Portland to Missoula

My plan on this trip is to drive the slower, older roads, but if you have to start a trip on an Interstate, there is hardly one more scenic, more dramatic than the 150 miles of I 84 up the Columbia River gorge, from the dense forests, cliffs, and waterfalls in the west,

into the dry, folded country to the east, all of it part of the vast Columbia River basalt flows that blanket the region.

 Sure the gorge has towns, highways, railroads, dams, and now many wind turbines, but the beauty and power of the landscape remains. And if you take the long, geologic view, none of the small human constructions will be around for long, certainly it will all be gone in 10,000 years, the blink of a rock's eye.

Leaving the Columbia at the big bend, Highway 12 lopes around the north end of the Blue Mountains through the south end of the Palouse, box of Washington peaches out of the back of a pickup from a friendly, worn man, many wineries around Walla Walla, more wind turbines, and rolling loess wheat country courtesy of the ice age Lake Missoula floods.

Brewery closed in Waitsburg (alas),

on to a couple of fine early 1900's courthouses in Dayton and Pomeroy,

main streets and old brick buildings refreshed but like so many farm towns everywhere mostly empty, then up over through a long windy canyon with more wind turbines close on the skyline,

over a low pass hard on the heels of Lewis and Clark and down to the Snake River near Clarkston to a quiet park with many trees (oaks, maples, sycamores, big cottonwoods)

quail, swallows, a kingfisher, nighthawks at dusk and an owl low in the trees, leaving no wake, a quick swim and a dram of huckleberry wine

 and the introduction to Leaves of Grass. Oh Walt, so generous, so optimistic: “[t]he largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen” and on and on. Was it ever so, or are we that much smaller and meaner 150 years on? It is easy to be a cynical, condescending, snarky traveller, to be overwhelmed by the trivial and nostalgic and mean spirited, even more so in this awful election season, and certainly Whitman never imagined the commercial and mercantile would so overrun our society and our lives. I don't know the answer, except the world returns what we bring to it, people are decent and generous when given the    opportunity, and through all, the land abides.

The next day, up the Clearwater River through Orofino, country of my surveyor adventures from 40 years ago, the country still quiet, today the canyon smoky from fires

but the river the same, clean, noisy, bearing messages from the wilderness to the east, on up the Lochsa River, over Lolo pass and down into the Missoula valley, hot and smoky but feeling the end of summer.

“I'm  fixing a hole where the rain gets in

And stops my mind from wandering

where it will go.”

Starting out from Portland this morning, headed east in the Eurovan with a bike, kayak and backpack gear, and Walt Whitman, route and destinations mostly unknown. Oh, freedom!

This journey has been on my mind for awhile now, and it has taken more time than I had hoped and a lot of fussing around with matters significant and not so much to arrive at this beginning. So I feel a real sense of freedom, leaving behind the lists, with the things that needed to be attended to and finally, just going.

And I feel the freedom that comes with leaving home. We travel for many reasons, among them to reconnect with family and friends, to again travel roads and visit places we have known in the past, to wander paths and explore places we have never been, and to meet new folks along the way. Connecting, nostalgia, discovery, all well and good, and I'm on my way for all of those reasons, and more, but a fair amount of travel is simply just the urge to get out of the house and away from wherever we are, to be somewhere different.

And, if we are lucky, to be someone different. We say, without much thought, “wherever you go, there you are” and there is a certain kind of truth there, especially for those of us who have weathered into ourselves. We aren't likely to pull on a new personality as easily as exchanging gabardine slacks for baggy shorts. But identity is contextual: part of the the sense of folks from the west is that who we are is intimately bound up with where we live. Geography matters, landscape matters. So, leaving that home place, even for awhile, presents an opportunity to try on other places, and maybe other selves.

End of August and the light is long earlier, by late afternoon, the first sign of fall even before weather cooling and birds moving. A good time to travel, happy travels to myself.