July 2008
I was sitting against a concrete wall outside Starbucks in a strip-mall along Highway 99 in north Seattle, a place that could have been absolutely anywhere and the sort I typically avoid. I was there because Car Toys was installing a stereo in my new Yaris, and they said it would take three hours. What I was supposed to do on Highway 99 for three hours was beyond me. I had a tolerable dinner at Ivar's and a cup of coffee at Starbucks and was reading Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen to the noise of the traffic. The day was muggy but cooling in the still relatively warm (for Seattle) breeze, and the fact was I felt pretty nice. The physical workout from my yard sale that afternoon was one reason. Another was the pleasant temperature. But I had to admit that sitting outside a strip mall along Highway 99 was part of it too, giving me a sense of detachment that comes from being somewhere that could be absolutely anywhere, even though it was just a few miles from home.
The fact was my entire existence now had a quality of detachment that I really didn’t mind, even seemed to benefit from. "Feeling kind of exempt"*: that's the line I was looking for. I’d quit my job, was moving out of my apartment, and hitting the road for what I was hoping would be a 15-month tour of the mountains and deserts of the western United States.
I quit my job because I could. Single, no kids, no debt, no real responsibilities, I had grown bored with my job, not bored in the sense that I didn’t find it interesting, bored in the sense that my soul began screaming in pain as I sat for hours at a time in a dim cubicle staring at an outmoded monitor, ostensibly reviewing numbers on an archaic computer program. As I say, I quit because I could.
I had done a lot of hiking in the Pacific Northwest over the previous 14 years and was chafing to expand my range. A two-week vacation could get me into British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies, and down to Oregon and the south Cascades, but I was lusting over photos of the Colorado Plateau, Sedona, Antelope Canyon. I had never been to Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Grand Canyon. Basically I had never been anywhere and I decided that this was the time to go. How much longer would I be able to hike as strenuously as I wanted to?
Once I decided that I would do it, I came up with a grand itinerary in about fifteen minutes. It was rudimentary but had the beauty of simplicity. I would head south from Seattle into California in early summer, see the southernmost Cascades of Lassen and Shasta, then spend the bulk of the summer in the Sierras. When the weather pushed me out of the mountains I would head into the desert and winter in southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. In spring I would explore the Colorado Plateau and spend the second summer in the Rockies until weather once again drove me out, at which time I would return to the Pacific Northwest and…
…well, I wasn’t sure what I would do then. Ideally, fifteen months out in the country would inspire me to a new life move, though the fatalist in me told acquaintances that they would find me on a street corner near them and please could they give generously. The truth was I was focusing on my trip and paying no attention at all to what would come next for what would by then be a grizzled 55-year old unemployed bookseller even more removed from modern life than he was when he left.
Reality was shaking me some. I was confronting the new technology. I needed to study my new car manual. I was switching to a digital camera for my trip and had to figure out how that worked. My new (also first) cell phone had not yet arrived and may or may not have been shipped. I was used to the imperial unresponsiveness of the old phone service. The new phone service was bright and cheery and shockingly amateurish. Root canal is old fashioned though, and my dental insurance was already exhausted for the year. Glad I saved $1000 on my car, as all that and more went into my mouth.
Not to mention the fires this time. The worst lightning storm in California's recorded history struck two weeks before I was scheduled to take off. In less than a day, an electrical storm unleashed nearly 8,000 lightning strikes that set more than 800 wildfires across northern California. Yosemite National Park had an air quality alert. Lassen National Park remained open despite thick smoke and falling ash. Road closures and evacuation orders prevailed in Shasta, Butte, and Trinity Counties.
“This doesn’t bode well for the fire season’, said Ken Clark, a meteorologist in Southern California and AccuWeather.com. ’We’re not even into the meat of the fire season at this point, and the brush is extremely dry. It’s not going to get any better, it’s going to get worse.”
I postponed my departure for a week, not because of the fires but because I couldn’t empty my apartment in time. For a single guy in a one bedroom apartment, I had an awful lot of stuff. Part of the problem was my apartment came with a generous storage compartment, which saved me from having to get rid of everything when I moved there from a three bedroom house 15 years earlier following my divorce. So here I was unearthing wedding gifts I hadn't sold in THAT garage sale.
And then there were books. I had been been a buyer in a bookstore for the past nine years and had accumulated a million books. I actually got rid of a million books and somehow still had a million books. It seemed I could get rid of another million and continue to have a million.
The heart of my packing was to divide things into three categories: 1) dispose 2) store somewhere and 3) bring along for the ride. Deciding to store or dispose required figuring where and how, while deciding to bring along meant only that, though whether it would all fit in my car would have to wait until I actually tried to pack. And the answer to that proved to be yeah but not very smoothly or intelligently. As my packing became more baroque - I marked one box "floor behind driver's seat" - I had visions of the people traveling the Oregon Trail and jettisoning the possessions they once thought of as "valuables” as they realized survival was their only remaining value. I suppose some people got to Sacramento or Willamette with their wardrobe in one piece. We just don't hear about them.
The delay did serve to let the fire situation unfold. I considered realigning my itinerary: going to the Rockies first and saving California for the following summer, as it looked possible that this just happened to be the summer not to hike in California. I resisted this plan in part because it would result in a lot more driving, but more because it would spoil the elegance of my magical U. I decided I would drive down to northern California and take a closer look. If it was bad enough I could circumvent the fires via Nevada and try California again further to the south. I took a crash course on the hiking in Nevada just in case.
July 7 was my birthday and I was feeling very sad and exhausted. The latter contributed to the former for sure. The preparations had been hellish and I frequently felt defeated, but I persevered and prevailed. I attributed this to the underlying excitement and buried prospects kicking up hope from below, even as the weight pushed them too far down for me to actually feel.
I finally left Seattle on July 9th at about 4:30 in the afternoon, driving down I-5 into the teeth of rush hour. Once I got past Tacoma the freeway was smooth sailing and I got to the turnoff for the Columbia Gorge and promptly made my first tactical error, taking the highway along the Washington side rather than the freeway along the Oregon side. My choice was in line with my goals for the trip - rural highway rather than intense interstate, but in this instance it meant a lot of ups and downs and no public campgrounds for quite a while. I finally got to Beacon Rock Stat Park around 9:30PM, grabbed the first campsite I saw, set up quickly, and had a very pleasant night. I spent several hours the next morning reorganizing my very, very (seriously, absurdly) over-loaded Yaris. I didn't shed significant weight, and my clearance remained that of a low-rider, but at least I put things where I might find them and got myself better visibility than I had on I-5.
So on July 10, 11:30AM, on the Oregon side of the Columbia River in the shadow (but not wind screen) of the Bridge of the Gods, it was a new day. And as the great Van Morrison once sang, "Let the healing begin."
* Un-American Blues Activity Dream Richard Fariña
A Note on Dates
Blogger does not provide a simple method of listing posts chronologically, so I had to manipulate posting dates in order to list them the way I wanted. All dates of 2020 reflect this manipulation and should be ignored. The 2008-2009 dates are close estimates of the actual events. Historians, biographers, private investigators, law enforcement officers, et al will need to conduct more extensive investigation if they wish to determine the precise dates.
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