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

Kindness Is Katching

Lucia Falls County Park
Battle Ground, WA


I'm confused.

What happened to RORT? You know, rec.outdoors.rv-travel, that jumbledupnewspile of thumb-wrestling jerks and bozos? Remember them?

From Prince Rupert south, I've met with nothing but kindness and encouragement. Not one old grump yet. Well, maybe the one in the mirror.

What's up with that?

Here's the facts:

Wade let a complete stranger stay in his driveway for 4 days. Over Labor Day, at that. Meep let the same potential creep use her address for a mail drop. You can see the job Don Bradner's doing, sponsoring a website for someone he just met. Bob Hatch cheerfully volunteered to scan and clean up a bunch of photos I'd been needing to send to Don, and let me camp in front of his studio. Breakfast included.

Then BD invited me to plant myself in his yard, and greeted me upon arrival with the heavenly odor of pumpkin pies fresh out of the oven, and a couple of the prettiest tenderloin steaks you could ever hope to meet. Burp. Many others, including Ben, Mike, Frank, Ralph, Don, and Cecil, have offered kindnesses I was often simply too out of pocket to accept. That's off the top of my head. I know I'm missing some, but I'm running out of

paragraph here. :o)

But wait, it gets weirder. A complete stranger offered her property on Clallam Bay for a camping spot. Several I know only as nicknames seem to want to buy me a meal. They know the way to my heart. And now more generosity is wafting through the ether, up from California.

It's more than I can fathom. My fabled stern reserve is weakening. How can I maintain a studied indifference to company, if you people keep being so darned nice? Huh? I'm telling ya, if this goes on much longer, I'll...I'll... I'll be forced to adopt a dopey genial cheerful disposition towards mankind in general. There.

God. Where will it end? Kindness, smiles, and consideration, everywhere you look. The whole country filled with the stuff. Even Republicans.

Chaos, I say. Chaos!

I guess I'll just have to deal with it. But do you realize the karmic debt I've accumulated lately? I've been smacked with the Golden Ruler. Now I've got to go out and be nice to other people. Unh.

Where do I start? Do I just jump in? Locate the nearest lawyer, and wish him a good day? Whoa. Better begin with baby steps.

But, but, but... learning to be pleasant and helpful? At my age? When it comes to the milk of human kindness, I've always been sort of lactose intolerant.

It was so much simpler back in the old anonymous RORT, where a guy could ask the time of day and be dependably met with snarling combativeness and sarcasm. Not to mention multiple comically apocalyptic warnings that he better change his ways.

Ah yesss. Now those were debts easy to repay. There. Keep the change.

Often I skated, even so.

Kindness is harder to forget, somehow.


Bob

Rain

Kalalock Campground
Olympic National Park


Rain.

Another lesson of the rain forest borne home: you can't hang things outside and expect them to dry. Inside isn't much better, unless you have the heater going. Today I was going to walk up to a place called Aurora Ridge, near Sol Duc Springs, but...

Rain.

I was going to take a morning-after picture of the Springs, but...

Rain.

Don't get me wrong. It has rained nearly every day I've been in Washington. An occasional maintenance downpour. But then the sun would come out, and instantly banish it all to primordial memory.

Like a dream.

This is different. A heavy sky is hard to explain, but it's like something's decided to quit fooling around. There's damp work to be done, work that's built up and won't go away, that's going to take time. There's a slight lessening, now and then. A breather. Then it bears down.

Rain.

It was still pouring when I stopped for propane at the True Value Hardware in Forks. I was apologetic to the phlegmatic fellow who came out to fill the tank.

"It's bad weather for filling tanks, but it's even worse weather to run out."

"I reckon." Water was dripping off the bill of his gimme cap.

"I haven't seen the news. When is this supposed to let up?"

For a second or two I didn't think he was going to answer. Then he squinted dourly up at the sky, wiped the brim of his hat with a slow finger, flicked the water away.

"Well...I been here a long time...and I'd say... July. The next significant break will be ...July 5th."

I started to laugh, but stopped when I caught his look. He was perfectly serious.

Rain.

I came into Kalalock campground around 2 pm. There's only about a dozen RVs here, mostly strung out along the bluff. Everyone's inside, of course. Miraculously I found a similar spot, with a grill and a table, parallel to the beach. I couldn't find the site number, but I paid my 12 bucks anyway. The envelope was soaked by the time I got it in the slot.

Trees out here all grow away from the shore, turning their bare shivering backsides to the sea. I could see why, after wrapping up and attempting a walk on the beach. The wind is relentless. There's a wild challenging beauty to the chill wet blow, but after a few minutes I decided it was best enjoyed from the dinette, with the heater going, and a hot cup of tea in hand.

From this calm vantage, I find the multiple roaring rolling breakers soothing, like watching the deep inside flames of a campfire. The comparison is inexact, I know, but both are mesmerizing. Motion in the midst of stasis. Evanescent forms sustained through time, always consuming, always the same. Watching them, sometimes, half dreaming, you can slip without effort into the soft illusion of thinking, not of anything in particular, just following the form without burden of content. And if you can free yourself to imagine truly what I am seeing here, the rolling repetitive meaningless powerful portent of waves passing waves passing waves passing waves, then cluck like a chicken.

For you have been hypnotized, as I was. You can snap out of it now. Unless you need the eggs.

Rain.

Just as I was zoning out, for perhaps the third time, a fellow in a wet parks jacket came right up, rapped on the window in a no-nonsense manner, and told me I had perched myself in a picnic area, and would have to move. I opened my mouth, but couldn't think of a thing to say. So I shut it.

Too good to be true. O well. There's plenty of other sites to choose from. And they're all about equally wet.

Tomorrow I am almost certainly heading down to Oregon. It's been swell, but Washington is beginning to discourage. Three months ago, to the day, I roared up out of the humid hell of summer Texas, desperate for cooler weather.

It was 38 last night, and no higher than 52 today. Cool accomplished.

Now at length I find myself pining for a little of that powerful sun I abandoned behind me, some bright warm place where I can take my shirt off and walk around in shorts for a while, maybe lay up like a lizard on a flat rock.

Perhaps I'll find it in California, a week from now. Or Arizona. Or even Texas.

Some people are just never satisfied. It's true.

That's why they put wheels on these things.


Bob

Feeling Sequimish

Sol Duc Hot Springs


When I came through Sequim the first time, after leaving Canada, I took the low road through Dungeness. There I discovered the Three Crabs Restaurant. Following my diet, I had the crab cakes, followed by a bowl of oyster stew and an open-faced crab sandwich.

About an hour and a half later I got an extreme case of the gottagos, which kept me busy all afternoon. I didn't see much of Sequim because I was too busy searching for marginal places to pull over. It was especially embarrassing at the John Wayne Memorial Marina, where I suddenly cut short a conversation with a fella selling a sailboat and literally ran for the head on the hill.

Made it.

I mention this as a possible explanation for missing all the lavender signs the first time around. I was distracted. This time, going west, I saw my first sign in Gardiner, where I stopped at the Expresso Garden and Lavender Pantry.

The Lavender Pantry is sort of a herbiform appendix to the coffee shop. It's not my thing, but you gotta admire the grit of these folks. They use the weed for practically everything: soaps, lotions, jelly, sachet, candles, and other smelly stuff I couldn't figure out.

They'll even put it in your coffee.

I demurred. The only thing I expect from coffee is that it grab me firmly by the throat and shake me till my teeth rattle. During that exercise I don't want it pretending to be candy, or soap, or underarm deodorant. I asked for high octane latte, and got it. There was so much herb in that place, though, that I had to get outside before the stuff tasted normal. Then it was pretty good.

There were several other lavender places, but I'd had my hit for the day. I particularly liked the name of one of them, though: The Purple Haze Lavender Farm.

Sounds like a band from the late Sixties.

What I really needed was a laundromat. Finally found one ("Open 24 Hours") in Sequim across from the Safeway. In the same area, behind the McDonald's and a considerable step up, was the Sawade Thai Restaurant. I've gotten to where I start salivating whenever I see the word Thai. It almost always means good food.

And basil beats lavender any day.

The drive from Port Angeles to Lake Crescent was as beautiful as always, but I passed up Hurricane Ridge this time. It was socked in and looked like rain way up there. So, in late afternoon, I turned into Fairholm, a National Park campground at the west end of the lake. One of my favorite places, a real rain forest campground. Of course, they'd closed down all the sites but a handful, and these weren't the best ones, down by the lake. The little store that served breakfast on the deck was closed too.

This is getting way too commonplace. I feel like I'm being emphatically told to fly south for the winter, before Bob season starts. Anxious about the morrow, I let off the trailer and drove on up to Sol Duc, 12 miles in the twilight.

Whew. They're still open for another two weeks. And I had forgotten they had a campground.

Today I soaked in 106 degree mineral water most of the afternoon, had surprisingly complete semi-english conversations with German and Japanese tourists, ate hamburgers and ice cream, and generally acted like I didn't have a care in the world.

The secret behind that, which I've never told anyone till now, is just this: with the help of beer and short term memory loss, I really don't have a care in the world.

That's the best way to keep secrets. Out in plain sight.


Bob

Quartering the Kitsap

Lake Crescent, WA



I left Olympia in a blowing rain, under sullen skies. By the time I got up 101 to where I had to decide between Aberdeen and Port Angeles, things had lightened up a bit, and so had I.

I stopped at a place called The Place for breakfast. Prime rib, eggs, and hash browns, for nine bucks. Not bad. The management, not content with educating my palate, also wanted to sell me a little chicken soup for the soul. Scattered around the table was a side dish of homilies:

"Growing old is inevitable. Growing up is an option." (There's no guidance, though, as to whether it's a desirable option.)

"If you want the fruit, you've got to climb the tree." There you go. Hard to argue with that, especially with your mouth full.

While I was eating, I used the rest of the table to sort through all the accumulated mail my brother had sent me. Been gone since July 15th . In all that time, only 23 letters deemed worth forwarding. Only one really worth looking at.

Amazing how little of this stuff matters, once you get the bills paid automatically.

They are changing up my health insurance again. Needless to say, it's not an improvement. I had believed, naively, that leeches were no longer an approved form of medical practice.

Nonetheless, somewhat mollified by a fine breakfast, I made my way up 106 to Hunter Farms, where I stopped to pick up some pears and plums. The plan was to spend the day circling the Kitsap peninsula, looking for the perfect camping spot. Just as I was getting into Union, Julie Kendall came on the radio, singing "Heaven's just a Sin Away". I pulled over to give her my full attention, and found myself in front of a curious squat ramshackle structure, with a tilted rusty wheel of welded buckets sticking out of one end.

The Dalby Water Wheel was built in 1923, and was "one of the first hydroelectric plants on the Hood Canal". It looks like something you might throw together in your back yard, but apparently was useful enough to warrant rebuilding in 1927.

I passed through Twanoh State Park. There was an ominous sign: " Park closes 10/13". Tomorrow. I think they're trying to tell me something. Everybody respectable has gone back to work. I may have to get more creative about where I'm camping. Perhaps light a candle to Our Lady of Walmarts.

There was no such sign at Belfair State Park, but it didn't appeal to me particularly, despite the handy liquor store right at the entrance. Besides, it was early, and the highway along the hook of the Hood Canal was narrow, slow, sunlit, and charming. So I rolled on down to the bend at Tahuva, where the roadway narrows to a primitive wet one-lane gravel track that hugs the bluffs all the way up to Dewatto.

North Shore Road. There were times I was not sure I was ever going to get out of there, winding back and forth interminably between mossy trees and shafts of sunlight, under an intermittent drizzle of yellow leaves. But it sure was a fine slow crawl through the rain forest. The sort of road that is itself a destination.

On the map there's a Harvey Rensland State Park in there somewhere, but I never saw it. Perhaps I was distracted by the falling tree. Luckily I had the windows down, and heard the premonitory "cre-e-e-ee-kk-k-k-k-k...." I came to an abrupt stop, which was not much slower than I had been going. Then !Bam!Whap!... there it was, 30 feet in front of me, covering half the road. Not a large tree, but large enough.

Timing is everything, up here in the Kitsap.

Finally I came onto pavement again, along the Dewatto River. It was a smooth and unmemorable drive, all the way to where the Canal opens up at Seabeck. There I found the perfect camping spot, at Scenic Beach State Park. It was closed.

I walked around down there anyway. It is a gorgeous spot, right on the water. The weather was perfect. Arrgh. I'll have to save it for some future spring.

Some future spring. Reminds me of the poem by Judith Viorst:

"Why does some future spring
Collapse my heart with longing when
I will not feel a thing?"

I went on to Kitsap Memorial State Park. It's a letdown after Scenic, and the dump station was closed. Claude, the camp host, told me with a sort of grim satisfaction that they'd capped it off. They're going to put in a new one. Some day.

Claude and one of the maintenance guys woke me at 9 o'clock the next morning, standing next to my truck, discussing at the top of their lungs how much work there was to do around there. Forty-five minutes later they were still at it, shifting from one foot to another, bitching about the burdens they bore.

I got up, finally. I was just sitting down at the dinette to write you guys when outside my trailer there arose such a squeal, that I jumped to my feet to see what was the deal. No, it wasn't a jolly old elf. It was Elizabeth, the black Vietnamese pig. The woman two sites down was taking her pig for a walk, and Elizabeth didn't want to cooperate.

Diva syndrome. Apparently this pig is about to be a superstar of children's books. Look for "Busy Lizzy", the pig with panache.

I didn't get the lady's name, but she had driven up here from California in a truck camper with this pig, a German Shepherd, a rabbit, and a husband. The dog looked a bit embarrassed, standing there with a pig. The rabbit and the husband were in hiding.

RV the invisible rabbit. Where've I heard that before?

All of them ride up front in the cab of the pickup. Lizzy takes the console area, between the seats. The rest arrange themselves in whatever space is left. Miss Piggy...er...Elizabeth, despite her diminutive stature and dainty feet, is a Ham with Heft. She weighs in at close to 150 pounds. I asked what she ate. Turns out Purina manufactures Sow Chow. Liz will eat it, though she prefers raw fruits and vegetables.

In fact, Elizabeth has a tendency to get excited whenever someone says the word "apple". I found this out when I was telling the lady she ought to get a bumper sticker that says "I brake for fruit stands."

Elizabeth squealed and started grunting, pulling at her harness. All that time wasted in the fire department, when I could have had a fine career as a motivational speaker for hogs. Who knew?

Gotta watch it, though. This pig understands more than you'd think. I wonder how she'd react to less pleasant words?

Like "bacon"? Or even "spam"?

I sure didn't want to find out.


Bob

Boondocker's Attitude Adjustment

Bruceport County Park
South Bend, WA


After a weekend with the good people of PNWCO, I needed a bit of decompression and attitude adjustment.

You can't travel alone if you are too used to company.

And it was good company. I learned a lot, too. Meep explained the workings of a clam gun. Don Murray told me how to get a hog to back up into the bed of a pickup. You can't buy expertise like that.

But I knew I'd gotten soft when I casually put my coffee in the microwave this morning to heat it up. Microwaves don't work without electricity.

What kind of a blundering boondocker will I be if this keeps up? I can see it's going to take a few days of isolation to reacquire that fine-tuned antisocial independence that sustains me in my travels.

Time to toughen up again.

I found a good place for it here at Bruceport County Park, about 5 miles southwest of South Bend. I'm told this park has been here since the 30s. Imagine the looming trees of Millersylvania, sans Snopes, transplanted to a bluff above Willapa Bay. Now thin them out a bit, just enough to allow nearly every campsite a view of bay and evening sunset.

Ain't it fine? Thirteen bucks.

Erratic deep Vs of honking geese are flying south overhead, while a layer of fog settles down on the water below like a soft wool sock.

There's gunfire out there somewhere, in Willapa Bay. Gill-netters, I'm told, shooting seals. Seals tear up their nets. About like having dogs get into your cattle, I guess.

In an older park like this, the best sites are usually dry camping, and I've got one of them. There are full hookups available near the entrance, but they are bunched up, a late addition. I like this arrangement. It keeps most of the motorhomes at bay. Here on the bluff I'm almost alone.

See? Turning downright antisocial again, even as we speak.

I've been working on a website with Don Bradner. I missed the Great Clam Dig at Long Beach because I got wrapped up in talking to him about it. It's coming along well, but it's more work than I envisioned. I'm missing stuff, and need to Google for it in the archives.

I've been intending to get something like this together eventually, but years might have slipped by without the intervention of the formidable DB, who came over to where I was lazing around Don Murray's campfire at PNWCO, plunked down his laptop, and showed me about half of Second Wind already in HTML.

"You want to do this?"

What could I say? It was put up or shut up time.

Don's made it very easy for me. I'm sitting here on the bluff working through all the old stories, trying to find out what's missing, organizing the rest.

And though I said I wouldn't, I'm editing a little. These stories posted to the newsgroup are one end of a casual conversation, and written that way. Stuff that wasn't said in the initial post would come out subsequently.

If somebody didn't get something, I could be sure they'd ask about it. These guys are anything but shy.

If I put these stories on the web, they'll be monologues, and that takes a little more clarity. And that means some organizing. There's a lot more of this stuff than I remembered.

But there'll never be a better time.

Pretty soon I've got to get to a place where there's a better cell connection, if I'm gonna be sending pictures and surfing the web. I'll bet somewhere around Aberdeen ought to do it. Maybe they've got a library.

I've kept a fire burning on the edge of the bluff since I got here, day and night, just in case there's some huddled lonesome soul out there, floating around in the fog, needing the ragged safety of a temporary shore.

None showed up. Hell with it. See, I'm getting my edge back.

Time to move on, while I can still stand myself.


Bob

Pinwiko 6

Bruceport County Park
South Bend, WA


What can I say about PNWCO6?

You are unlikely to meet a more pleasant group of people to camp with. I have no complaints.

WHAT? No COMPLAINTS?!? What the devil are you going to write about? Huh? What?

Pacific North West Camp Out.

PNWCO. I guess if you just had to pronounce it, it would sound something like pinwiko. Sounds vaguely governmental. But this acronym is not meant to be pronounced, or even understood.

It's meant to be enjoyed.

PNWCO is all about the 4 Ps of Camping: pfood, pfellowship, pfires, and pfun. All were present in plenitude. Lessee, wasn't there another P? Hmmmmm. It'll come to me.

I got here on Thursday. I drove up to Oysterville and back, stopped at the Thai restaurant in Long Beach and had a fine Panang curry with mixed seafood. Then down to Ilwaco, for a walk along the marina.

I'd planned to arrive anonymous in the evening at a pinwiko campfire, introducing myself as Dewey Noam, a perennial lurker on the newsgroup. Check out the hospitality. But the hardcore campfire folks, other than myself, hadn't come yet. Then Wade drove by, offering to introduce me to the other early arrivals. A lot of my jokes end up like this. Dewey never really had a chance.

Wade and I spent a couple of pleasant hours talking to Mike and Carol in their motorhome. Mike gave me some pretty good clues about kayaking in the local sloughs.

Next morning dim and early I went down to the beach with a folding chair. It was plenty foggy. There was a more than misty indistinctness to the borders of things, like rocks, and driftwood, and even the surface of the sand. I thought my eyes had finally gone bye-bye when the top of a large log I was about to sit on seemed to squirm and slip away from me.

That's when I discovered sand fleas. There were millions of them, everywhere, hopping all over. So much for sleeping on the beach. They didn't bite, at least not me, but the endless creeping vibration of every surface was eerie.

Think I'll use the chair.

Sand fleas seem to always jump forward. They are optimists that way. The regular biting black sort back home, if I remember rightly, jump backward. At any rate, as the sun rose they magically disappeared, probably down into the sand, and the outlines of things firmed up.

Much as it seems to stay the same, everything is always moving here along the shore. It is always at edges that the truth comes out. There's always ferment, always a whittling away.

Ready or not.

Even on this mild day, I see 6 distinct rumbling frothy lines of cold combers coming in, rolling and tossing whatever they touch.

Back by the dune it is quieter, but there are waves building in the earth also. It diminishes here where the grass takes hold. But you can hear it happening, that slippery constant whisper of tiny grains tumbling in the wind, rolling and massing and toppling into slow breakers.

I sat back against one such, and found myself lost in the breathing center of a poem by Robert Frost:

"The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be...
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea."

I brought the book along for company. But who was I kidding? How could I read with all this stuff going on? I got up and folded the chair, turned back to the trail up and over into the campsites.

On the bluff above there was an elegant indistinct figure standing. The sun behind him threw a glittering halo round his head. I knew I'd been lulled into hallucination out there when I got close enough to see it was Wade.

Wade? With a halo? Please.

There was an incredible pile of food on the tables at dinner. And then desserts. I was taken with BD's pumpkin pies. I may have eaten one of them entire, myself. Burp. Sorry about that.

O yeah. That other P.

Perhaps it was Pfat. Which is how I look in the pictures people took.

Back in '95, when I had my first heart attack, I was told to cut fat out of my diet. I did, and lost 42 pounds in two months. I looked a little like the recently released inmate of a prison camp, but I felt pretty good. Two hundred pounds is skin and bones for me.

This time the surgical procedure had an opposite effect. When I got out of hospital in Edmonton, I couldn't seem to get enough sensation, of every sort. Like a gasping man thrown up on shore, I just sucked down the precious air. Also memories, ideas, colors, smells, sounds, tastes. Everything I almost lost.

Food was a part of that. It was everywhere, and I was right there with it.

Now that I am pretty sure of living a bit longer, I guess it's time to tone that down. Before the angina attack, with all that exercise and fresh mountain air, weight was actually melting off me.

I've tried all sorts of diets, and they all work, if you can be consistent about it. Lately I've discovered a couple of new ones.

Kevin on the newsgroup suggested the Stunt Double Diet. Hire somebody to take your place during the dangerous part of every meal. Sounds like it could work, but it might get expensive. Especially if they unionize.

Last month I invented another ploy: The Delicious Diet. For when you can't get to the mountains, and can't afford a stand-in.

It's simple. Try everything you see. If it is not Delicious, put your fork down. Eat only when it actually tastes outstanding.

Don't spell out this rule too precisely to your wife. You could get into real trouble.

But if you can avoid just eating out of habit or boredom, that ought to eliminate maybe half the calories you now take in. Most of the items you will be able to eat are on the appetizer menu. That's a bonus.

But it may work better in the middle of the country. To my chagrin, I can testify that it doesn't work at all well in the midst of all this fresh seafood on the Pacific coast.

And it certainly didn't work at supper during PNWCO6.

After everyone was gorged, and beginning to wander back to their sites to sleep it off, Cecil brought out some wonderfully gratuitous party favors: individual sacks of some of the best home-smoked salmon I've ever tasted.

I had most of mine for breakfast, in an 3 egg omelette, with cream cheese, black olives, paprika, and cracked black pepper. Hey, it's on my diet.

And everyone knows you can't make a new body without breaking eggs.

So what's the point of trying to diet, you say? I dunno. It's a little like:

"Backward, turn backward,
O Time in your flight..."

Foolishness? Probably. But consider the last verse of that Frost poem:

"They do not look out far.
They do not look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?"

And that's enough poetry for one day.


Bob