Day Nine: Oregon and California!

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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.

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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.

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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.

Posted by Kristin on 05/05/06 at 07:42 AM
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