Oregon - Portland

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My experience in Oregon was essentially a day trip to the city of Portland, and later a day where I was passing through. I had met up with a friend from back home who was also traveling across America. I would have gladly spent days in that wonderful, friendly, eclectic city, but that wasn't possible at the time. Though traffic is abysmal given how small Portland really is, it's something that I would happily deal with if I ever find myself in that area for any extended period of time again (and I hope I do). The important thing in Oregon was that it was the second time for me--the first being South Dakota--that traveling had transcended the act of physically moving.

Oregon was gorgeous, thanks to the abundant scenery offered up via the Pacific coastal highway. The high frequency of summer vacation bullshit towns I had to crawl through repeatedly at 25 miles per hour on my way south on highway 101 was wearing on me tremendously, but just as I was getting fed up with my route, I was blessed with views captured in the pictures above; big rolling sheets of fog slid over impossible blueness, rubbing right up against the cliffs and windswept trees like a tattered cotton blanket being pulled up over the coast by an invisible hand.

These big lonely beautiful views rolled by for hours, and heat didn't exist in Oregon when I was driving; I rolled down my windows and didn't give a damn when the cold damp fog wisped into my car as I was driving too fast through the cliffside parts of the road. My vehicle was no longer a car, but simply a container designed to capture the sea-born fog. I was moving in the sense that the wheels were spinning, but I felt stationary and timeless; no place to be except where the clouds were. I drove over two hundred miles without ever feeling like I left the first perfect vision of the coast, and yet I knew every other such instance of visual wholeness just as intimately; it all blended together into one dramatic landscape, the consummation of all the flawless little parts being perfection.

When the timing was right, I found access to a beach and pulled off alongside the ocean to watch the sunset. The wild fragments of clouds made the horizon one massive continuous piece of stained glass, some sort of cathedral window filtering all the light coming in millions of miles away. There are churches, temples, and mosques that can't attain that kind of divinity no matter how much money they have or how blessed the grounds are.

So I sat on an immense piece of wet driftwood--a tree, actually, one warped and twisted from maybe centuries of incoming tides, a tree that looked like it had grown from the ground sideways and protruded into the dune behind it for god knows how far, like the beach had formed around it--and that's all. I sat.

A perfect moment of golden silence, a silence I've been yearning for but could only find then and there at the end of the continent and under those conditions. I thought about nothing and did nothing for fifteen quiet holy minutes as the sun went down. It was worth everything.

Washington - Seattle, Gig Harbor, Tacoma, Ephrata

(Mount Rainier National Park)

(Mount Rainier)

(The Columbia River)

(Ephrata, Washington)

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I was surprised upon entering Washington, as the land was a hot, barren, flat stretch of land with dust devils and not much to offer scenery-wise as I was heading west through probably the first third of the state. I bypassed Spokane and rolled straight into the increasingly interesting vistas of the Columbia river, then over the looming Cascades as I approached Seattle to meet my cousin. I would spend the next week in Gig Harbor, Tacoma, Seattle, and the surrounding areas.

My cousin gave me an anti-tourist tour of the city, which was exactly the experience I had hoped for. Not much of the city was left unexplored, and I soaked up parts of the city I never would have thought to consider. Good food, diversity, and the general progressive attitude of Seattle led me to form an excellent opinion of the city by the end of the day.

The following day we hiked several miles up near Mount Rainier, on a trail that brought us through the forest, over rock and boulder fields that extended as far up and down the mountain as you could see (with concrete-colored water flowing in a white rush through some areas), and ultimately to a minor waterfall further up the mountain. Where the small river flows in a rapid after the fall, it snakes a bit around an outcropping of rock where you can stand and overlook the rush of water as it comes straight at you, then turns sharply twenty feet below. You can feel the drastic temperature change as you enjoy the cold mountain water mist--bliss on a hot day like that one.

I spent a good portion of the following days enjoying the company of transplanted-from-the-east family and the ubiquitous cafes that seem to make up all of Washington. I had found a productive atmosphere in which to work for the first time since Utah, but after a few days of Washington--as well as a day-trip to Portland, Oregon--I was beginning to feel the urge to move on and continue. I hadn't exactly planned the west coast leg of my trip as much as I had liked, and therefore this promised to be the most spur-of-the-moment portion of my journey.

Montana - Missoula

“‘Montana’s my home now—Missoula. You come up there sometime and see God’s country’” (17).

"... I took a walk down by the Mississippi River and watched the logs that came floating from Montana in the north—grand Odyssean logs of our continental dream….The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis.” (95)

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Kerouac didn't go as far north as Montana in On the Road, but I was curious to see how beautiful the state is--and it is beautiful. In the East when I've heard something about Montana it was typically derogatory or a reference to how 'nowhere' it is. I can understand dismissing it as a conservative state, but if anyone ever tells you it's a waste of space or something similar, then all I can say is that they are, frankly, full of shit.

I arrived in Missoula late at night and noticed a chill in the air, which I welcomed after the afternoon heat of Utah and Idaho. I came to the home of an awesome individual who offered a place for me to stay before I headed west over to Seattle. The next day I spent a few hours digging Missoula in all its eclectic and surprisingly hip glory, diversity and culture which the city can probably thank the University of Montana for. Friendly people, a busy yet uncrowded city, and a cool summer day gave me a phenomenal impression of the city and of Montana as a whole. I continued west on 90 and stopped at a massive used bookstore in some mountain town, but left with nothing save good pictures. I enjoyed my brief time in rugged Montana, and I understand why some people like "cowboy" in On the Road can consider it God's country.

Utah - Park City, Salt Lake City, Arches, Moab

"... and at dusk were in the Salt Lake flats with the lights of Salt Lake City infinitesimally glimmering almost a hundred miles across the mirage of the flats, twice showing, above and below the curve of the earth, one clear, one dim” (199).

“I sat back and enjoyed nightfall on the desert and waited for poorchild Angel Dean to wake up again. We were on a hill overlooking Salt Lake City’s neat patterns of light and he opened his eyes to the place in this spectral world where he was born, unnamed and bedraggled, years ago” (199).

"... arriving at Salt Lake City at dawn—a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born ..." (54).

"As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, ‘Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven.’” (171)

“We had spent almost the entire night crawling cautiously over Strawberry Pass in Utah …” (200).

(on my way to the Moab)

(The Colorado River, Utah)

(peering above the road to Arches national park)

(Delicate Arch, in Arches national park)

(On my way through Utah, I forget where I was heading)

(in Park City, UT)

(Park City, UT)

(a dust devil)

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Utah was another hard time on this trip--at least the beginning of the state was. My car had a problem, but I'll skip the details and say that I was in the middle of nowhere when I had some trouble--or what I thought was trouble, but turned out to be nothing, despite the dramatic alarmism I received when I called mechanics asking what might be wrong. I called triple-A and was towed over 130 miles to Park City, Utah, where I had a place lined up to stay. This was late saturday night, however, and the people I was going to stay with weren't going to be around until Sunday night sometime, thus I had a day to spend on my own, without transportation. He dropped me off in an inconspicuous section of a walmart parking lot, where I would spend my Sunday.

I thought that after my ordeal in Indiana, I could deal with anything. So I found a way to spend my time, drifting from big-chain retailer to retailer, loitering in various cafes, and constantly walking around the concrete purgatory I found myself in as the surprisingly benign Utah sun pulsed in the cloudless sky. The elevation was probably the reason why I didn't worry about the heat. I even tried (briefly) hitchhiking to Salt Lake City, then I realized I'd have to get a ride back and wasn't sure how likely it was for me to find one when I needed to, given my luck in the state so far. After fifteen minutes nobody picked me up anyway, (I remembered the hitchhiker I regrettably passed by in Nebraska, and I thought of Kerouac saying, "there's your karma, ripe as peaches") so I continued to while away my time--it was strangely relaxing to stay so stationary after previously driving over 1300 miles the day before. A day ago, I had passed through Colorado (twice), New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming, and now I'm spending more time in a parking lot in Utah than I've spent driving through five states. And I thought, "finally, something funny."

But the people I had planned on staying with were sympathetic to my situation and picked me up as soon as they got home; they were an extremely hospitable couple, with a pair of hyper-obedient dogs (one that was the spitting image of the coyote I nearly hit in South Dakota), and I slept like the exhausted traveler turned parking-lot-wanderer I was. The next morning I took my car to a garage and spent the day walking around downtown Park City--aka the "playground of the rich"--while my engine was getting flushed and checked for potential problems. The results were positive, and my car was good to go on (and now I know it has a bottomless appetite for the expensive synthetic oil I've been treating it to). But I stayed in Park City for a few days, joining my hosts as they went to their gratuitously rich friend's house for dinner; a four-million dollar mansion in the heart of Utah's ski country, and I couldn't help thinking that this time last week I was sleeping on the floor of a one-room apartment in Rapid City, South Dakota.

The next day I took a hike in the moab and visited Arches national park. The moab wasn't the sandy wasteland I had anticipated when I thought of the word "desert"--it was a scrubby, high plain soaked in a blood-red landscape thanks to the ubiquitous rusty rocks. Arches park was also a uniquely natural experience, as the hike I took there was more arduous and hotter than I had expected (I severely underestimated the trail, thinking that a trail already laid-out couldn't be that difficult). I did a little climbing in order to get the picture I took of Delicate Arch, and as I was standing up there I noticed the wind was relentless and had been for a while, though I didn't really notice until I was high up with nothing else around me and nowhere to go but down.

The next day I left my hospitable, good-natured hosts and continued on my way, passing through Salt Lake City briefly (just long enough to take the above pictures of the city, actually), then it was up through Idaho and on to Missoula, Montana. One more word on Utah, however; I got the sense that government--particularly the police--are more present here than in any state I've been to. I've heard numerous stories being recounted, both by the people I've stayed with as well as strangers I've chatted with, about the confiscation of alcohol purchased out of state (Utah's alcohol laws are infamously strict and backward), as well as the unbending will of the highway patrol; I was advised not to speed on my way to and through the moab, else I'd be subjected to fines that would cripple my bank account--advice which I followed. Earlier in the week I had purchased two six packs and a bottle of red wine, and my bill came out to $37--double what it would have been in most other states. So I got the sense that big brother is too present in Utah, and aside from that it's a "red" state anyway. However, there are exceptions to the "red" state mentality, as I was fortunate enough to experience in a place I might have otherwise driven through immediately had I not had car trouble.