Travel
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Where the West Meets the Northwest
I am back from another week on the road and feeling a bit relieved that I finally have some work lined up for the next several days...lest I be tempted to take off again. A girl sort of gets used to expecting a new adventure every day, not to mention taking all her meals at roadside stops like Flo’s Cafe in Grand Coulee, Washington, where the food is fantastic and the motto is “Ten thousand flies can’t be wrong.”
Pat and I drove for two days en route to Lake Chelan, where we spent a sleepy week at a lakeside resort, courtesy of my very generous auntie. This area of Washington is supposedly home to the world’s best tasting apples, and after sampling a couple from the business center in Manson, I couldn’t disagree: firm, juicy, good texture, and extraordinary flavor. From now on, it’s Chelan apples or nothing for me.
I remembered to bring my great grandparents’ book with me this time so I could explore some of the places they lived while they “gyppo’d” around that state. One of the first things we did was hike through a region close to Joe Creek, where my great grandfather and grandfather logged in the 1930s. I guess I thought walking where they once tread in their calks (pronounced “corks") would somehow slow down time, but its effect was exactly the opposite. Their lives were filled with both family and adventure, and yet how quickly they were over. You can’t waste one minute....
The following day we drove out to Grand Coulee Dam, mostly because Pat wanted to go. I was caught off guard, though, by how much the first sight of the behemoth moved me. Unlike Hoover Dam, which uses a visually striking concrete arch along with gravity to hold the Colorado back, Grand Coulee works simply because it’s so damn enormous. I know it destroyed fisheries and the Colville Indian Tribes’ way of life, submerged entire towns, and cost dozens of men their lives, but there is beauty in the testament it provides to the awesome human effort, cooperation, and ingenuity its construction required. I believe in the free market as much as the next gal, but it doesn’t seem possible that we could ever build something on the scale of Grand Coulee in this country again. I hope that doesn’t make me a communist.
A couple days before we left to come home, we took a ferry, Lady of the Lake II, from Chelan to Stehekin, which is only accessible by plane or boat. It took about four hours to get there, but the pleasant weather made for a smooth ride. I sat outside reading for most of the trip and consequently ended up with a red neck (for reals) and one red leg. Once we arrived at our destination, most of us got on an old school bus driven by a friendly but fast-talking preacher who drove us to Rainbow Falls and rapidly relayed some highlights about the community along the way (like the best place to pick blackberries, who fills in for the postmaster when she wants to take a break, and the place where he got his Plymouth Horizon stuck in high water one year when it flooded). I loved his style, but Pat was made nervous by the fact that all the while the preacher’s left hand was busy holding a mic, the right one frequently retreated from the steering wheel to wave energetically at passing cars on the narrow road skirting the roaring Stehekin River, which also just happened to be at flood stage. That Pat. What a nut.
Well, it appears I have run out of time to write, but tomorrow I will tell you how we spent a $100 on meat and cookies in Cle Elum, Washington, were nearly killed(!) in a freak hail storm in north central Oregon, missed out on mountain oysters in Bend, but eventually feasted on homemade ravioli before returning home.
Friday, May 05, 2006
Day Nine: Oregon and California!
Despite Jim’s Cassady-esque efforts to ingest enough coffee to keep him awake until Portland, we decided to find a motel at The Dalles on the Columbia River. Throughout this trip, he has employed a technique for determining how much time we have left to drive before the sun goes down. It involves him holding out his hand and counting the number of fingers between the horizon and the middle of the sun. Each finger supposedly represents fifteen minutes. I thought it was some sort of surveyor’s trick, but he said he got it out of a cereal box when he was a boy. Apparently in the 1940s and ‘50s, Nabisco included tips it termed “Indian Secret Injunuities” (whoops) in boxes of Shredded Wheat, and from them you could learn new skills like how to make a belt, stalk wild game, or determine how much light was left in the day. Cereal box marketing ploy or not, the finger-counting trick really does work. We timed it, and Jim was only off by a few minutes.
Before leaving The Dalles, we took a look at a rock fort used by Lewis and Clark, and then drove over Mt. Hood to avoid the Portland area traffic. The terrain slowly changed as we motored closer to the California border. The rugged country and redwoods made me feel like I was already home, but they also interfered with the reception on my Treo, making it impossible to check email, post here, or AIM with Evany as I had been doing to kill time in the pickup on this trip. As we passed a mill somewhere around the state line and not too far from Ken Kesey country, Jim remarked how much he loved the smell of fir and then quickly made an exception for white fir, which smells like urine when it’s cut.
“You mean piss fir?” I said, even though I’d been making an effort to keep my potty mouth in check since we left Victorville. The truth is...I have never known the real name of that particular tree. That’s why I asked.
“You really are the daughter of a logger,” he laughed, and then told me how his grandfather claimed to have coined that term.
Not to be outdone, I told him how one of my great-great uncles in Washington claimed he had invented the term “gyppo,” which refers to independent contract loggers (like the Stamper family in Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion). We were both skeptical of our ancestors’ stories, but I enjoyed the brief celebration of our heritage nonetheless. (Another of my favorite logging slang terms is “pecker poles,” which is most often used in derision to describe a truckload of thin trees that have been harvested early.)
Jim dropped me off in Crescent City, where Pat was waiting. On the way home, we stopped at The Trees of Mystery, and by the time we got to Humboldt County I felt like I couldn’t possibly be any happier. As we drove along the coastline, I opened the sunroof and smelled the redwoods. The rhododendron and lupine are in bloom. The technicolor green hillsides around Orick always make me blush. It’s like Mother Nature’s paired a belt-sized mini skirt with a halter top and hooker heels to really strut her stuff right there along Highway 101.
We made it to Eureka just in time to get chili dogs and garlic fries at Mike’s, a burger joint my dad’s family has patronized for at least five generations (it’s that good). I saw a lot of beautiful country on this trip, but it just doesn’t get any better than Humboldt County in the springtime. All you nice folks I met in Kansas, Wyoming, and Montana need not worry: This is one Californian who is staying put. As Dorothy said way back there near the 100th meridian, there’s no place like home.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Day Eight: Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon
So it turned out that the senators couldn’t do much for us despite their willingness to try, but some staff members at the Montana Historical Society (more really nice, helpful people!) were able to locate new information about Henry Larrabee within a few minutes. This left me some time to check out the stuffed buffalo known as Big Medicine (scroll down) and the Montana Museum’s exhibit of Evelyn Cameron photographs before we left Helena. I first learned about Cameron several years ago when I was researching a woman named Emma O’ Connor, who worked as a photographer in Blocksburg in the late 1800s. Cameron was making captivating and sometimes sassy images of life on the Montana frontier around the same time as O’ Connor, and I especially fell in love with her photographs depicting women’s lives out West. After we said goodbye to Joetta and Bob (and Montana), Jim pointed the pickup west and we headed for home.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Day Seven: Montana Senators are Nice!
I just happened to meet Montana State Senator Jim Elliott while trying to find rooms for everyone at a motel in Helena (yikes...I originally wrote “I met a Montana state senator at a motel in Helena..."). He very kindly offered to help us in our search for Henry Larrabee, and also put me in touch with another senator named Mike Cooney, whose grandfather was a Montana governor in the 1930s. This trip just keeps getting better and better.
Day Seven: Virginia City and Helena
I had the first good night of sleep I’ve had on this whole trip at the Stonehouse Inn last night. I woke up at six, and slipped outside for a walk downtown. When I returned, everyone was up and John and Linda were fixing breakfast (John, a self-taught carpenter, remodeled their amazing kitchen and built some of the furniture in the house). Later, we met Evelyn and Joanne over at the library. With their help we were able to determine that Henry Larrabee wasn’t in fact the sheriff of Madison County, as we previously thought. He was, however, the first sheriff in Missoula, which meant this afternoon we had to drive to Helena where the records we need are stored (I made Jim listen to Paul Zarzyski’s poem Why I Like Butte on my iPod as we passed by Butte). We will do more research at the Montana Historical Society tomorrow, and then we’ll head home.
Evelyn and Joanne also arranged for us to meet with John Ellingson, a respected Montana historian and Mason. John very graciously allowed us to see the inside of the Virginia City Masonic lodge room (the oldest, he said, in the country). We looked through the relevant registers they had on site (there are apparently more in other locations), but we were unable to find Larrabee. Jim thought he might have been involved in the Virginia City vigilance committee that hung several “road agents” in 1864. Larrabee had helped found the first Masonic lodge in California while he was there and is the only person who essentially admitted his involvement with the vigilante group that perpetrated the massacre on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay. It seems unlikely now, though, that he had anything to do with what went on in Virginia City. We’ll see what we turn up tomorrow.
Day Six: Club-Foot George
John, our host at the Stonehouse Inn, entertained us with some fantastic stories about Virginia City, but the best was the tale of how George Lane’s club foot ended up on a shelf at the local museum. Lane was among the “road agents” who terrorized Virginia City in the winter months of 1863 and 1864, and who were consequently hanged by a group of vigilantes with ties to the local Masonic Lodge. In the 1930s, as John said the story goes, some fellas down at the local bar got in an argument over where in fact Lane was buried. The original grave markers had been made of wood and over the years they had deteriorated and fallen over, making it difficult to determine who was buried where. As the drink-infused discussion continued down at the saloon, some of the men decided they were going to find out once in for all which grave belonged to Club Foot George. They headed up to Boot Hill and started digging until they found a skeleton that resembled him. They took the foot back to the bar “to show the rest of ‘em,” and that’s where it stayed until it was finally moved to the museum. John said they are planning to make a plaster cast of the foot for their exhibit and rebury the actual appendage under George Lane’s marker.
