listening to Billie Holiday singing "I'm gonna lock my heart and throw away the key", and all this vast silence the next. Not even wind.

I dug a folding chair out of the back of the truck and carried it onto the dam, past the barrier. Put my feet up on the guard rail. Sipped my tea. No aurora.

But my God there are stars. Millions of them. A sea of stars, and a milky river running through it.

People have all kinds of reasons for wanting to get up high like this, to climb until they can't climb any more. Some like to look down, I guess, and so do I. But you can sure see a lot more looking up.

I remember when I was 14 years old, standing for hours at the racks in Heine Bucholtz's newstand in Georgetown, reading through the books I could not afford to buy. Paperbacks were fifty cents then, and I still couldn't afford enough of them.

Problem was, I wanted them all.

Standing there, reading Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke and Anderson, it didn't seem at all farfetched that I might be living on Mars by now. Or somebody would. Certainly 40 years seemed an abyss of time in which anything might be accomplished. Even in the desert.

And now here I am alone on a dam in Oregon, still looking up at the stars like every monkey-man that ever scratched his ass. Of course we are more than monkeys these days.

And less than we ought to be.

You want to know what I feel right now, looking up there? I feel a whisper of what Moses must have felt, looking down into Canaan. After 40 years. Knowing he was never going to get there. Right there, just out of reach.

The promised land.

I remember the salmon, back on the Lewis River, gathered quivering at the base of the falls. What do they sense up there, in that hellish high place above the waters they know so well? What makes them leap, again and again and again, out of the mother of waters, into a place where they cannot breathe?

Certainly not comfort.

Oh, there's some that will give it up, squabbling in the shallows for a little patch of sand. I understand them perfectly. I am no Moses. These days I wear my trousers rolled, and walk upon the beach. Where I am going I will not need to leap.

But some do leap. And fail. And leap again. Fish or monkey or man, they have a sense of where they ought to be. There it is, above the falls.

And so they leap.

It isn't home up there, exactly. Not yet. It isn't all milk and honey. There will be suffering. Plenty. Many a cold and breathless place, and rocky ground. There may even be some Canaanites to deal with. We may have to conjure up a Moses. Or two. Or three.

We can spare them.

If the sky is clear where you are tonight, go out in the yard and look up. There it is. Where it has always been. Always. The reason we leap. The river of stars. The promised land.

Where we ought to be.


Bob

Going With The Flow

In a flat spot in Oregon,
above Diamond Lake


On Saturday around noon I rolled into Oakridge and filled up with propane, gas, and groceries. At the deli counter I asked the lady about something I'd seen on Streets and Trips: Kitson Hot Springs. It has been a long time since I sat in some springs.

"Oh, that's gone private now. It belongs to the Boy Scouts." She hesitated for a moment. "Ah...our hot spring is McKensie Hot Springs. Down the other side of Blue Hole."

I hadn't seen that on any map. I followed her directions south on Hwy 58, back the way I had come. Sure enough, about a quarter mile past Blue Hole Campground (closed) there was a wide turnout on the right side, with a couple of Kenworths rattling away in the middle of it. Truckers seem to know about this place. One of them was from California, and the other from BC. I found the worn but unmarked trail, and followed it down to the river.

There were 4 pools this side, and a couple more across the river. In the large pool were 4 guys and a gal, all buck naked. Well, the gal was covered by a few strategic tatoos. What the hell. When in Rome. I stripped down and joined them. Aaaahhh.

After the initial warmth wore off, I found it hard to get just the right temperature. The problem was that the little pool feeding this one was so incredibly hot that it didn't mix readily with the cool water. What you got was about two inches of hot to boiling water floating on top of tepid. You had to keep moving around to avoid being scalded by the hot skim.

Still, it beat any other spring I've been in this month. I think August was the last time I had this pleasure.

It was a beautiful day. I was just about to get out and investigate the pools across the river when we were joined by three generations of women, all clothed. Grandma was wearing a baggy black bloomer swimsuit, leaning on a cane and her granddaughter, about 6 or 7 years old. The girl was wearing a neon green swimsuit. Mom promptly stripped off her shirt, shoes, jeans, and underwear, and climbed into the water. The others got in with her.

Now it's none of my business, but a six or seven year old girl seems a little old, and way too young, to be exposed to a situation where any truck driver could and did get up and waggle his presumably poxy prick at her. On the other hand, her mom and grandma were right there, and it was indeed about as non-sexual a situation as you could imagine. On the other hand, grown men have gotten in a lot more hot water than you could ever find even in the upper pool by exposing themselves to young girls. On the other hand...

Well, there wasn't any other hand. I decided to stay under the water for a while. And felt a fool for doing it. Hiding from a child.

Of course, as luck would have it, the girl made a beeline for me, and sat herself down right at my feet.

"You know you can cook taters in there?"

"Can you? How do you know that?"

"'Cause I seen'em do it one time. They cooked eggs in the other one."

So. She and Mom are regulars here. Right then she got up and leaned over me. Good grief.

"There's a spider on you."

I looked around, and indeed an industrious aerial arachnid trailing a wisp of silk had landed on my left shoulder. I brushed it off.

"That's okay. I'm not gonna be here long enough to get all caught up in spiderwebs."

"Prairie. Leave the man alone. He's trying to relax."

Thank you, Mom. At last.

I leaned back until the water covered my ears, and the world went away. After a while, I just got up and put my clothes back on. I wasn't going to hang around there all day. And whatever I contributed to Prairie's education was pretty minor compared to everything else going on.

Besides, she had moved on to the tattooed lady.

But did you ever find yourself unexpectedly going the wrong way down a forest road at night, and realize it might be a while before you could get turned around? That's how I felt in that pool. I went there to relax, and got into a questionable situation. Even if I was the only one asking the questions.

Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow. I left.

I drove back into town. I had forgotten to get beer, believe it or not. The market was just inside the city limits. As I swung into the parking lot I noticed a cop turn in right behind the trailer with his lights on. Great. How long has he been there? I hate it when they get so close behind you. He could follow me for miles and I wouldn't see him. I got out of the truck.

"I didn't see you back there. What can I do for you, Officer?"

This guy had a thin smile like a car salesman. Inauthentic. He asked for my license and registration, insurance card, the usual routine. Told me I'd been going 52 in a 35 zone.

"I just came off the highway. I slowed up when I saw the sign." I looked around him and pointed. It was right there, about a block away.

"Sir, that's the second sign. The first is about a quarter mile back."

O Brother.

"Well, I guess I didn't see it. I sure didn't intend to speed. I was just coming to the store..." Whine. Grovel.

He took my license, walked back to the patrol car, and left me standing there with my wallet in my hand for a long time. This looked bad. Then he came back, same smirk on his face.

"Sir, I've issued you a citation for speeding."

"How much is this going to cost me?"

"The minimum is $140."

Good Grief. Last chance. "I'm sorry, Officer. It wasn't intentional. Couldn't you just give me a warning?"

Not a chance. "You can protest this ticket with the Judge if you want."

I gave it up. "Now that's a loser's game. And you know it. If you're not inclined to be lenient, he sure won't be."

"Thank you for your cooperation, sir." He turned and went back to his car. Yeah, right. Prick. What else was I going to do? Knock you down and make you eat this ticket?

Now that really would be a loser's game.

I just stood there for a minute with a frozen smile on my face. Remarkably like his, no doubt. Sigh. Sometimes you gotta go with the flow. Even when the flow's against ya.

Grrrrrr. Now I really do want that beer.


Bob

Dollars and Sense in Sisters

Sisters, Oregon


Rain and wind during the night on Lake Bob, and fog in the morning. Cold most of the day. Lake turned back into Timothy with the arrival of fishermen in the afternoon on Wednesday, then back into Bob for the night. Then Timothy again with the morning fog. This was getting confusing.

I decided to ride down into Bend and get a kayak cover. Hood River didn't have one to fit. They specialize in those little surfboard sorts of kayaks for river riding.

On the way I came across evidence of a big fire. Many, many acres of sentinel snags along the road.

It was getting dark as I pulled into Sisters, and there was a city campground on the south side for 10 bucks a night. Dump included. That was the only bargain to be had in Sisters. This Texas boy was flabbergasted to find someone asking $18 for a fajita dinner of dubious Mexicanality. Hamburgers for 10 bucks. Yessiree, I think I've landed in the economic quicksand of a genuine pre-season ski resort.

Pardon the green eyeshade.

The restaurants in Sisters drove me to take a probing, sad, and puzzled look at the probity of my spending habits last quarter. Excluding expenses associated with the heart attack and keeping the house in Georgetown (which are considerable), I've been bleeding cash at the rate of $3200 a month. This includes everything: taxes, insurance, repairs, the lot.

Earlier trips seemed a lot cheaper. My sweep through East Texas last March ran less than 50 bucks a day. But that didn't include fixed expenses, or any repairs.

Looking over all this in Quicken, two particularly recalcitrant categories stand out: gas, at $500/mo., and "Misc." at (gasp) $1380/mo. Every month. Month after month.

"Misc." covers all cash disbursements. Mostly groceries, restaurants, and camping fees. It's a broad category that I've come to use for convenience while traveling. Perhaps it is a little too convenient.

Aha. Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it, is to reduce the expense in both these categories by half. Otherwise your budget will self-destruct in 30 seconds.

It's not impossible. I've been traveling far too much. That's an odd thing for an inveterate traveller to admit, I know. But there it is. There's no need for me to move every single day. In fact, it's inconvenient. And expensive.

I think I can eat very well, cooking in the trailer, for $500 a month. Or less. Restaurants are budget bludgeoners. Get that through your pointy head, Bobaroo.

I am aware that the problem is really social. I get bored, and go into restaurants just to get out of the truck. Another reason to stop driving every day. I think I could easily feed two people on half the money, if I just did the cooking myself. I have had good food spoil in the refrigerator recently, and that's just silly.

Food is cheap. Being served food is expensive. Not today, or tomorrow. But cumulatively, over time, and for the rest of your life. Tonight I'll forego the fabulous fleshpots of Sisters, Oregon. I'll just have a steak right here in camp.



24 Oct 03


Whooooo.

It's a sunlit, slightly windy 27 degrees here in camp at 7 o'clock this morning. Makes me want to walk around on the balls of my feet, with a spring in my step. Paw the ground a little. Also makes me want to start the generator and replace the power loss from the heater fan last night.

I went to do wash, and visit the library. The laundromat was brand new. I mentioned this at a nearby bakery, and the lady said "Oh, we just got the town septic done. Before that we couldn't have a laundromat."

While I was eating my poppyseed bagel and cream cheese, a fella at the next table was holding forth earnestly on a theory that "the loggers" had set the fire this summer, two days before Bush was to arrive on a Presidential tour.

Wasn't really a debate. The other guy was just scratching his beard and drinking coffee.

Bend, Oregon, is far too small to get lost in. But it sure is hard to find anything there. That's because there's lots of streets that drift off into dead ends, and half of them have the same six names, differentiated only by SW, NW, SE, NE. You can get real close, and then find yourself abruptly up the river without a paddle. I went round and round looking for a store that sold kayak covers, and had success at last. It was under a restaurant addressed off another street.

Then there's these traffic circles. They may be easy to negotiate if you know where you're going and you're not dragging 30 feet of trailer behind you. They seem to like them here. But I've really come to depend on a slow red light, or a stop sign, to give me time to look down at Streets and Trips. The Walmart, as you might expect, was easy to find.

For a small town, there sure are a lot of people here in a honking hurry. Almost as bad as Aberdeen, WA.

Just as soon as I could, I left for Bachelor Mountain. More of those nicely paved mountain roads. Around Elk Lake I got out to take a picture of a burnt area, and here came a fella on roller-skis, making a spritely 10 mph or thereabouts. We were 20 miles from anywhere, but he was in no mood to stop and talk. Momentum means a lot on those things.

I was looking for something like I found at Timothy Lake. Lava Lake wasn't it. Why, there's 4 trailers in there. Cultus wasn't completely right, but I decided it was close enough. One Class C down the road, and a couple of trucks and boat trailers by the ramp. Pretty quiet. I pulled into the picnic area.

The motorhome left after an hour or two. I never heard the boats. I built a fire, and towards sunset I realized just where I was.

I was back on Lake Bob.

Bob

Lake Bob

Lake Bob, Oregon


Whenever you head south on Hwy 35 out of Hood River, the first thing that smacks you in the face is Mt. Hood. It takes up half the sky. Floating above the fruit stands and orchards, it seems supernatural. I kept looking for a place to pull over and take a picture, but there was always something nearby in the way, like a building or trees.

I wonder if people around here get to where they never see it? It would mean walking around with your head down. Which is common enough. Hood River itself is built up the side of a cliff, which hides the mountain. They turn their backs on it, and watch the river.

I finally got a Verizon signal, for the first time in days, on the south flanks of Mt. Hood. I stopped by the side of the road and sent off some adventures that had been stacking up, and called home. My brother informed me that my decrepit old dachshund was doing fine. It seems she has even discovered a cure for cancer. She's 17 years old, blind, incontinent, crippled up, and apparently immortal. So far. The vet gave her 6 months, a year and a half ago.

And what, you ask, is the canine cure for cancer? In Sugar's case, it seems to involve sleeping 23 hours a day, and believing she's the center of the universe the rest of the time. I've sometimes suspected that a few people on the newsgroup have taken up this regimen. I may try it myself, one of these days.

I took forest roads south. One of the surprises of my return to the mountains, in both Washington and Oregon, is that many of these roads are paved. Even the narrow, twisty, one-track wonders, with turnouts that force you to the edge of a cliff halfway up a mountain, are often smoothly covered with tarmac. My expectations rose from the familiar nightmare of Colorado gravel and mud, not the smooth pleasant dream of Oregon pavement.

I don't know who pays for all this, but it is an incredible luxury. In Colorado, most back road maintenance falls to counties with a tiny tax base, and little of it gets done. You learn quickly to be grateful for the annual grading. The humpy, jittery, disintegrating roads of backwoods Colorado informed my original idea of Rving. These were the only roads that lead to where I wanted to go.

Eventually those roads will shake any ride to pieces. If you are going up there, forget about motorhomes. They don't articulate on turns. They are made to go only from one parking lot to another. Many don't even allow a quick way to jump out just before you go over a cliff.

Imagine that.

There are two working philosophies of transportation in such places. One is to spend a million dollars, more or less, on something like a tank. The other is to buy cheap, maintain like your life depends on it, and throw the thing away when more of it eventually comes to lie in the ditch than on the axles. If seat belts should happen to inhibit your ability to instantly abandon the vehicle, be very careful when you wear them.

I paid $13,000 for this 5th wheel Behemoth, and a little more than twice that for the pickup. Maybe $6000 more for improvements and taxes. I figured from the start that if I got 5 years out of that $50K, I would then be content to throw it away.

With luck, I'll get 8 years. I am now almost 3 years in, and it's holding up about as I expected.

But if my understanding of back roads had been formed here in Oregon, I might have bought a motorhome. The only problems you seem to encounter here have to do with clearance, the tendency to get to moving way too fast, and the off chance you'll run round a blind corner into a log-hauler, or a van full of nuns on an outing.

C'est la Rue.

Up here in Oregon, roads seldom lead to rue, and they led me, around 3 pm this afternoon, to Timothy Lake. All the campgrounds were closed, of course, but there is a parking lot next to the boat ramp, right along the shore. Nobody else to be seen on the whole lake. Only the wind and a few bobbing ducks. Sunshine on the water.

It looks like a Naming Destination.

I'll let you in on a little secret. When I arrive somewhere like Timothy Lake, and it is beautiful, quiet, and empty, after a celebratory beer or two I am apt to conduct a short Ceremony of Naming.

Timothy can take a hike. This is Lake Bob.

If someone else should come along, it will unfortunately fall suddenly short of those criteria, and I'll have to take the name back, store the place in memory, and wait for Lake Bob to turn up somewhere else. Lake Bob is a hidden place, and only I know how to get there. If someone else is there, it ain't Lake Bob.

Eight o'clock, and the stars are out. Looks like a long untroubled night at Lake Bob. Sweet.

Which reminds me of Sugar, the immortal dachshund. Maybe that's her secret. She lives no longer than other dogs. But she only counts the years on Sugar Lake.


Bob

Round and Round and Round

Memaloose State Park
Hood River, Oregon


I came down from the mountains to the tawny desert along the Columbia River Sunday afternoon. Looking for a place to hole up for a few days. I'm getting way behind on my reading, and that makes me cranky. I'd been thinking of taking a couple of weeks' break from this journal, but then I start up again. It's sort of a smoothly functioning dysfunctional relationship, Wordsworth and me. Hard to read when I'm writing, though.

I lost my kayak cover again. Who knows where? BD noticed it missing back in Battle Ground. (You know, I never did find out what battle was on that ground.) Hood River, with all the river sports going on there, ought to be a place that can sell me a new cover. When I was almost there, however, instead of going straight across the river I turned east to investigate Doug's Beach State Park. I liked the informal quality of the name. Turned out to be just a spit of land across the railroad tracks, used for windsurfing launches and little else. Didn't even get to find out who Doug was.

Going along beside the tracks, I glimpsed a flash of color on the river, and pulled over to take several pictures of a guy skiing behind a red kite or parasail. He was really moving along, tacking down-river in the teeth of the usual Columbia gale. One of the ironies of the infamous wind here is that the Gorge is probably one of the world's premier sites for a Wind Farm to generate electrical power, but the omnipresent hydroelectric plants up and down the river make it economically redundant.

Just before crossing on the Dalles bridge, I saw a pair of COE parks on the east side. One had a couple of small lakes and free camping. The one motorhome present was in the process of leaving. It was utterly silent, except for the wind. There was this troubling sign warning of Swimmer's Itch, some sort of tiny worm parasite, but I didn't plan to go in the water anyway.

I had the place to myself for two hours. Delightful.

Then the Snopes turned up. Again. Oregon branch of the clan. These had a 1978 Ford pickup with no muffler. They were carrying a full sized refrigerator and a wheel chair back in the bed, along with a lumpy high pile of stuff under blue tarps. The trailer behind that was hail battered Prowler, about 24 feet long.

The immediately alarming thing, other than the noise, was that the trailer door was hanging wide open, banging back and forth. As they circled through, eyeing me and the small parking lot, I hollered out "Your door's open!" Grandma Snopes just waved and yelled back "That's all right!" I had to wonder how many miles they'd driven that way.

Finally they circled clear around and parked behind me. Turned that motor off. Whew. Four of them piled out of the unfortunate Ford, and they set to pulling out folding chairs. The kids headed for the toilet like it was the Promised Land.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, as long as they didn't start up the truck again. About 5 minutes later, Junior Snopes, the one with the tatoos, cranked up his tunes on the stereo. Sigh. Fortunately, I had never unhooked the trailer. In 5 more minutes I was on my way out.

Which is how I discovered Memaloose State Park, right next to the rest area east of Hood River. This is a calm, clean facility, with full hookups galore, and right next to the river. Twelve bucks, if you don't need electricity. The view of the river is grand, and the highway not too noisy. The railroad made up for it, but only a couple of times during the night. I settled in. Washed my truck and trailer. Built a fire. Watched the barges rumbling up and down the river. Went into Hood River for a beer.

When I took the Hwy 35 exit into the Hood, I saw something that combined two of my few remaining passions: an RV turned into a Thai Kitchen. The couple had completely gutted a 19 foot Terry trailer and neatly outfitted it with stoves and refrigerators. Had the Snopes beat all hollow. They were making a busy living out of the thing. I had the Ginger Curry Chicken. Mmmmmm.

I looked up an old camping acquaintance in Hood River. A couple of years ago Hans and I got inadvertently drunk in a county park south of Tillamook. Sand Island, perhaps. Something like that. A naturalized citizen and a native of Hamburg by way of Melbourne, Hans had the most peculiar German-Australian accent. He was impressed that I not only knew what Schnapps was, but actually had a bottle. Things proceeded from there, until the wee hours. I couldn't see him very well the next morning, and haven't seen him since.

We met for breakfast on Monday, then went to his house. He has a truck camper, and the unit is raised on one of the most impressively strong and safe looking systems I have seen. A rectangular cage of steel tubing lowers by four electric motors to the ground, and you drive out from underneath it. When on the truck, the unit is clamped to the frame by the same framework. Rock solid. Since the two sides are connected, I'm not sure how it does on uneven ground. I forgot to ask. Hans spends much of the winter in Yuma in some sort of RV Chalet he's built there. He calls it his "partial residence."

On Tuesday morning I went back in to town to check out something I'd seen the day before, the International Museum of Carousel Art. I usually don't write gushing accounts of the carny type sideshows you find along the road. Like the Rattlesnake Farm. There's plenty who do that. But this thing was intriguing. Five thousand square feet and 119 items in an old bank building, open every day from 11 to 3. Nice old clock on the building. Inside were carved and painted wooden figures from carousel rides, dating from twenty years either side of 1900. Many horses, of course, but also chickens, dragons, dogs, pigs, tigers, household cats, giraffes, you name it. If a kid ever rode round and round on it, it's probably here somewhere.

They advertise a complete English Carousel, but it's on loan at present.

"You hardly ever see an intact carousel any more," she said. "There's too much money to be made parting it out."

"How much money?"

"Oh, millions. Maybe 4 or 5 million dollars."

None are deliberately scary, though the life-sized tiger might give a little pause, that and the cat with the dead bird in it's mouth. Remember that these come from an age before cartoons, when fairy tales were Grimm, and gingerbread houses hid real witches inside.

Calliope music rang softly throughout the building. I don't believe I'm old enough to have ridden on any of these. I have little memory of carousels. But this place has me wishing I did.

Round and round and round and round...

Hold on tight, now.


Bob

Few And Far Between

North of Trout Lake, WA


Campgrounds are getting few and far between in Washington state, here in late October. I've spent most of the afternoon traveling the long narrow forest roads from Battle Ground to the flanks of Mt. Adams, and every place I've come to has been closed and gated for the season.

BD gave me a long list of potential sites. All closed. It's a trail of tears and disappointment, I'm tellin' ya.

The weather is perfect. Mid 60s, clear to partly cloudy. Quite a change from the sopping wet and bedraggled Pacific coast I left a few days ago. I was planning to stop as soon as possible and get outside to enjoy the sunshine. I skirted a number of large reservoirs - Merwin, Yale, Swift - on my way up into the Pinchot National Forest.

"No Camping." "Get Lost." "This Means You." More or less like that. That's the impression, anyway. Not enough campers to suitably enrich the concessionaires, I guess. But I wasn't the only RV trolling disconsolately down the roads.

Middle Falls CG on FR 90 was the only place I found unlocked out of ten or so campsites between Lake Merwin and Mt. Adams. By that time I had altitude fever, and passed it by. For a short while I had the giddy feeling I was getting above timberline, but the stubby trees turned out to be second or third growth. The roads I can take the Behemoth over don't go up that far. Finally, as it was getting dark, I found a dirt turnoff beside a small stream, about 14 miles north of Trout Lake. Nobody else around. Quiet. Ideal.

Time was, at least where I used to go in Colorado, when National Forest campgrounds were left open year round for fishermen and solitary campers like myself. There was no gate. You could go in with snow on the ground and have the place largely to yourself, save the occasional scavenging squawking crow.

That was before somebody decided parks and campgrounds ought to be treated as a "business".

I keep running into that really bad idea. Back in Torquay Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, I was toting a sack and wandering the campground looking fruitlessly for a dumpster when the concessionaire drove by on the way to collect fees. "No Dumpster. Pack it in, pack it out," he said. This was in a provincial public campground at the end of a graded road. It had been used steadily for 40 years, one way or another, for fishing and camping, and as a jumping off place for boaters going out to the Broken Island Group.

Not by any means a wilderness setting.

He said 14,000 kayakers came through there every year. And that was the problem, the way he saw it. Durn kayakers only pay 2 bucks a day for parking while they were out paddling around, and then they dumped two weeks of garbage ("Pack it out") in his dumpsters. So he had'em taken out. Then the campers and kayakers started leaving their little sacks in front of his trailer door. Or worse, tossed them down the toilets. Pissed him off no end, but he couldn't see a way to get back at'em without spending all his time there, and he had a store to run up the bay.

I tried to tell him that if he kept on with this attitude, he wasn't going to have a campground to run. Was that the idea? What's next? Take out the toilets? He was collecting fees and providing only a parking place. He admitted it had all been "free", including dumpsters, only a few years back. Back then it was considered a public park, maintained with public funds, for the public to enjoy. Still was, supposedly, only now he was being paid to administer it as a contractor rather than a public employee.

Here's the thing. Public parks aren't supposed to "make money". What they do, and do well, is attract money. Lots of money, all over the area.

Fourteen thousand people a year. On the way across Vancouver Island, and locally in Tofino and Ucluelet, each one of these smartass paddlers probably spends at least - at least - a thousand dollars on gas, groceries, restaurants, souvenirs, and the like. Just getting to that one little piece of beach.

That's 14 million dollars floating around Vancouver Island that could have gone, say, to Baja California, or the San Juans. I'm sure someone would be glad to have it. Kayakers come here to park their cars and paddle off for days or weeks. Mostly they don't even hang around like I did, causing him problems.

Providing a dumpster or two seems the least that he could do.

He wasn't too happy to hear all this, when he was looking for sympathy. Well, he brought it up. I hear this "self-sustaining" crap all the time, and it doesn't hold water. Penny wise and pound foolish. But it's not him to blame. Someone in government went looking for a guy with his attitude to run this park, and they got what they wanted.

In the last decade, governments large and small have come to misconstrue the economic role of public parks. They are money magnets. That's how they pay for themselves. But they can't do their job if they are not open. Lock up the toilets and turn off the water for the winter if necessary. But what would be the marginal cost of leaving the gate open a month or two longer? Or taking it out altogether?

And spare me the ososcary lawyer-talk about liability. We're talking about primitive campgrounds. People can get in there now and run head first into a tree or tear things up if they really want to. Wouldn't an "Enter At Your Own Risk" sign be as good as a gate for that purpose?

All but the poorest people will occasionally uproot themselves and spend what it takes to get out to a bucolic spot and enjoy the public lands. If government is short-sighted and penny-ante enough to close early and cut services and raise fees and generally try to run people off, they have only themselves to blame when local businesses and tax revenues are appropriately impoverished.

Meanwhile, it is a glorious fall in the mountains, and I am at last camped on a feeless flatspot up in the Pinchot National Forest, with Mount Adams looming in the near distance. The price is right, the trees are a riot of red and gold, and in the morning I'll pack my garbage down to Trout Lake, where I'll spend 8 bucks or so for breakfast, and fill up with 30 dollars worth of gas.

Somebody's got to keep the economy going. Even if it is October.


Bob

Natural Selections

Lucia Falls
Battle Ground, WA


Okay. I admit it. I'm a fair weather camper. I don't mind cold, or even a little snow. But I hate rain that comes and sits on top of you for days.

So I fled Kalalock, and the coast in general. When I hit I5 a bit of blue appeared. By the time I reached BD's place in Battle Ground, the weather was sunny and summery again. Hah! I'm a steely-eyed Rver. I laugh at weather. Hah!

And then I run like hell on wheels.

I stayed in BD's driveway for a couple of days. I can't believe he wants to sell this place. It feels like home to me, though I've never been here before. The house is backed up to the south bank of a hill covered with old timber, and there's a line of firs planted along the sides and the road. In the middle of that box, four acres or so are clear, a gentle slope of mowed greensward. The trees and hill give privacy, and the open center draws your eye upward to a wonderful view of the southern and eastern sky.

If BD could bottle this place, his fortune would be made. Call it Soul's Rest. An elixir you'd want to keep on the top shelf, like any addictive thing, but you could take it down for a restorative sip now and then, whenever you were feeling low. Heck, I might even spring for a traveling flagon or two myself, if it weren't too dear.

On Friday, BD volunteered to show me the many sights of the great city of Battle Ground, WA. While we were at the Post Office, I noticed a brand new one ton van with a lot of expensive lettering on the side, advertising a home delivery pet food service. Now I know there are shut-ins enough to justify a general delivery service for groceries and such. And there are catalogues for mail order items. But can you really make a living home-delivering pet food alone, in a spread-out semi-rural area like this? Evidently someone thinks so.

I mentioned my amazement to BD, and he told me about a fellow who makes something of a living out of owl pellets. It seems that when an owl swallows a mouse whole, as they are wont to do, not all of it is processed through the gut. Stomach juices eat up everything but the hide and the intact skeleton, and these are rolled into a little ball and regurgitated. They usually get rid of it promptly each evening, when leaving the roost to hunt again.

Now it may seem counterintuitive, but there is a market for these little balls of hair and bone. Somebody packages them commercially for high school biology classes, with an explanatory brochure, a pair of tweezers, and perhaps a small blunt probe. Apparently they are all the rage, and each owl pellet can bring as much as 25 cents wholesale. In old barns, the sort that are collapsing all over the country, you can find windrows of them. Piles. Thousands. If left too long they will dry out and deteriorate, so you have to shovel and rake through all this stuff and find the layers of nice moist ones.

Wear a mask. It gets mighty dusty in there.

Yes, friends, it seems it is possible to fill up garbage sacks with owl-vomited mouse mummies from many an old barn or abandoned building. And then package and sell them. It's just a matter of getting permission. Or sneaking around, which is a romantic touch. The notorious Owl Pellet Gang.

Think about this the next time you believe you are dissatisfied with your present job. It may not be the berries, but maybe...just maybe...it's still a cut above "inside man at the owl vomitorium". Some people will put anything in a resume.

I found the story truly inspiring. There's just no end to human ingenuity, when it comes to making a buck. God bless us every one.

We talked about all this over lunch, believe it or not. Afterwards, BD took me on a tour of some of the local county parks. We got an unexpected bonus at Lucia Falls, near the headwaters of the Lewis River. Steelhead trout and salmon were spawning, and trying to climb the falls.

It was a remarkable sight. These fish have come hundreds of miles from the sea. Up the Columbia, up the Lewis River, into smaller and smaller tributaries. Their journey ends here, or perhaps a mile or two further up. The falls are in ragged steps 6-10 feet high, the river is running strong, and the pools below are all froth and roar.

You can't see a thing down there, but in the extreme shallows on the north bank you can watch them lining up, sometimes touching, their upright black dorsal fins showing above the water. Are they conserving their strength? Gathering courage? Or are they like a line of children in school, each daring the others to do something truly outrageous?

There's a leap every 5 minutes of so, sometimes several at a time. The salmon were larger. Suddenly out of the foam a muscular two feet or so of shining silver and black will rise straight up, 5 or 6 feet above the water. Sometimes they seem to hang there in the clear air for a moment, a dazzling display of hope and will and beauty, before gravity claims them.

They have no thought of failure. They hold nothing back. So when failure comes, it is truly awful. They fall badly, flailing sideways onto the sharp rocks, bouncing down to the next tier, and then below. At every bounce they flop and twist and struggle as though expecting to find purchase even there, to swim through the air. Then they're gone.

Some must succeed. But we could not tell. Their failures are repeated public catastrophes. Their victories, if any, are private, swallowed by the water. They don't come back to brag.

In the shallows downstream, well below the falls, a few female salmon gave up the climb. This was it. Good enough. No time left. They circle and circle, guarding small patches of sand on the bottom. Their bellies are a deep dull red, distended, gorged with eggs, their fins beginning to turn a deadly mushroom white from the edges in.

They are nervous, eager, combative with each other, looking for a male. Their urgency is obvious. They have only hours left, maybe minutes, to spill their eggs, and for the male to spill his milt over them, into them, and then the job is done.

They are worn out. They will begin to die almost immediately.

But it was a glorious run.


Bob