Photo by Dave Croker The weather changes with the setting of the sun here, in this outpost of cloud/sky/tall tree/mud that was once the ocean …
Travel Diary: The Capital of Nowhere
From Jan Morris’s last book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere—words that speak to me, maybe help explain some of what I struggle to understand, this otherness, this search for place and identity and tribe…
Travel Diary: Back from Vancouver, B.C.
Road trip north up I-5 until it ends and is highway 99 again and dumps you easily and with charm into downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. The Vancouver International Jazz Festival was happening while we were there — free concerts in and around Granville Island…
Big Smile Sunflowers
Whoever has the job of naming new hybrids of flowers got it right with this one. How can you not grin when you know you are going to have not one but two Big Smile sunflowers vying for sun along with the chard, pole beans, heirloom tomatoes, callas, zinnas, dahlias…
(Saturday) Morning Morgantown
Joni Mitchell, vintage, the old stuff, stuff of my untoward youth, on the CD player, loud, so I can hear it over the water running in the shower I am about to take. I can sit here and think I’ve done nothing since waking but, in addition to writing in my morning pages book and on the blogs, I made and drank Illy coffee…
Hummingbird Out My Window
Photo by Paul Danese Still morning here in the Coast Range. Been up for a few hours, sipping my Illy espresso — they make a …
Longest Day of the Year…
Still daylight here in the foothills of the Coast Range in western Oregon. In fact, I think there’s a long way to go. There was a parking lot full of cars already lined up at Bald Hill Park when I drove home an hour — I think there’s some kind of solstice celebration at the top of Bald Hill peak every year…
Order from Chaos
It has taken me all damn day to get the room of my own, the one in which I write, returned to a modicum of order so I can begin to focus on writing again. Piles of books, piles of random newspaper clippings, and newsletters and mail and receipts
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That Said, What Was Fun About Driving 1000 Miles…
Highlights of My Thousand Miles to Nowhere, Somewhere and Back…
— Stumbling on/into Klindt’s, the oldest bookstore in Oregon, in The Dalles and finding a set of Lawrence Durell’s Alexandria Quartet for $12 just as R.E.M. is playing “The Great Beyond.”
— Doing “drive-by shootings”– photographs from the car while moving. Hold up the camera, point, and click. Vistas, clouds, rain off in the distance, the sunlight on the top of an old silo, a way-too-huge flag on the twin towers of a cement factory that rises up out of nowhere.
— A crow that I can pretend is Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, perched on the top of sign on Route 30, outside Haines, Oregon, announcing that I’m at the 45th parallel, the midpoint between the North Pole and the equator
— The way the leaves moved in the slightest breeze on the quaking aspen outside my window at the Sandman Inn in LaGrande, Oregon.
— At the same Sandman, overhearing a shard of conversation between army guys-on-tour and a couple who live near Antelope, Oregon where (as the husband says) “that Rajneesh guy used to live.”
— Eas-as-pie wireless in the Sandman; picking up wireless from hotels blocks away in downtown Boise before the genius light bulb goes on in my head and I think, aha! close the drapes!
— The Idaho Black History Museum in the Julia Davis Park across from the Rose Garden where I talk with the director (her sister is in the Lion King on Broadway) while I buy my son a $5 Juneteenth T-shirt for his birthday.
— The “Homage to the Pedestrian” art installation in The Grove in downtown Boise. Every time a person walks by, bells, whistles, clapping and light drumming start. I could never figure out if it was canned/pre-recorded or if the actual act of an individual walking by generated a unique set of rhythms each and every time.
— Getting that hour back as I return into Pacific Daylight Time just north of Huntington, Oregon.
— The sign at Exit 383 at Weatherby, Oregon “Panning for Gold, Next Exit.” Panning for gold translates into a pack of RVs and campers and tents alongside the highway and a bunch of humans with picks and shovels digging into the soil that made up two very tiny hills of dirt that look like they were leftover from some outhouse construction project.
— Randi Rhodes and her big, wonderful, sassy, obnoxious politically savvy mouth when I’m finally on I-5, close Albany, Oregon, and can pick up KTTH, 990 AM, The Truth once again.
— Cleaning out the car, starting laundry, realizing I have days and days stretching out in front of me where basically I don’t have to drive much again…
Why Road Trips Are Less Than Fun These Days…
Ten Reasons (So Far) Why Road Trips Are Less Than Wonderful These 21st Century Days
1. The roads are too damn crowded. Even in the wide open spaces of Eastern Oregon’s Malheur County, an irresponsible, big honkin’ Chevy Tahoe or Ford F350 Super Cab with the requisite “Support Our Troops”
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