A Journey of Self-Discovery and Shit

The center of Oregon is this weird wonderland. In the very center of it, there's this multi-hued, throbbing heart of pure geological and paleontological weirdness. And it's fun to wander north from it, watching it slowly, slowly fading back into just plain old land forms.

But it is also home to towns like Friend, and also the town of Post, which is said to be the exact geographic center of Oregon. I've never been to either. So what are we doing talking about this?

Well, it's Spring again, or at least pretty close. So that means it's time for the lady of the house and I to head out east. This is, as we have explored before, a beautiful time to be in the desert.

As we've also noted before, actually very little of Oregon looks like the Willamette Valley. Hell, almost none of it does. But you get so used to depictions of it being more or less culled from around here: when you see a montage about "Oregon," what you get is shots of Mount Hood, the view east from the rose garden in Washington Park, Bonneville Dam, Haystack Rock...Probably Crater Lake, but anyway...

But in the center of it all, where not really all that many people go (except for Facebook, which has already started building its new center in Prineville), there it all comes together in this serious riot of colors, with a reminder of the giants in the earth that once were here.

There's that thing that sometimes happens in the best of all pursuits: someone actually hits the perfect note, someone actually cooks the perfect meal, you have the exact amount of the right chemicals going on where you see exactly, once and for all, where you stand in the universe and what it all means.
And the funny part is what happens afterwards, as you back away from it, as you inevitably will have to. Like I say, heading north out of the Painted Hills, you can see remnants of the geological mystery that made it all possible, fading fading back away slowly.

By the time you get to Condon, it just looks like the high plains again.

So anyways, we're either gonna go over Hwy. 26, over the top of Hood (my least favorite way of getting to Central OR, by the by), or over to The Dalles, down through Dufur, Maupin, Tygh Valley, etc.

Spend the night at The Riverhouse in Bend, maybe go over to Tumalo Reservoir, maybe go to drink Mirror Pond within walking distance of the actual Mirror Pond! Oh, magical place, yo.


Thence over to Prineville, over the Ochocos to Mitchell, where I suspect we'll get lunch and visit with Henry the Bear. After that, the Painted Hills.

Then we go up to the John Day Fossil Beds, and possibly over to the Clarno Unit, where basically Oregon's version of Arches National Monument is.


And spend the night at the Hotel Condon. Probably eating Painted Hills beef, just like you would in any decent restaurant in Portland, just fresher is all.

Maybe go to the only other location of Powell's Books there is in Oregon outside of the Portland metropolitan area. (If it's still there. Michael Powell was apparently wandering around Central Oregon ten or more years ago and decided that Condon was just charming enough that it needed a good bookstore. Go figure.)

So, four hundred-sixty miles, does Google Maps say. That's according to its route, which I think maybe will not be my route, exactly.

Coming back to what looks like a busy as hell month, which is good. More to come, from de road.

Leaving EO

"The desert spring is something very special. Most beautiful things are short-lived. Suppose a sunset lasted forever- we would scarcely notice it. The glory of dawn passes as we watch. Utmost perfection in a rose exists for a day. So it is with spring in a harsh and forbidding setting. The air is not yet filled with the summer dust; it is sweet, clean, and bracing; distant hills are magically close at hand so that every person owns two telescopic lenses; desert flowers tentatively offer their gentle and beguiling paradise to passing insects; all of nature is tasting life to the full." - E.R. Jackman, 'The Unshorn Fields' from The Oregon Desert

We were lucky enough to be in the desert in spring this year. Lookit some photos.


Here would be the cliffs just north (?) of Frenchglen, in the Diamond Craters area. I really should have taken more pictures on this entire journey, but I was driving more or less constantly, and when I wasn't trying to figure out where the hell I was, I was contentedly grooving on the beauty of the landscape. I was too busy experiencing things, man, okay?





Here is a closeup of the same cliffs. Note how they kind of look like tiki heads. Were I in a different phase of my life, I would have spent all day here, just exploring and photographing.

Not now though; I'm all macro and shit. Furthermore, I'm still trying to figure out this new, fancy digital camera.








A typical field south of Burns, along the Silvies River. Shot taken randomly from out the open side window of the Meep.

Again, no establishing shots, no nothing. Just random stop n' shoots, when the impulse struck. One day soon, I shall be back to documenting in a finer style, and yes- makin' art, just as soon as I'm as comfy with this thing as I was with my various analog cameras.



The insects of the low desert are legion, and famous for being so. Last time I was in these parts (over twenty-five years ago, at Malheur Field Station, which is right south of this pic), we were issued this clear, viscous liquid that smelled like chemical death itself. It kind of prevented me from getting stung hundreds and hundreds of times.

I don't remember what it was called. Maybe it's only available down there.




Another shot from the same road. With the converging lines I like so much in a picture. I believe this was an attempt at capturing the beauty n' contrast of a red farm house set amid endless blue sky and a carpet of purest green.

And again, probably a month from now, most of the contrast will be entirely missing from the region.



Something I forgot to point out about Burns is that they have responded to ongoing economic stagnation by having most businesses fulfill two or three purposes. It gets creepy at times, how ubiquitous it is. My favorite place for breakfast in this town, for instance, was quite happy to make me a croissant sandwich, which I enjoyed. As I sat doing so, a local woman came in, and was greeted with, "Hello Evelyn. Coffee? Do you want me to test your blood sugar?"

After a fine breakfast at the deli in Burns that serves a good croissant sandwich and also will offer to test your blood sugar, we headed north, into the Malheur National Forest. I kept wanting to take pictures, but I also wanted to get where we were going before it was completely dark out. There was smoke hanging above the distant hills, and the Willie station wouldn't stop playing that damn song by Billy Bob Thornton's band, which is about Willie. Brown noser...


Then up through Seneca, with our first views of the Blue Mountains, which contains the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness. This is Strawberry Mountain, as viewed from a ridge northeast of Prairie City.
Prairie City doesn't sound like an especially pretty place -just based on the name- but it really is.
It reminds me of all those old gold mining towns that dot the slopes of Colorado's Western Slope, (which Bee has already noted elsewhere) and I shoulda taken pictures.


Art! A shot of our reflections in a pillar in Baker City, the Queen City of the Mines. We had wandered lazily across the high mountain meadows, through Austin and Whitney (both of which are largely un-populated, though not entirely), stopping at Sumpter, which hosts an enormous outdoor flea market, and serves as a living reminder of exactly how destructive placer mining is to a landscape.
Bee fell in love with Baker, and with John Day, Canyon City...Eastern Oregon at large. On one hand, I can cynically reply, "Well, try being there longer than overnight..." But it's true: beautiful old buildings set in a stunning natural mise en scene seems like just the thing for the yearning soul. I too wish that a whole bunch of people with money and interesting ideas would move to places like Baker City.
Am I one of those people? Maybe one day. It's true that I rarely attend live music any more, or watch much avant-garde cinema in theaters, so why live in a city? Well, can't really commute six hours as a stagehand, and urban areas still score higher in the decent restaurant department.

On the other hand, I've been practicing to be a cranky old fuck for much of my life, and think I would kinda fit in with a place like Baker.


The atrium of the Geiser Grand Hotel. The place was easily as beautiful as the advertising suggested, and due to the efforts of one Barbara Sidway, we were updated from a wonderful room to a wonderful room with a parlor.
Barbara has a nifty web-crawling program that is, I believe, a feature of Google, and sends her an email whenever anyone mentions the Geiser Grand at all on the web. Needless to say, but I'll say it again, Thanks, Barbara.

I am, as has been mentioned before, a person who loves old things. The bar alone at this place enchanted me, but add in a writing desk and a library, and you got me. The parlor made me wish we were hosting a bunch of people.

The joint is staffed by a bunch o' smart ass ladies in their early twenties. Generally amusing, sometimes nowhere as entertaining as they think they are. That said, they're still more engaged and professional than your average person working in the Columbia Gorge, where we spend much of our time.


The view from our window. Note that the former hotel -probably more recently an apartment building and currently empty-called The Antlers, described itself as 'Absolutely Modern'. Another sign on the west face of the building elaborated on this a bit, but some of the paint had been obscured over the years, and it sort of seemed that 'modern' could be defined as "we will set your children on fire", or something.



The next morning we tooled around town for a bit, reluctantly hitting the road west. Stopped in Pendleton, stopped in Boardman, checked the changes. Rolled into Portland circa sunset, picked up da Thug Dawgz.


Awww.

Unleashed in the East II: Fuck Eastern Oregon

I guess I forgot to mention that the people in charge of highway 205 (not to be confused with Interstate 205, of course) have sort of decided not to take care of you in any way. Amenities are few and far between, and even an oasis like Frenchglen feels like it can tell you that bathrooms are only for customers. This is how I came to be shitting in someone's driveway.

Well, not 'driveway', and not really 'someone'. It was one of the many gravel access roads leading up to property owned by Roaring Springs Ranch, and as there was no one at all around, not driving, not farming, not nothing, I felt okay doing it.
But of course, if for some reason someone had come along, I'd be the bad guy. This is what we, the outsiders do when we come to God's Country: We Shit All Over It.

I was listening to somebody singing the praises of Fort Worth, Texas (something I never thought I'd hear) on the Willie station, and I thought; "Well, there's too much Texas-sucking going on on this station, but that's not really all that surprising and hell, let 'em have it. Let people have things like that."
Strangely though, what it got me thinking about next was my own mixed feelings about the half of the state that I called home for much of my young life.

I was part of that rural brain drain thing y'know that they all keep talkin' about. The first time I was offered an opportunity to leave eastern Oregon, I took it with only tentative glances back. This lead to several years worth of the same question every time I went back to visit; when are you coming back? Oh, 'never', was my reply, and this made people just stare blankly. Lots of people leave that place, and almost every one of them I've seen goes back. Except the queer ones. They largely can't.
And I might add that this is a milieu in which many of my peers had never even left the county, and sort of viewed it as a badge of pride. So after we finally got it established that I was not going to be returning to eastern Oregon, the message then became oh, so you think you're better than us?

For one thing, non sequitur, asshole. For another, maybe I am, but that's not the issue. The question really is; what incentive was I ever given to stay? Widespread dislike of/threatening behavior toward me because I was a smarty pants who made everybody else look bad? Casting nasty little aspersions on me because I dress funny? Just the plain old 'staying is the right thing to do because everybody thinks so'? (Cue the voice of Janine Turner from 'Cliffhanger', shrieking at Sylvester Stallone; "SOME US STAYED!" I like to use this line when something unremarkable has happened.), or Loyalty for Loyalty's sake?

Let me explain something to you, EO. For all your lovely vistas and -yes- occasional quiet, homespun wisdom, there is a reason that thinkin' folks abandon you. There is this 'to be simple is to be an a baby is to be an angel' thing going on with you (though certainly not just you) that is to be avoided and discouraged. It's that good old American bullshit about how the best reaction is the first one, before you've thought about it at all, and how to think about things too much renders them effete and impure. How it is at base a good thing to be incoherently angry all the time, and to be a screaming child the rest of your miserable fucking life, consistently blaming all those people out there who think they're better than you, and are Elite.

Well, back atcha: what could be more elitist than thinking that you know the thoughts of God? That you are somehow better equipped to judge who and what is immoral, due to your baby-like simplicity? That it is right and good to attempt to be an arm of God's judgment and vengeance here on Earth (which is specifically warned against in the Bible, by the way)?

Above all else, how culturally arrogant it is to socially enforce the most closed-minded responses to all issues, in lieu of actually listening to other people for half a fucking second. On one hand, this is a remarkably lovely part of the state, on the other hand, fuck eastern Oregon; I know of which I speak.

But of course, those who -on either side of the Cascades- would seek to further divide us as a state also deserve my most heartfelt contempt. Hey Portland: thanks for buying things and shipping them everywhere! Couldn't have done it without ya', love, eastern Oregon.

Hey the-rest-of-the-state: thanks for living places we don't wanna live and doing things we don't wanna do, which leads to the production of things we need to survive. Honestly, couldn't have done it without ya', love, Portland.

So there. We all gotta get along. The thing about it is, when we're talking about things like water, the social niceties quickly fall away. The people who first moved to the farthest southeastern corner of Oregon did so because the government was giving away land there. So people, doin' like people do, moved there in droves. Generally speaking, five or ten years was all it took for them to see that a small farm just wasn't going to work, and they left.

But some of them STAYYYED! And before too long, the government began massive irrigation projects that helped bring water to places like this. Technology in general improved, and finally you could at least kind of grow things in the desert.
Flash forward to the present day, and what few people stuck around are beset and besieged with a whole bunch of fees and bureaucratic bullshit because they're tryin' to make an honest living tilling the soil. On one hand, bureaucracy truly can be excruciating, and law tends to overlook the human aspect. Some of the regulations are genuinely arbitrary seeming and maybe even weirdly punitive.

Furthermore, I think I can accurately say that they aren't well served by their political representatives. Those would generally speaking be Republicans, who are far more likely to wander around shrieking about teen pregnancy and how there's gay people and stuff than to maybe make life better for their constituents. For instance, most people in Harney County are pretty up against it financially; they're barely making it as it is, and still must fork over the same amount of certification fees for everything, it seems that the rest of us who want to work in Oregon do. So...Yeah, if you could put down your picture of an aborted fetus for a minute there, maybe you could help out the farmers, yes?

But: the fact that so many of the locals respond to all this with ideas along the lines of 'well, screw fish; nobody cares about fish, or makes a living off them' is just goddamn precious. Or they'll get all mad at lawyers and environmentalists, while forgetting that -if left to themselves- they will not bother taking care of their water sources and will gladly kill each other rather than share.

We had the pleasure of debating this with a bar owner/auto body mechanic. It's not like we were sitting there talking about our political/environmental views, either; it's just that after forty-eight hours in a town that small, everybody is wondering what the hell you're doing there.
And dude, when he was not buying strange drinks for Bee (what kind of redneck enjoys a fucking Creamsicle, anyway?), just wants to yell. He will not listen, and I don't mean '...to reason'. I mean just the basics of what it is we actually do with ourselves. He's too incoherently angry, too tired of the rest of the world...Understands deep down that we're not the problem, but still, likes to be loud, and dislikes having to comprehend things.

He also grew up forty minutes or so from where I did. I asked him why he left, and he muttered something about all the goddamn Mexicans. When asked for my reasoning, I just said, "I just had to get out of eastern Oregon."

Unleashed in the East

Along the road south, the weather went from so-rainy-I-could barely-see to stunningly bright every few minutes. This continued well into the mountains. When we finally hit the summit of the North Santiam Pass, the evidence of a forest fire (which happened three years ago, it turns out) was all around.

After this it was into Bend, and then a very long stretch across the desert to Burns. Saw what remains of Brothers, of Millican...Towns I have seen depopulated in my lifetime. Like touring the outer edges of a crumbling empire, seeing its outposts shot to splinters. The town of Hampton continues though; it's like a compound, and could probably defend itself if it came down to that. Beyond there, just the occasional farms and long stretches of nothing, punctuated by white-tailed deer.

The twin towns of Burns and Hines are former capitols of their respective industries (ranching and timber, respectively), and now are sort of there-because-there's-always-been-something-there. They sit on the outermost rim of what passes for civilization in these parts, and below there is nothing but The Great Basin. This would be the floor of a massive prehistoric inland sea that is now dried up, and forms a great deal of southeastern Oregon and much of northern Nevada.
We left our squalid, unimaginably hot room at the Days Inn, and began to search the bars for Truth.

We more or less found it, I guess, and had a template for where to go and what to do in town the next night. As Ms. Bee had a conference on water rights and law to attend (which she blogs about, of course), I had a mission of sorts: try to achieve the peak of Steens Mountain.
But that's all an excuse; just a sort of reason to go somewhere and look at things. Like Ken Kesey's dad always said, when you're walking up the creek, take along a fishing pole so no one will think you're crazy for staring at the water.

My accompaniment for this journey was the Sirius/XM station 'Willie', which is Willie Nelson's satellite radio station. Although I was deep enough in the desert that my cell phone didn't even kind of work, the reception from space was fantastic. I recommend this station; they're funny as hell and they have fantastic taste in music.
This was a Wednesday, which meant 'Wednesdays With Willie', in which listeners may call in and chat with Mr. Nelson himself on the phone. This eventually rolled over into the program hosted by one Dallas Wayne, who I'd not heard of, but then again, I'm not really country like that.

Country is fantastic soundtrack music for a spiritual journey, because it's filled with lots and lots of sweeping generalizations about life, and at any given point one may easily feel that the fella on the radio just read my mind for this very reason. It's very intersubjective; very group-mind.
Furthermore, Mr. Wayne is fond of inviting in a whole bunch of other older gentleman with thick Southern accents to sit around bullshitting about everything in general. This is satellite radio, so you can do that.
It was fun as hell to listen to these old time wordslingers go at it, and make no mistake; wordslingers is exactly what they are. They're not farmers, for gawd sake, even though they may sound that way...They're entertainment industry professionals, and adopt a pose of 'aw shucks' early on in their careers. They don't pitch hay and raise cattle -they portray an artistic interpretation of those who might, however, as those types tend to be somewhat taciturn.

I was thinking all this after I discovered that the road to the top of Steens Mountain was closed, took the curvy switchback road up from Frenchglen, and up onto the plains. I was now on a road that would go around the Steens in general, and Dallas and his friends were bullshitting about something or the other. I felt like I was rapidly becoming part of this conversation they were having.
"Why are we talkin' about this?" I drawled, then cracked the hell up.

There's a lot to be said for being alone in a truck in the middle of nowhere with a headfull of psychedelic mushrooms. You have this place of consensus that is just so rare in today's world. You may happily and loudly agree with yourself (not to mention unashamedly talk to yourself) and just kind of affirm things. You may remind yourself of all the things that are Okay, and ask yourself some honest questions about those that are not.
Again, all this with a backdrop of endless country witticisms and observation. I would occasionally pause in my commentary on life and the universe to adjudge a song; "That was heartbreaking," and then the familiar chords of Ernest Tubb's "I'm Walking The Floor Over You" come on, and it's like seeing an old friend: "Aww, pick it out, Smitty!"

It was a beautiful day, and I was having a wonderful time. I was also skirting the edges of what is known as Roaring Springs Ranch. This 'ranch' is actually a massive tract of land that comprises what remains of Pete French's ranching empire.
In the first big land rush around these parts, it didn't take long for lots of people to realize that this is no place for the small homesteader. It's the fucking desert, and people will indeed (and did) kill each other over water. So, as everybody pulled up stakes and ran, people like Pete French stuck around and ended up owning everything. Those that would not go were intimidated into doing so by French's men.

Naturally, this led to someone killing him. A tiny man with a huge moustache, he was known to never ever be without his gun, except the one time the day after Christmas 1897. He was partying with some friends at their house, he got called out and shot by a man who was eventually acquitted of any wrongdoing in the case.
So anyway, it's Julius Caesar on the high plains, and I'm amazed that no one's made a movie about this specific incident, but to this day, it's the biggest privately held piece of property around there.

No one, no one at all on that road. I was on my way down to Fields, which is well on your way to Nevada, if you so choose. Fields is a couple farm houses and a landing strip, should you need to land your Cessna. The closest thing to a governmental authority figure I saw was a guy spraying weeds by the side of the road. I passed him twice, waving both times.
Around here, I realized that if I wanted to make it back to Narrows -the closest place with gas- I'd probably best turn around. But I was enjoying my driving so much. Here, Dale Watson came on with the song "I Got To Drive", one of those numbers where I can't tell if the guy is joking or not. (Please enjoy with video some guy made of his semi.)




So I was running back north, millions of bugs splattering against my windshield. I made it past Narrows, and ultimately back to the top of the hill where one may view the entire valley where Burns and Hines lay.
I quickly realized that not only were the legendary mosquitoes out in full force, and standing in one place for any length of time was out of the question, but that I was in the middle of a whole bunch of mounds. Mounds that were all decorated with plastic flowers. Hm. Pet Cemetary? I left.

And of course Bee had been basically sitting around listening to a bunch of ranchers complain about the goddam gummint all day long. We were soon to meet, down at the Central Pastime, which is about as good n' descriptive a name for a bar in a desert town as can be.

Continued, next...

We Apologize for the Inconvenience (slaving in the inland empire, II)

Here is the Pasco-Kennewick bridge, also known as the Ed Hendler bridge. I found this picture on some guy's website noting "The World's Most Interesting Bridges".
Well, it certainly is interesting for two reasons; first, I'm pretty sure that those cables aren't actually supporting anything, and are just there for show. Secondly, despite how stunning the bridge itself is, it connects one ugly-as-sin excuse for a downtown area with another ugly-as-shit excuse for a downtown.


I drove over the Ed Hendler last week, in a vain attempt to find something, anything vaguely beautiful or interesting in the Tri-Cities area. It just don't exist, folks. I finally drove down to the waterfront, past Red's Western Smorgy, to at least look at the Columbia.
While there, I spoke to Ms. Bee, who informed me that we need to vacate our house by July 1st. It would seem that our landladies can't pay their mortgage, and would either need to raise our rent to extravagant rates, or sell the damn thing in this, the worst possible time to sell a house.

Sigh. Well, at least it isn't as hard as some things. People continue to want to move to Portland, and they will need houses. And selling a house is nowhere near as hard as finding a supermarket in the Tri-Cities.
After work on Monday, the rest of the crew decided to check out a bar called The Pub, which promised 'fun and games'. I didn't like the look of that, and agreed with the always frugal Renzo that our best bet was buying fresh produce, and not dealing with the strangely non-complimentary breakfast buffet. And the Asian woman who worked there, another one of those people who feels it is heartwarming to be addressed in a very loud voice, first thing in the morning.

But even before that, I needed to address the fact that I still would be losing my room in the morning. As always, the Washingtonians at the front desk were unapologetic, and offered nothing in the way of a solution. Apparently, the entire hotel was sold out for the rest of the week. There would be a policemen's convention there, and more than one person noted the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas overtones there.
But then I called up my boss, who called up his boss and told me again, not to worry, that everything was taken care of. The next morning, I was awakened at a quarter to six by a lesser boss of mine, her voice lowered by cigarettes to man-like octaves, confirming that I didn't have to find other lodging. Right after this, Renzo wandered outside and found that the hotel had gone ahead and given us our final bill.
That particular day, I wouldn't be there at noon, which was check-out time, and neither would Renzo, who had to go to the rehearsal.

Oh, but the night before, we went looking for a supermarket. Since Kennewick is a seemingly endless sprawl of large roads that go nowhere in particular with smaller roads that go fuck knows where, we were sort of on our own. Nearby; a ShopKo. Closed at 10:00. The Albertson's we'd been promised? Nowhere in evidence.
As we wandered down toward the river, I wondered what in the hell kind of city doesn't have stores that are open twenty-four hours. But, of course, lots of things call themselves 'cities' that aren't.

Randomly, I decided to hop on the freeway. The town of Richland beckoned nearby.
From the road, again gleaming red like a beacon in the darkness, a Fred Meyer sign. It looked smeary, like a hallucination.
Once we were off the freeway, there was no indication whatsoever that there was anything at all, except for dark trees and darkened residential streets. Nothing in the way of signs; just guesswork. I drove in the direction of where I sort of remembered the store being.

The parking lot was empty, and the lighting, again, was spare. It was open though, like all Fred Meyers, until eleven.
For the first time in a long time, I found myself having to consider what my new friend and I looked like to others. Like a couple, that is. He looks like a supermodel, and...I'm also a man. We're shopping together, having conversations like, "Okay, I'll get the bread if you'll pay for the mustard..."
Yeah, that's right. It'd been a while since I'd had to consider the thought of having to physically defend either my friend or both of us. I've done it before, but it's been a while. Portland makes ya' lazy.

Of course, just because a man is slight of build, soft spoken, Peruvian and gorgeous does not automatically make them queer. That's my own particular assumptions running wild. I knew what it looked like to the dam-rats who lived around there, though, and was wary, even though we were the only two people in that giant store, aside from employees.
I tried to explain to him that Ranier beer is every bit as wonderful as Pabst, which they for some reason did not have. I also tried to buy it for him.
"I'm frugal, I'm not broke," he said.

It had been a good hour and a half of wandering around that bit of paved desert before we achieved our modest goal. The shopkeep bid us a good night, and I nearly drove off with the back door open.
"Kennewick: We're...Sorry?" Renzo said.
"Welcome to Washington: We Apologize for the Inconvenience." I said.

The next day I didn't have to work, so I drove over to Pendleton. Past the brown humps that contain subterranean bunkers filled with nerve gas, smelling Hansell's hog farm again. It's been closed over ten years, but that farm still stinks up the entire area.
Wandered around my hometown. Noticed that all those nice old houses from the 1800's look oddly naked, now that someone decided to cut down all the trees on Despain Avenue. Went up Skyline Drive, looked at Senator Gordon Smith's house, tried to figure out which one my dad lives in.
Not a lot to say there. My daughter and I got together for lunch, and for the most part, what we discussed is personal. I will tell you that the Mexican joint she wanted us to meet at was the first place in town where I'd been treated friendly. The other two places were both thrift stores, and both staffed by that scowling, immediately disapproving type of hescher woman that I just can't take. They act as though their fear of anyone they don't immediately recognize is a virtue: well, if there wasn't something wrong with you, you'd live here, where good people live.

Afterwards, I wandered over to the Rainbow, easily my favorite bar in Pendlytown. All the Round-Up champeens since 1910 up on the wall, the memorabilia all priceless. I'm doin' a crossword puzzle, like I always do.
I hear some of the older folks down the bar discussing one Sally Simpson. An awful person, this woman was my third grade teacher, and like most of them, they had no business whatsoever being near children. It was as though they hired them, around there, based on their open antipathy for small beings.
Anyway, turns out she's still alive. She was old in the Seventies-she's 105 now- which is one of those things which is amazing since she had a heart made of pure Fuck You, but then again, I've met other people who were Too Mean To Die, too.

I decided to take Cold Springs Canyon back up to Washington. This is a road that wanders lazily through the wheat farms, the "town" of Holdman, and little else. I was laying back, enjoying the scenery.
Pulling over to relieeeeve myself, I quickly noticed that my tires were sunk deep in the sand of the shoulder. This would be like trying to get out of a snowdrift. The four-wheel-drive didn't work, and I sat down to think about this.
So; I was on my way back to this "city" where I wasn't sure I even had a hotel room, was set up for camping in my truck if I had to, though having no food (whiskey, though. Had that). Calling my daughter-who was training at Pizza Hut that afternoon- I hoped like hell that my message was in some way coherent, as I was out in the middle of the damn wheatfields. I told her voicemail that I needed a tow truck. I tried to flag down all two of the vehicles that passed me: no dice. I could walk to the town of Umatilla, but who knew how fucking far away that was? (Not far, it turned out.)
But of course, in time I noticed a pile of sticks over by somebody's fence, grabbed a bunch of them, stuck them under my back tires and rocked myself out of the hole. Really, whole lotta worry for nothing, but still.
** ** **

Here is the Three Rivers Convention Center, described as "cavernous" in the weird puff piece for some company that set up the audio in there.
It is certainly that. Outside, like all of them, a shiny, futuristic gathering node, hopefully drawing folks in-like an airport. Inside, like all of them, the rooms are like airport concourses built in the '80's, and backstage, it's like a fortress.

This place is an attempt on the part of the city fathers to finally break the Tri-Cities out of the limited-though-constant lure of the government dollar. Everyone who lives there is either employed by a defense contractor, or they work at the McNary Dam. And of course, they work at mini-marts, deal blackjack, roll dollar tacos, sell Orange Juliuses...You know.
But here, like many other cities of this size, they're trying to bring in the business tourism dollar, which is weird considering the location.

I definitely wasn't expecting chicken cordon bleu, grilled asparagus and a pretty decent looking cheesecake to be crew chow, but it was. Served on the nice linen tablecloths, too.

So that was weird. After that, we set to, in the desert winds now howling in through the massive open hangar-style door to the loading dock. Panel by panel, we took down the LED wall, the riggers brought down the truss, we ripped up the stage as carefully as possible, coiled cables, the whole bit.

As we did so, I thought about the night before, when Renzo and I shared a hot tub with three middle-aged gentlemen. One used to teach at the university that my daughter will be attending, this fall. Another was a roaming ultrasound technician who would stay at that particular Hilton once a week, every week. The third was part of a team of people testing a frictionless engine either called the Sterling Engine, or was an engine made out of sterling silver. I don't know.

The ultrasound guy was finishing up his studies at OHSU right around the time I was ending my career in medical records at that same hospital. He wished he could have done more with his life, but you know, you need to have three children, so you may spend the rest of your life being jokingly bitter about it.

The ex-educator turned sales rep was providing the good-common-sense, moderately conservative viewpoint on everything we talked about, and assured me that the aforementioned university my kid's going to is sheltered from the outside world by dint of the community they've made there for themselves, or something. I forget exactly how he put it, but he was really sayin'- don't worry 'bout th' niggers.

The guy from the team with the engine was actually more in the promotion line of things, but was able to answer most of the technical questions Renzo and I peppered him with. He had the most interesting things to say out of the three.

On the way back to our room, my head feeling airy from the combination of whiskey and hot tub, I observed that the conversation felt more like once would have on acid, as opposed to what it really was.
Renzo then was asking some advice about his romantic life, and I finally said, "Okay, boys or girls, which is it?"
He's hetero, and had been wondering same about me. Once I realized we were discussing the reactions women might have to given hypotheticals, I was better able to formulate some answers.

After work, we all went out to The Pub, with its attendant Fun and Games. We shot pool; I played miserably.
Around 1:30, I received a call from a noticeably distressed Bee, who said that the neighbors' house was burning down. She wanted to know if she should grab the pugs and get out of our house.
I asked if the trees next door were on fire; they touch our trees, in our back yard, y'see. The answer was no.
So really there wasn't a lot I could say or do, and I told her to go outside and monitor the situation, and to call me back if she had to abandon house.
She didn't, and we all got together in someone's room for the final phase of the evening.

This was a scene of everyone smoking weed but me, and at some point, our boss Casey passed the pipe around, asking that everyone at least touch it, and he'd tell us why in a moment.
I sort of hate shit like that; I feel it to be emotionally manipulative. But on the other hand, this was clearly important to Casey, and I took the pipe, inhaled a bit of smoke through my nose, explaining that I always did like the smell of the stuff.
Apparently his dad had died on that date, two years before. He was going to get a tattoo finished the next day, with the insignia of his dad's unit (tank battalion, it looked like), and that pipe-passing number was some sort of keeping-the-circle, vaguely Native American thing.

What's more to say? I made the four-hour drive back to Portland the next day in three hours. I got one hell of a case of Trucker's Arm (i.e. second or third degree burns on just your left arm)...It's hard to actually sum up a trip like this one, since the work is long and hard, but mundane to describe in detail. My feelings about the eastern parts of Oregon and Washington are influenced by growing up there, so it's probable that the profundity of what I felt is lost on anyone else.

I really am going to write something about our recent trip to the Chicagoland area. The difference there is; I didn't take notes on that one.

Slaving in the Inland Empire

How Renzo ended up in my car is this: he had arrived late, minus his belt. He needed a belt, and although he lived not far away, he was told that if he went to go get it, “it'd better be the shortest run of (his) life,” or something along those lines.

Due to high level of communication at work in this (and most) small production companies, I had not been told that we'd be travelling the four hours east in two minivans, and I didn't need to bring my truck. But I had brought it, and I'd done my usual and loaded for bear. On top of bringing my laptop and screwgun with case, extra battery and charger, I'd brought an entire tool belt, one messenger bag full of clothes and another, smaller one for books n' shit. On top of all that, I was fully prepared to camp a night in my truck if it broke down somewhere far away, i.e.; sleeping bag, pad, lantern...

So I certainly wasn't bringing all that along in a crowded minivan. Plus, I wanted to smoke, listen to the music I chose, and in general be alone, now that it was clear that I wouldn't be dragging along two or three stagehands.

But Renzo also was going to be sharing a hotel room with me, so I said, “If you want to ride with me, that's fine, just so long as you don't mind my constant smoking of cigarettes.”
He noticeably blanched. “You mean like, chain smoking? Or, say, five cigarettes in four hours? Or...”
I put him at ease, and off we went.

I was the only person in our twelve-person, three vehicle caravan who had even been to the Tri-Cities. Well, there was one guy, but I get the feeling that he got really stoned last year, then someone drove him there, and for all he knew, we were going to Idaho. For his part, Renzo thought that the Tri-Cities were up by Seattle.
This is not the case. Richland, Pasco and Kennewick are three hours east and another half-hour north of Portland. The closest town of any size in Oregon is Pendleton, where I grew up. This entire region is collectively known, sometimes, as The Inland Empire.

And we were going there because Lockheed-Martin was having an IT Day event at the convention center, and as always, someone needs to do the stage work for that.
Who is Lockheed-Martin?, most of my fellow hands wanted to know. "They make planes," said the bossman.
"They make bombers," someone else said.
"Basically, they sell war," I said.

The Tri-Cities have lived and died by the defense industry for a good long time. Hanford Nuclear Reservation (in Richland) was where the uranium for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs was enriched. Just down the road, in a series of depressing bunkers that stretch to the horizon, is the Umatilla Military Depot, where all the old chemical ordnance is semi-buried/leaking into the groundwater/slowly being incinerated...And that's just some of it.
On the other hand, this was my old stompin' grounds, and I was looking forward to it. "We're off to the dark and lonely East." I said to Renzo.

We got along well; matter o' fact, I do believe I made myself a friend this week. We talked about everything, and I also did that tour guide number I can't help but do whenever I'm in the Columbia Gorge. We stopped in Biggs, which is about halfway out, east from Portland. Renzo, born in Peru but raised in Miami, was amazed at how heavy the gusts were there, right where the winds from the Canadian Rockies crash into those sent from the Pacific Ocean.
Behind the counter at Dinty's mini mart, a cow-eyed woman who smiled distantly at something on the counter, still able to complete the basics of her job, but that's it. I asked her how it was going, and she just kept on contemplating whatever made her so happy.
** ** **

So we get there roughly three minutes or so after one of the minivans, and we all wander in, looking like we're there to rob the joint.
We're all wearing matching hats, and many of us are carrying tools. I myself have an impressive armload, and look like I'm impersonating a repairman.

It also turns out that our reservations, for whatever reason, were booked as only one night, as opposed to the three we actually needed. As has often been the case in my life, I was told to trust that this would be taken care of, and not to worry.


Everyone wanted to go out, and a few of us wanted to know where the nearest supermarket was. The bar wouldn't be hard work to find, according to the front desk ladies, but I saw how worried they looked when asked about the location of a store that sold food. We will return to this.

Those of us who wished a bit of bar time piled into one of the vans, driven by the one non-drinker among us, and tore off down the road. The non-drinker, I might add, is one of the most high strung people I've met in my life, and actually was making me a hell of a lot more nervous than most drunks would have.
The Tri-Cities have this odd southern California vibe about them, which is to say that it's an expanse of sagebrush covered at intervals by strip malls. In the area behind those malls, there sits an unnavigable welter of roads that- despite the fact that there's nothing really on them -have decided to class the joint up a bit by adding English-style roundabouts.

Or "rotundas", as our driver seemed to think they were called. We drove blindly and way too quickly into one of them, took one of the four options presented to us by the vague and incomplete signage, were briefly shot out onto a large main thoroughfare, saw something that looked kind of promising, ran back into yet another roundabout that led us back to exactly where we began.
This was terrifying. "Did we just slip into some kind of time hole?" I asked. I then requested that our driver slow down so I might better scan the horizon. Back out onto the wide main thoroughfare...Dark, but everything has neon signs...Red Lobster, Red Robin- ah! Red Lion, where we'd been directed.

The parking lot was so dark, one could easily run over a careless pedestrian. There was almost nothing indicating that this was a hotel at all, and could have just been a very large manor house on an estate that had been plunked down right next to a mall.
Outside, lots of young kids milling around, smoking, as you can't do that indoors in Washington. Lots of white baseball hats in that crowd, and you know what that means...
Inside, packed to the gills with fratboys and sorority sisters, beefy dude checkin' IDs at the door. I wanted no part of this situation where it would probably take an hour to get served, and nothing but annoyance the entire time. So I left, thinking it would only be a brief walk back to the hotel.

I had forgotten that we'd sort of gotten lost getting here, even though we were truly only five minutes or so away. Crossing the massive thoroughfare, I found what looked like the right road, avoiding getting killed by Red Robin employees speeding off into the night from another oddly unlit parking lot, and plunged in.
Then I remembered that I needed to negotiate a maze of mostly featureless roads featuring roundabouts that further confuse one. I knew I was heading south; but where is that, exactly? An enormous, deserted bus stop served as a promontory, but all I could see was lights twinkling in the distance, any of them possibly being the Hilton Spring Garden Inn (tm) where we were staying.

Further trudging along seemingly endless and dark roads led me ultimately to the massive, beige Benton County Justice Center. I had noticed it earlier during our 'rotunda' phase, and was trying to put this information to work for me. I briefly considered walking into the jail to ask directions back to my hotel, but thought better of it.
Behind this, a large expanse of weedy pavement with a rickety wooden tower in the center. This was an abandoned drive-in theater from back when this all would have been on the edge of town. I started walking through it, then realized that if there was ever a place to fall into a hole, pierce one's foot with something sharp and rusty, or just wander for a mile before coming up against some fence in the darkness, this was it. Instead, I skirted the edge of the lot, and ultimately saw the hotel's sign, a red beacon in the darkness.

On the way back, I noticed both an enormous complex named the "Toyota Center", and the Three Rivers Convention Center. Even though no one else knew it yet, our worksite was happily located across the street from our hotel.
It had taken perhaps forty-five minutes to walk back from a bar maybe ten blocks from my hotel. Renzo and I elected to drink whiskey and watch 'Iron Chef'.

What we did the next day was construct a stage, send up a modest amount of lights on trusses, and put together an enormous soft LED wall. More or less a twenty-five foot tall TV, this thing was comprised of fuck-who-knows-how-many individual panels of venetian blind-like strips of metal with multicolored lights on the front. The whole thing was held together, naturally, with hundreds of insanely fragile aluminum connectors. Each individual panel cost $2500, I was told, and upon completion would look like this:

That's a picture from the Tri-Cities Herald from that day, and the figure walking in front of it is this guy from L.A. named Don. The four enormous (and puzzling) styrofoam Oscars that stood behind it were installed the next day, which I had off.
In that photo, it's still in test pattern mode, but when in use, it would enlarge the head of whoever was on stage to massive proportions. This fact apparently was lost on a hapless opera singer who, during the actual conference, sang for quite some time with a giant snot ball dangling out of his enormous nostril.

This particular instrument, like many I've encountered in my line of work, is the kind of thing that only a handful of people in the world own. When they aren't traveling around installing it themselves, they rent it out for even bigger dollars. I figured that the software that controls it is proprietary, but nope: that's free. It's the massive expense of purchasing (and later safely shipping and installing) the actual piece that's the problem.

That day's load-in took thirteen hours, minus two meal breaks and four smoke/coffee breaks. We stagehands are nothing if not hyper-legalistic, and will burn your ass for not giving us as much break time as the law allows, even on a non-union gig like this one.
Lunch was at the Wok King, over on the massive thoroughfare named Columbia Center Boulevard. I suggested that this sprawling Asian smorgasbord (or 'smorgy', a word I'd never heard until that day) with its hum bao filled with horrifying yellow paste and baby ocotopi in a gritty broth should have "It's Disgusting (c) !" as its motto, accompanied by a cute little frog or something.
Dinner was at a casino of sorts that seemed to have been cobbled together from the remains of a Chuck E. Cheese. It was dollar taco night, and I prepared myself for what that probably meant. But no: it was fantastic pork, roasted carnitas style. Earlier, I'd been reminding everyone that while it might seem that Outback Steakhouse was the only near-decent food to be had in this area, one could probably find hundreds of fantastic Mexican joints.

(Gee, this sure is taking a long time, huh? I'll break here, as there's still way too much more information to impart. Tomorrow: Rich and Renzo try to find a supermarket)

(what now, what now, wha-at now, what now)

Capping off Grizzly Bear's epic Yellow House album is the song "Colorado", which has the blogtitle (it's one word! get with the program!) there as its chorus. The entire time I was in Colorado, I kept hearing it in my head.
I loved the state. It has moments that rival the greatest aspects of both Oregon's and Montana's landscape, and there's so much more of it. As Bee rightly pointed out, you can feel that there isn't some guy's house right around the corner; you're in the middle of fucking nowhere, which is pretty much where I like to be.

It was hot, and the air was noticeably thinner. Cottonwood blew not-lazily but aggressively through the air. The town of Remote Mountain Village (as per Aunty Christ, and which is loomed over by a peak that is redundantly titled Mount Remote Mountain Village. Maddening.) is both a natural wonderland and a place where the children of the rich come to get their swerve on. And Texan Tourists? I only thought that I hated them worse than dental receptionists. Now I Know.
All the architecture is well-kept 1880's style: from my years as a ghost town-obsessed young boy, I remembered not only the names of many of these places, but pictures of them as well. Put shortly, none of them were bona fide ghost towns then, and haven't been for at least twenty years now.
Ouray springs to mind as an example. It felt like our hotel room was a set from 'Deadwood', but in a nice way. An overwhelming feeling of History, like I was walking in the footsteps of those same bastids who mined the living hell out of these beautiful mountains, searching for gold.
Their descendants now mine self-same mountains for molybdenum and copper, utterly fouling the water supply. One of the few things that would cause me not to retire to a place such as this (after making my fortune, you understand) would be that particular fact.

In fact, Colorado and places like it are environmental barometers. The snowpack melts ever-earlier, and is contaminated (it is said) by that giant toxic dust cloud from Asia.
But I still love the fact that it is both a place where I can see nothing at all in the way of a city, but has also learned that tourists are best lured by fantastic food.

Liked the lady's friends, too. Got to hold the one-month-old offspring of one of them. I always like to do that: take the kid off the hands of the already-going-a-little-nuts new mother, and see if I can lull it into sleep. I do okay.
"You like holding babies," said Bee, and she's right: I do. It's interesting too to note that some of the most evil looks you, as a man, will ever get off of a woman of Grandma-age is when you are a man holding a baby that is crying.
Fuck that. Babies cry. That is all, and I do better than many women I've known on the subject.
The friend? Glad to not have to hold the kid for a few, I figured.

From the mountains to the plains: in Gunnison (often noted as the coldest place in the Lower 48, right next to Meacham, Oregon and International Falls, Minnesota), we purchased Cowboy Hats. They keep, it turns out, the sun off your face.
Whenever I think of Colorado, I think of mountains. The license plates themselves give you this bias, as did "Mork and Mindy". But of course, most of it is anything but.
My last experience with the state was in 1985, and outside of Mesa Verde (which you all gotta go check), my impression was gleaned from Cortez, Colorado. A place in the desert that also happened to be a strip mall hellscape.
That was the summer when I was writing the unpublished (and underappreciated!) Stoic Observer's Guide to Travelling the West. Yeah, gonna have to dig that particular notebook out.
The point being, on one hand I view the state of Colorado as being a glen up in the mountains, where the hippies dance and make macrame. On the other, I view it as being as lovely as Nevada.

It's always a treat to read the local papers, too. The Denver Post being what passed for that sort of thing around there (actually, the two papers Bee used to work for were there, too, but they don't have the ever-important crossword puzzles).
Buncha assholes, these Den-verians. I read a wonderful letter from a man who found that whole Pride Festival thing he- for some reason- attended to be shocking and lewd. Man was just looking for fun at the Civic Center, you know? Take the kids! Hot dogs! Why'd he take them to the big Queer thing? I don't exactly know, but here was a Perfectly Heterosexual Gentleman who had his precious Sensiblities offended, and...
One might find the same screed in the Portland paper, though, and I think that I have. More interestingly/annoyingly though; you don't see as much unbridled enthusiasm for the concept of patriotism around here. This leads to earnest young chaps such as Christopher Rawlings not only writing op-eds, but getting them published in the Post:

"It's a good thing that America is still around."
(Oh good. I'm looking forward to you formulating some sort of argument to back up this thesis statement.)

"That assertion could be a tough sell to many among the cultural elite of America and Europe, but it's something most of us accept without much reservation. Simply put, the world is a better place with America in a position of global power."
(Oh. Well, I suppose when you're done pointing fingers at the easy targets, you'll get back to defending your now somewhat expanded basic point.)

"If nothing else, Independence Day is a celebration of what America stands for and the happy fact that we're still around, standing up for the things we famously stand for: America is still about freedom and opportunity, here and abroad; our free market enables economic success unparalleled in the world; and, despite the frantic efforts of the ACLU and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, we're still one nation under God. These are all noble ideals and the world is better to have an America that bothers defending them."
(I suppose it's best to continually underscore your happiness at the happy facts that we're all rightfully happy about -and again do some demonizing of some easy targets-but then ending on a somewhat indefinable note and then repeating yourself seems a bit...Soft headed.)

"But that's the point: The ideals are only noble so long as they're worthy of being defended. It's great that you believe in freedom of the market and freedom of religion and speech. But it takes more than a cutesy bumper-sticker to protect those freedoms. As it turns out, arms aren't just for hugging."
(Yeah! Yeaaah! Right on!-er, What? Okay; ideals that you're willing to kill for are the only worthy ones, I believe you're saying. How...odd. Then-somewhat ridiculing Constitutional rights because there's some of us who know The Truth, and Should Speak, and then there's Others who...Well, You Know [rolls eyes]...Then the author ridicules a bumper sticker that he takes issue with.)

"Serious countries don't subsist for long on sweet-sounding slogans. It takes a fighting spirit and a willingness to defend a nation in existential crisis."
(Man, I'd forgotten how to be a serious country! Especially one overtaken by Fear and Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death. I didn't realize you right wing pigeons read so much Kierkegaard! After this, the author tells a pointless story about Washington at Valley Forge, for some reason leading to...)

"Republicanism was derided by the fancy- pants leaders in Europe as myopic, the war seemed too difficult and too costly, and many initial war supporters backed out as political pressure mounted for a "peaceful conclusion" (read: surrender). Thinking about that puts me in a time warp. Add the Air Force, the Internet, and a baseball team in Denver and it begins to sound a lot like America today and the ongoing war on terror. (OK, maybe scratch the baseball-team part.)"
(One of the most damning things one may call another in this, the country that is terrified of the idea that someone, somewhere just might think they're Better Than You is 'fancy pants'. The fact that this usage was deemed acceptable by some editor is simply charming. And hey: know what we have in Colorado? The Internet! )

"Maybe American ideals just aren't seen as being at risk. The usual argument in favor of a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq goes something like this: Just as the war won't help us, quitting won't hurt us. But there is something narrow and naïve about that assumption. A loss to al-Qaeda in Iraq is a loss to al-Qaeda everywhere. Our credibility and future lie in balance - and the truth is that we cannot succeed in Afghanistan or Iran or anywhere else if we can't succeed in Iraq. Iraq is the proverbial canary in the coal mine."
(Well yes, that's what they say, anyway. I keep forgetting that our 'credibility' is somehow involved with our success in Iraq, and that as we all know, this base of our 'success' is still somehow a flashpoint for this international terrorist organization that may or may not exist. Comfortably omitted here is the idea that perhaps we are making allies of sects in Islam that have actively loathed each other for centuries.)

"But what we don't see is the realignment of power in the region that hinges a lot less on whether you are Sunni or Shiite, Arab or Persian, Iraqi or Pakistani than whether or not you're Muslim - or, more accurately, a Muslim who has pledged his life in fighting the Great Satan. The Jihadist ideology has grown to encompass unlikely allies, and it is this ideology and the proponents thereof that we are up against in Iraq."
(Whoops. Nope. There is the omitted point, although now being used to justify further incursions into sovereign lands elsewhere who will also, no doubt, welcome us as liberators.)

"Your neighbor may be perfectly content in seeing this one through with a witty bumper sticker on his Saab. But for America and its national ethos - formed in 1776 to remain the global standard - it will take a whole lot more than stickers."
(Ha. 'Saab'. Funny car name. But really: sloganeering is foolish, unless practiced by some bright bulb with no idea what he is talking about; in which case it is that good, wholesome horse sense. In Your Heart, You Know He's Right. It Just Makes Good Sense.)

Pardon that. Regardless of where you are, the Fourth of July is an endless reminder that to be American is to be complicated, when not merely being vindictive and childish. The local radio station in Remote Mountain Village spent much of the day playing the music of true rebellion: Sixties shit.
I love them for it: they played "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", by that greatest of all American bands (though all but one of them was from Canada): The Band. A reminder, again: nothing but conflict, and things to talk about. There are people who view The Brother's War (my favorite name for it yet: 'Deadwood' again) as a personal matter to this day.
That evening, as we sat by the riverside in an enormous valley, in between giant mountains streaked with iron-y reds and copper-y greens, they played what pretty much seemed like the entire 'Woodstock' soundtrack. It just seemed right. To rebel against the endless non-questioning and again-automatic vindictiveness that characterizes our nation is the true revolution, if I may get all teary-eyed from all the soap in this box.

They ended off with Dylan's "Song To Woody", which summed it up nicely: for all the time we spend loving the hell out of the men who rip off the tops of mountains to find the pretty rocks underneath, leaving the rest of us undrinkable water for starters, every now and again someone with a folksy smile and a clear voice wanders down the road, singing songs for the rest of us, and reminding us that the real duty we have is not to the Nice Men who own the mines, but the resta these dumb bastards down here in the valley.

Shit. Way off track there. Colorado. Really loved it. Hope to take This One Here back there one day, after we make Our Fortunes, and live there as Decent Old People who Just Fucking Know Better Than You, now go get me a goddamn drink.

Mounds of Delicious Pancakes

Ah, what the hell. There's definitely some addendizing I could do here with the Caliblornificatiog...Thing, too.

The Water
Yeah, I'd forgotten about this one. It's so awful, it rivals that of Twin Falls, Idaho. In this case, it is from the sea...Well, it almost certainly is not, but tastes of the worst aspects of the ocean (pollution, too much saline for drinkability, actual garbage and fish poop).
When asking one of our waitresses what the hell was wrong with the water in Monterey, I got the sort of response an overly servile waitperson will give ("Oh, you want that water? Instead of tap water? Greeat choiiice..."), as opposed to an actual answer. Too bad. She lived around there too, and had noticed how bad it had become...And still I only sorta know why. Because God shuns him some Callyforny, I suppose.
The next night, at the restaurant set in a building from the 1840's with this queer little plaque out front describing it as having been the scene of several "interesting occurrences" or something, the big, dumb waiter brought us our by-now-mandatory bottled water, but in glasses that had been washed in that goddamned Monterey water, so they still tasted like seal ass.

The People
The big, dumb waiter, by the way, was a California stereotype in the making. Here's what I saw: guy who had been himself the big football star in high school, right around '86 or so. So to compensate, he grew himself a stupid little ponytail for wear while working in a restaurant he fears may be a bit too hip for him, this being a Don Johnson-y type place where the men, you know, don't wear socks with their shoes. Twilight of a Champion; yes, I know, but in H-school, he was the coolest. Then he got out of high school.
It's true that people are pretty much the same wherever you go, and much of the similarity has to do with what a bunch of assheads everyone is/are. Do we really need to do the whole myself included! number? I don't really think so. It should be implied.
But should we then stop making fun of the ridiculous/inane/unfogiveable? Of course not. California is full of idiots, but it's hard to say, as I was in tourist havens. But even in Marina, with its syringes glowing proudly in the dunes, as the locals voice complaints along the lines of 'that's something a tourist would do...', I see that same old shitty insularity that passes for community, just about always, and I want to say: "Hey-you're the idiot who chose to live here, genius."
They drive like assholes too, but you already knew that.

Best Bars Ever, cont'd
Mortimer's, on Reservation Road in Marina. I cannot express the seediness.
The one place south of Carmel that is up on a cliff overlooking the ocean, whatever it was called. From the not-exactly-appropriate banter between our clearly drunk or hungover bartender and the rest of the staff to the chicken drumstick platter ("Drummies"!), they coulda served me something in a sock, and I'd still go there every day just to look at the ocean from a bar.

Hey! Check this out:

"Learn how you can make 50k per year (comm.+bonus)"
Yeah yeah. Whyncha promise me something you haven't already promised me millions of times?
"WHILE EATING MOUNDS OF DELICIOUS PANCAKES!"
EEEEEEEEEEEE! Oh man! I love me some pancake!
"(A little maple syrup never hurt anyone)"
Huh? Yeah, well I suppose you diabetics don't really want to make 50k comm. plus bonus anyway. Now tell me about the pancakes!
"At The Oregonian "Territory Sales Associate" Pancake Employment Seminar."
Pancake employment? Let's get back to where the amount of pancake I was being offerred was 'mounds'!

No such luck. As you can imagine, a 'territory sales associate' is someone who goes door to door bothering people. Thought it was nice telling the telemarketers for the newspaper to fuck off before slamming down the phone? Imagine slamming a door! In their face! But anyway, this thing is happening on a contiguous Wednesday and Thursday pairing late this month. You hafta listen to the sermon to get the pancakes probably, and it's being held at two seperate Elmer's (the local equivalent of IHOP, really) in buttfuck northeast and hateyousomuch southwest. I'll go though. I'll slam a pancake right in their face!
Delicious!

The Way to San Jose

The security cop is talking to the lady behind the volunteers desk, which is in his favor, as she can't just beg off politely and leave. "It's a pretty long story," he's saying. "After I got home from Vietnam, I became an alcoholic, and..." He is standing next to a large foam-core sign that reads "THE SALMON BAKE HAS BEEN CANCELLED".
And this is the fun of working at The Convention Center. All of us are basically stuck here with each other, and for whatever reason, can't leave. Most of us are working, and everyone else is here for a conference. To wit: the Sixteenth National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect.
For this dubious pursuit (how are you and your conference going to change thousands of years of socially/religiously enforced Hatred of the Weak?), I spend my days wandering the unnecessarily labyrinthine hallways of this fortress of a building, becoming lost as many as six times in the last two days. Sometimes there's these Sartre-ian corners where you are faced with a dead-ended hallway, with three doors that don't open. It's both terrifying and deeply annoying.

Now, all I do is make certain that they have the means by which to amplify their voices and project their PowerPoint (tm) presentations onto large screens, but to a certain extent, their destinies are entwined with my own. We are all forced to drink Starbucks coffee, if we want coffee, for instance. There's the two that are located in the building itself, plus the one a block away, and that doesn't even include the stuff that is served by the full-time catering staff, which is also Starbucks.
"Maybe we should open some sort of competition for The Convention Center," says my companion, a guy who I've known for years. He's married to an acquaintance of mine, and I've never been able to remember his name. This was after I'd noticed that a sody pop from a machine in that building costs $2.75. The we went about bitching about the incompetence of our bosses. "All my sexists live in Texas..." I said, and added, "I've been waiting all day to make that joke, but largely speaking, I've been alone."
"Sorry I couldn't have been here for you," he said with mock solemnity.

We'd been wandering around all day, our job made much more difficult by our overlords, these four dudes from Texas. I don't want to engage in a bitching-about-my-job post, as those are boring, but what could have been a relatively smooth twelve-hour work day was seriously fucked up, since they seem to...No.
But I keep noting that here again is more evidence that it's been too long since I've left Portland. And this isn't what the problem was with their job-direction, but I mean, like every Southern Gentleman I've met in my life, they're fine with the ladies until they leave the room. And then, it's this puerile Assessment Game, about as clever as the observations made by fifteen-year-olds. And how their racism is smart enough to be somewhat covered by good-time-charlie witticisms, but it's still there, and it's still stupid.

This reminds me of the fact that I was recently in California. Again, I hate California in the abstract, much like I hate Texas (and Alaska-you're on my list). But we went there, my Honeybee and I, since we wanted to be someplace sunny. Or somewhere Not Portland, in any case.
Well, it was sunny , in any case, though not warm. The central coast of Cal'forny this time of year is about as warm as the north coast of Oregon, both buffetted about by high winds fresh off the sea. And we found out yet again-the internet lies!
Or y'know, it didn't lie, but if only Monterey was anywhere near as interesting as it described itself. We did find the one gay bar in town, though. After having been to a horrid tourist hell-spot on Cannery Row, thence to some pointless Polynesian-themed bar on Lighthouse Avenue (check Aunty Christ for her thoughts on this), we noticed this squat, dirty looking brick building that caused me to say, "There's the place for people like us!"

Well sure, if you view all of Portland's bars as being at least somewhat inherently Queer. This, on the other hand, was the one and only gay bar in a small town given largely to tourism, and the I-sure-do-feel-should-be discredited idea that anyplace should serve children.
I felt vaguely dirty and embarrassed, as if we were being viewed as sexual tourists, or worse yet, people who went to go look at the the monkeys in the zoo. But our bartendress was very nice to us, and the stereotyped gay dude up at the karaoke jockey's table sure seemed fond of me when I got up to sing The Eurythmics' "Love Is A Stranger". I left by saying, "This is my favorite bar in Monterey yet! We're definitely coming back!"
We never did.

We'd gotten off the plane in San Jose, where the rental car game is entirely the purview of the Sikhs, who all wear the mandatory turbans, but not the equally mandatory daggers, I'm gonna say. This is mirrored in our experience, at the end of the trip, with the mandatory presence of The Russians when taking a cab in Portland (again; go see Aunty), at the end of our journey.
From Saint Joe down south through wonderful, wonderful Gilroy, and again I was reminded of how fucking ugly most of California is. Like they noticed how damn beautiful the landscape was, and happily went about ignoring it, to their eternal shame.
For instance, where we actually stayed is a beach slum called Marina, California (and for some reason, I've had more than one person observe from my choice of description 'beach slum': "That sounds cool!"), where even the people who live there seem like they're there just because they got a good deal on Travelocity, and said, "What the hell, I might as well stay..." A feel of awful temporariness.

Monterey is a pretty cool city, but even there you see the mistake that California made, long ago, of not making their beaches entirely public, like Oregon did. And of course, the ghost of John Steinbeck hangs over it all, uncomfortably. (Truth is, the infinitely more charming Salinas, seventeen miles northeast, is the one that hosts his museum. But even there-if all you got is Steinbeck's writings about economic inequality as your heritage as the Mexicans toil in your fields, well...) Both Cannery Row and Fisherman's Wharf aren't really worth the price of admission, i.e. being surrounded by tourists and their awful fucking kids.

But when we finally got around to heading south, it all changed. Big Sur is everything they said it would be, and seeing places like Esalen (where a young Hunter S. Thompson was once groundskeeper, and Jack Kerouac had his first vision of nature not as cosmic protector, but as Devourer of All).
Actually, Kerouac had a great deal to say on the subject: he was horrified at Esalen to see the queer boys in the hot tubs, with all the 'spermatazoa' floating on the surface. I've always been weirded out by the common American misuse of the term 'sperm'. It's like getting hit by a train, and blaming all those molecules on board. Shortly thereafter, he had one of the worst alcoholic death trips ever recorded on paper, when all he wanted was a quiet getaway...

Upon my return home, I put on Burt Bacharach's Make It Easy On Yourself album. With songs like his sad/ebullient instrumental take on "Do You Know The Way to San Jose" and "Pacific Coast Highway", I was reminded of the idealized California I picture in my mind, as does the better part of America, I'm sure.
For me, it's an America (okay; a California) that is long dead, and charming for its quiet isolation. That part still lives down around Big Sur, even though it's still too crowded with traffic. I'm viewing it as the home of good-time-charlies about to become too old for their times (check the sax break on 'San Jose'), people trying to spend their last few years in somewhat more easy surroundings, and people trying to forget all the bad they did.

Shit. Cal'forny. It's always been where everybody was heading (except for Californians, who head to Oregon, natch), and now their sky is a monstrous joke, and even that which is beautiful is surrounded by awfulness.
All the same; good times though.

Helix

The first thing you notice about Eastern Oregon is the smell. I was not all that far from what remains of Hansell's hog farm, closed these ten years at least, since Stafford Hansell died. It still smells like pig shit. I also was near the Umatilla Army Depot, where the work of incinerating all that nerve gas (and other wonderful things) continues each and every day. And then there's Carty Coal Fire Plant, producer of both electricity of the least efficient sort and acid rain, for our region. Having said all that, I felt good.
Despite all that, the air was still cleaner than that which I breathe every day, and the sun was warm on my face. I was at a rest stop. Large, prominently placed signs reminded one and all that it was okay (according to state law) for members of the opposite sex to visit the (wrong, I guess) bathroom if they had charge of someone who was handicapped or something, and at no other time.
This was followed by an ordinance number, and I wondered if there had been a problem around the public restrooms on the high plains, of late.

I rolled into Pendleton around five. I stopped by the airport to see if my baby mama, Petunia, was working. Nope.
She has recently spererated from her husband of the last ten years. They've not gotten along for at least the last five, and it seems that he hit her, over summer vacation. He did this in front of their daughters.
So she up and moved out, but I didn't know this, and even worse, had no idea where she had moved. With some resignation, I wandered into a bar, map book in hand. Her husband is a wheat farmer, and they live out in a tangle of roads where you pretty much just need to know where you're going, or you're forever lost.
Upon learning that this place didn't have whiskey, I ordered a beer and set to looking at my map book, knowing damn well that the road I was looking for probably wasn't on any map. It wasn't.
The twenty-something pony-tailed dude right next to me noted the map book and said, "Where you comin' from, bro?"
All I could think was-ten years ago, that pony tail wouldn't have been okay in this town. But I also had pause at the fact that a total stranger was immediately being friendly to me, and I was no longer in the city, clearly. We were in a crowd of maybe four people.
We got talking (and later played some pool: I got my ass handed to me), and it turns out that he works for an old classmate of mine, at the mustard plant. They make gourmet mustard (Haus Barhyte, if you ever see it), right down the road from the airport.
Everywhere I went, folks were friendly to me, and I appreciated it. I'm a white man, conventional looking for the most part, and I know that's a big part of it. Mind you, it was still rare, and nice. I decided to find a motel.
What had once been a Western-themed cheap motel had now been transformed into something that called itself the Rugged Country Inn, 'The Bed and Breakfast Motel'. As much as that should have given me pause, I figured that pretensions aside, it would offer me a bed, shower and cable television. This much was true.
But as I stood there in the office, the smell hit me: it was like I had been sent to stay with a particularly fussy aunt, who had decided to sachet the living hell out of everything (to make it smell nice, you know), and then had been introduced to the spiritual discipline of Aromatherapy. The overall effect was like standing in a warehouse filled with perfumed toilet paper.
"This is a non-smoking roooommm...", the lady said to me, as I paid. I was about to say, "Well, could I get one that isn't non-smoking," when she finished the thought: "They're all non-smoking rooommms..."
"Well, I guess I won't smoke in the room then." I said, and she thought that was pretty funny. I was just stating the obvious. Breakfast, I was told, would be served in the Rooster room, and I pretty much envisioned what that might look like. I was given a room in the basement, so as to make it even more difficult to get outside and smoke. I felt like I was being put in the Nice Dungeon.
She had asked why I was in town, and I said that I was there to visit my daughter, eschewing the cheap drama of the real point, which was that I was looking for my daughter.
Breakfast was a bunch of cheap crap from Costco, and I left to get gas. I was reminded that things and people just move slower in the country: usually folks can't wait for you to give them your money. I drove off down by the Woolen Mills.
On a whim, I crossed the Lee Street bridge. After passing by The Graveyard of Neon Signs (an unofficial museum of failure: three decades worth of neon signs from failed Pendleton businesses), one winds up this little gully until you hit the top of the grade, and you're not in town at all anymore. Wheat fields, far as the eye could see.
All I could really do was go up and down as many of those gravel and dirt roads as I could, seeking some purchase from memory. Mind you, I still had no idea whether or not Petunia had left the farm, and whether or not she took th' She Bear with her. Or the daughter she'd had with the farmer. I felt very alone and somewhat desperate.
Each and every one of those roads is named for the family that has farmed on it for the last hundred years or so, and as I say, almost none appears on even the most detailed topo maps (which is stupid, considering that you might want to go hunt pheasant or something, figure out way too late that you're trespassing, and get a leg-full of rock salt from some farmer's shotgun). I went back into town, along Wildhorse creek, up by Mt. Hebron (which is actually a hill, of course).
Got a decent breakfast at a place in town, visited a pawn shop. After thinking about it for a bit, I went back up to the airport.

I was greeted there by two blonde women, one who eerily resembled my daughter. I talked to her. She thought I kind of looked like Petunia. "And I kinda look like She Bear, too, don't I?", I said.
Then recognition dawned. We spoke a while about how cool my daughter is, and my ex, well..."You never can tell with Petunia," she said, apropos of I'm-not-exactly-sure-what.
"That's true, " I said, for some reason.
I left a digital camera up there, with written instructions for She Bear to take lots of pictures, and send them to me. The girls at the desk said they'd try to get a hold of Petunia for me.

I got out of there, started driving up the Holdman road. A very boring road movie about America as existential hell, made by somebody French, could very easily be filmed thereabouts. I mean, I think it's beautiful, but really it is just rolling golden (or yellow, or brown) hills, with a single stip of pavement (crossed by dirt and gravel roads), and occasional cross-hatching of power lines.
As I encountered a fork in the road, I saw a patch of trees that looked pretty, and so got out to photograph them. MacBeth's car has an emergency brake that basically doesn't work at all, but since I was on what certainly looked flat, I didn't bother stopping the car and putting it in gear.
After I took the pics, I turned and noticed the car, still playing a little tune on the stereo, creeping forward in the gravel, like it felt like leaving. "Hey! Where' n the hell do you think you're going?" I asked, running toward it as it gathered speed. Like I say, movie material.
Took a right, and was on what calls itself the Holdman-Helix Highway. It's about as much a highway as I am an Air Force pilot. Nonetheless, it snakes low through the hills, past groves of trees that I strongly assume are all that remains of old homesteads: pretty sure they didn't grow there on their own, but who can say?
The terrain started looking very familiar, and I realized that I was in roughly the same territory I'd been in that morning. Before long, a dirt road crossed my path, with a ruined farmhouse and windmill: Goodwin road.
It was the road that I'd been looking for all morning, and now here it was noon, when one could assume that he was out tending to the crops, and my kid would be in school. So I kept on to the town of Helix.
Helix is tiny, tiny, and seems to be in the process of being swallowed by the hills and fields. The high school there is also the middle school and grade school. So here I am driving a Saab into this place where everybody knows everybody and beyond. I figure that I could get out of this strange looking vehicle and stand there, looking like a stalker, but looking like a Stranger, above all else. Wouldn't be long before someone would come up and ask what the hell I wanted. I considered showing my face.
But no. That wouldn't do, either. I mean, I met a fair amount of folks last summer at Bear's graduation from Junior High, but there just had to be another way.

At said graduation, a teacher came out and gave this rambling speech about...Well, I knew this one. 'Think you've got it bad? Lemme tellya about bad!'. This is a common rant amongst Eastern Oregon educators and coaches. They describe the dire conditions they grew up under, as dirt (and dirt-poor) farmers, and how for some reason, this is a worthwhile reason to stay.
Because you know, the big world out there looks all shiny and interesting, but here is where real people are, and where family is, and someone's gotta grow these crops, right?
It was always a very unconvincing speech to me, and this one was made even worse by the fact that as this teacher went on, her voice grew more and more shrill, making her look and sound more than a little crazy.
I met her afterward. I complimented her on the speech, and pointed out that she shared the last name of someone I went to grade school with. I got this as my response:
"Oh yeah. That's my ex-husband's niece. She's had a real tough time."-and here her pace picked way up, like it had during the 'you don't know how good you have it here' speech-"Had three babies die under suspicious circumstances and had to move to the Tri-Cities, and..." on and on. I already had my hand up, and was preparing to say, "You don't need to be sharing private family business with a stranger...", but she stopped, leaving us both standing there looking at each other.
Talking to Petunia about that later, she said, "But everybody already knows all that stuff anyway. It is everybody's business."
I said, "Southeast Portland's kinda like a small town too, but we at least pretend not to know each other's business."

Later on, in a thrift store, my phone rang. Petunia.
We could get together at two o' clock, right before she had to go to work, and right before I had to get back to Portland and retrieve MacBeth at the airport.
She lives in a little house with a pretty big yard, right near Pioneer Park. Her rent is a hundred dollars less than my apartment's.
We sat down and talked it out. Separation yes, divorce no. The girls spend half the week at the farm and half the week in town. They're not moving to this side of the mountains after all, and Petunia's becoming a 911 dispatcher.
Like me.
Needless to say, we talked about as much of Everything as we could in a half-hour. What happened yesterday was that the ground is no longer poisoned between us, and I can feel a whole lot better pursuing a decent relationship with my daughter, which I didn't have before, really.
As I was leaving town, the phone rings again. The Tulsa Kid.
"I'll see you in four hours," I said.