"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
The Shangri-La Spa in Ashland, Oregon. Kate or Thom spotted this place Sunday, on our way up to Eugene. Kate and I stopped for lunch on our way south and happened to pass it again. As to the advertised servicies: I know what massage is. But ear candling? Foot detox? You have nothing to lose but your skepticism, and your cash.
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Just south of Red Bluff, about 11:30 this morning, northbound on Interstate 5: Thom, who was riding in the front of the van, pointed out a bird and said he thought it was a bald eagle. I looked up and spotted a turkey vulture. Nope, not an eagle. But the bird he was pointing to was flying roughly at our level over a little arroyo within about half a mile of the Sacramento River. We were going 70 mph, but somehow Thom managed to switch his camera on, get the bird in the viewfinder and shoot. It’s not a terriibly crisp frame, but it’s still astounding to me.
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As mentioned in a road-addled state earlier this week, I drove up to Eugene on Monday, then drove right back. Not that it was a world-class ironman stunt or anything, but still: 512 miles up there, 512 miles back. We were actually rolling at 9:14 a.m. (projected start: “8 o’clock at the latest”), and we pulled into Thom’s driveway near the University of Oregon at 5:37; that was with one fairly long stop (40 minutes) in Ashland gas up and then sit down and have lunch (Pangea; wraps highly recommended). I got another tank of gas in Eugene and was driving south again at 6:12 p.m. There was no traffic to speak of all the way south, but it started to rain when I got about halfway down the Sacramento Valley. It started to rain, and I started to get tired. Along the way, I experimented with some night-time windshield pictures. The one above is from southwestern Oregon, north of Glendale, Grants Pass and Medford (as the road sign indicates several times). The one below is from Interstate 80 in Vacaville, just after leaving i-505. Things were starting to look a little fractured at that point.
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Monday into Tuesday: Drove up to Eugene (to take Thom back up to school) and back (to be in time for my first day of school). Full moon tonight. Overworked word: magical. But the moonlight on the mountains up north was just that, magical. Going over one of the higher passes, a meteor came down nearly directly in from of me in a long, green, sparking arc. Then, on the way down the grade to Yreka, I could see the clouds around Mount Shasta had cleared. I pulled off to the vista point that commands the view of the high valleys sweeping south to the mountain and tried a couple time exposures (not perfect because it was very windy and cold and I had to try to hold the camera steady on top of a railing). A couple of them turned out OK.
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I see on the Western States Ride Calendar that there’s a 200-kilometer (125-American Distance Unit) brevet in southern Utah on December 1. It’s a great fantasy: driving out there across central Nevada, maybe doing a little riding along the way, then riding in that beautiful red rock landscape. But it’s a long way to go for a bike ride, especially having driven up to Coeur d’Alene in October. And besides, I’d never get away with it. December 1 is my wedding anniversary.
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Sitting in Terminal 3, Concourse L, waiting for my American Airlines flight back to San Francisco. Mission accomplished, mostly. My dad’s out of his rehab hospital, safely ensconced back in his North Side apartment (thanks to the heroic efforts of my sister Ann and brother-in-law Dan). Wish I was staying longer or lived much closer so that my visits didn’t require absenting myself from the rest of my life. And I wish I could have gotten out of town without starting a family fight, taking my dad’s keys with me, and forgetting my camera.
So, just about to board the plane. Flying in the economy cabin, which is really the “you’ll take whatever we dish out” Greyhound section of the plane. Fine. I did manage a moment of first-class treatment coming and going.
Flying out of San Francisco, I was very late getting to the airport. The person who checked in my baggage directed me to get in the nearest line through the security checkpoint. She actually said “hurry!” Densely, all I noted when I first got in line was that it was a lot shorter than the other one I could see. “Why don’t some of those people come over here?” I wondered. Then I saw a big sign that I had missed: VIP/First Class Security Check, or something like that. I thought for a millisecond, just out of a sense of heeding the ordained order of things, about getting out of the line and going to the one for serfs, helots and general unfortunates. But I stayed put. I figured I’d tell the TSA officer checking boarding passes and IDs that I’d been told to hustle my way to the gate and that I needed to be in this line.
And, after rehearsal, that’s the short speech I gave. I girded for a scowl or raised eyebrow. Instead, I got a smile. “I don’t care,” the officer said. “Just have a good trip.”
Wow.
So fast-forward to this afternoon. I was in a long security line in the American terminal, and for some reason one of the carrier’s line minders asked to see my boarding pass. I showed it to her, and she said, “Sir, please go down there and go through that line.” “Why?” I asked, with more than a trace of suspicion, bordering on resistance. “It’s closer to your gate,” she said.
So I went down the terminal a ways and stood in the next line, which was much, much shorter. “Thanks, line minder,” I thought to myself.
Then a woman behind me began complaining about O’Hare and all the long lines and about what a nightmare it would be if she had been traveling “without status.” It was then I noticed the sign that said I was standing in the line reserved for elite passengers. No wonder it was short.
But glancing around, I realized the TSA people inspecting documents weren’t looking to see whether any non-million-mile flyers were trying to sneak through. So I stayed in the line and avoided a good 30- or 45-minute wait with the serfs, helots, etc.
Which all goes to show — what, exactly? Don’t put too much stock in those VIP signs. And if you want to enjoy VIP perks without the headaches of actually being a VIP — paparazzi, congressional inquiries, rehab and the like — I highly recommend the special security check-in line. (Meantime, back in serfworld, American has just announced our flight is delayed indefinitely.)
On a railroad siding just north of Gazelle, California (a hamlet northwest of Weed and Mount Shasta). Interesting combination of amateur and expert spraypaint use; and if you click on the image, check out the face at the bottom center of the display; I assume it was stenciled, but it’s a pretty nice rendering, at least from a distance.
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Made it back to Berkeley tonight after a perhaps overly ambitious five-day trip up to northern Idaho and back. Total mileage: 2,195. That’s a lot, actually. More details on all that later, perhaps.
In the meantime: On the way south, I had an impulse to get off I-5 south of Yreka to take a couple pictures of Mount Shasta from an overpass. Then I headed down old U.S. 99, which parallels the freeway on the west, and came to the townlet of Gazelle.The pink-painted commercial building on the east side of the road prompted me to stop. According to a couple of local histories, the building was originally part of the Denny-Bar Company, a chain of stores started by three brothers in Callahan, a mining town in the mountains west of Gazelle. One of the histories, “The State of Jefferson,” includes a period picture of the building before the arcade was built onto the front; the date at the peak of the false-front gable is 1898, the same as the modern metal numbers affixed to the same location today. Most of the original details are still visible, though the only evidence the place has ever done business is a Holsum Bread sign painted on the north wall.
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I know one thing about Coeur D’Alene that I didn’t know yesterday when I left home: It’s 1,000 miles from Berkeley, almost exactly. I had broken the trip down into increments — 510 miles to Eugene, another 110 or so to Portland, and then a big jump of 380 to this place — so the enormity of the undertaking didn’t really hit me. Now that we (Pete and I) are here and now that we’ve eaten at the conveniently located Outback Steakhouse, our plan is to get up early and do a 112-mile bike ride. The course is the one used by the Ironman event held here each year in June; Pete’s signed up to do it in 2008, and he wants to get an idea of what the terrain is like. I’m just tagging along — no triathlons in my future that I know of.
Anyway, the drive up from Portland featured more spectacular Western landscape. Today’s drive started east on Interstate 84, up through the Columbia River Gorge and past the Bonneville, Dalles and John Day dams. The gorge is monumental and ought to be seen at less than 70 mph. A good 125 miles east of Portland the highway leaves the immediate riverside and you finally get a look at what lies beyond the edge of the gorge. Unlike the wet, green country around Portland, this is the dry West. But undulating and mountainous, in the distance, and beautiful.
Before we turned north across the Columbia, we saw what I took to be some artificially built mounds in the distance. Ahead of us on our right, there was a massive stand of trees. A massive tree farm, actually. And it went on and on for miles. The mounds in the distance were actually farmed forests. The trees looked familiar but unfamiliar — a kind of poplar, maybe. Pete saw a couple of signs, one naming the trees in as "Pacific albus" planted in 1999 and the outfit growing them as the GreenWood Tree Farm.
It’s not clear to me how much land they have planted out there — I’ve seen references that range from 6,000 to 35,000 acres. It’s a big expanse. Checking online, I see that GreenWood has developed Pacific albus, a poplar hybrid, as a source of commercial hardwood and has a deal with another Northwest forest products company to build a sawmill near the tree farm we passed. You could say lots about this kind of farming: that it’s a result of so much of the wild old forests in the region being cut down; that it spares wild forests, if any, from being cut down; that it’s a really smart way to answer a demand that’s only growing. I still have to say, though, it was odd to see these immense stands of trees so clearly meant for nothing other than cutting and milling.
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Interstate 5, north of Medford, Oregon. Drove up to Eugene today, on my way to Portland, where I’ll pick up my friend Pete to go up to ride our bikes in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on Saturday. More on that later. The sky was beautiful the whole trip, though it started to rain off and on just south of Mount Shasta for the rest of the way north. Lots of opportunities for windshield photography. (I insist: It’s not as distracting as cellphones or torch-juggling. Perfectly safe.)
In Eugene, Thom and I went out for dinner, then went back to his house. Isaac, one of his roommates, was surfing YouTube for musical treasures. Here’s a pretty amazing one: a guy dong an acoustic cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” I mean, I liked the original. But I didn’t realize the thing actually had lyrics, and I never imagined it might work as, gulp, a sensitive ballot. Check it out.
And last: The place we went for dinner had the second Cubs-Diamondbacks game on. Damn. That’s all there is to say about that.
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