July, She Will Fly
Shake It Like A Polaroid Picture is playing as we speed out of town, a good omen I’m sure, and Joshua looks over from behind his giant seventies sunglasses and I make my dance face and shake my hand in the blow of the open window. Like a Polaroid Picture. Got it just don’t get it till there’s nothing at all.Jaime is one car back with Sharon shotgun, Sharon up from the Bay Area for a weekend of play, completing our small caravan rolling east on twenty six out past the Portland that I think of as Portlandy, out past the Deluxe Motel and the highway exit Burgerville, out past much of anything except the jam and curios shop where we stop for one giant root beer float, four spoons. We’ve been talking about Our Futures, says Jaime, what about you guys? Joshua and I laugh. We’ve been singing.
On The Road Again and closer and closer to Mount Hood – Mount Hood that looms and grows until it disappears behind the trees, and before you realize it you are winding up its sharp cone on a narrow road edged by a steep drop. Joshua hugs the center line and I sit back and soak in the view. No use panicking when you’re the passenger. The road switches back and back again a dozen times, through Government Camp and on up into clouds, and there is Timberline Lodge, straight from the Shining.
We poke around the main hall like a pack of designers, look at those beams, did you see the cast iron? and picnic on the porch looking out over the forest. Hikers and wedding parties and die-hard July skiers congregate in the parking lot. But we’re headed for Tumalo State Park, so this is just lunch. Blue sky and brake lights all the way down.
Somewhere just shy of Madras a car is overheated on the roadside – too much steep now that the Valley has given way to High Desert. Like seven inches from the midday sun. We double back to the only gas station around, an unexpected pump-your-own since we’re passing through a reservation, to fill up and toss a few gallons of water in the hatchback. Back at the stranded car the jugs get poured into a hissing radiator while we jump into the river. Just enough trees off the highway so we don’t need suits.
Camping at last, we set up Jaime’s dad’s boyscout tent, the two-toned canvas kind with fifteen pounds of frame, and unload the coolers and the grill. Here goes three days of desert: tubing down the Deschutes, mixing up verses of Townes Van Zandt, hatcheting kindling, reapplying sunscreen. Poker and frisbee and dusty dry wind. Potatoes and onions in a cast iron pan. Summer brew, cocoa. Burritos of course. Catching up on Sharon.
Saturday night I trade the camaraderie of the tent for the silence of the sky, and I wake up every hour, time-lapse style, to track the almost-full moon: up and then down again in the column of stars between two pines. It’s huge and hugely bright and I listen hard for some secret, but all I can get is What do you want from me? I’m the moon. It’s Enough.
One last morning and Joshua and Jaime and I send the others hiking and head ourselves down south through Lava Butte to the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, a drivable park friendly to the limping, up Paulina Peak with a view of all directions: the line where the trees meet the desert, the big blue craters of Paulina and East Lakes, the obsidian fields where the lava went next, the Sisters and Hood and Bachelor to the west. Here’s the landscape of a great state from one single spot, what it is and how it was made, geologic time and Indian Paintbrush. You must remember this. Not a word from any of it. There it is, Enough.
posted by tortaluga @ 11:34 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home