Old Bones

Notes from Margo:

After three days of being feted, fed and generally treated like royalty by the Salt Lake Ludlows (Joy and Conrad Unit), we knew we’d have to readjust to roughing it. But there are compensations.

Let’s start with the sandhill cranes. And then we’ll talk about the huge uptilted rock formations that have changed colors steadily for the past few hours as the sun dipped down – from a daytime sandy off-white to a strange yellowish-orange at sunset on one side of our campsite, and from a dusky red to a brilliant terra cotta in the other direction.

We’re in Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border. As we approached, looking to see some dinosaur bones at the visitor center, we drove by a freshly mown field of corn – and saw what appeared to be herons, dozens of them, on the field. I asked at the visitors center, because I’ve never seen herons standing anywhere other than in water. Sandhill cranes!

So, before checking out the bones that have been there for eons, and will certainly still be there tomorrow, we headed back to the cornfield. Cranes, almost 100 of them. Through binoculars, we could see their bright red heads and regal high-stepping moves. Then a group took flight. (The group is called a construction of cranes, or a dance of cranes, or a sedge or a swoop of cranes. I love my birdbook.)

Watching them fly with their long slender necks stretched way out in front, and the gorgeous slow flapping of their wings (wingspans can reach 90 inches), well, I was beside myself. Lynn was laughing. He said he thought I was going to pee in my pants. But really! I don’t think I ever thought I’d see sandhill cranes. They migrate from the Arctic through the middle of the continent, so they just don’t show up on the California coast. And that was just the first bonus of the day.

We drove on to our campsite, which must be one of the more beautiful places to sleep in the western United States. We’re at the Green River, next to Split Mountain, which is just what it sounds like – a mountain with a river splitting right through it. Lynn and I were trying to describe the rock formations to each other: Take a Rothko painting, enlarge it 1,000 times, tilt it about 25 degrees and then drive your car through it. Or take an enormous wedding cake with dozens of layers, and knock it off the table, so the layers slip off one another, leaving jagged frosting on top. And then the sun started going down, and the colors started shifting in those jagged layers.

Yesterday, and the two days before, we were in Salt Lake City visiting Conrad and Joy, Lynn’s brother and sister-in-law. Conrad, for 20 years a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, is still teaching ballet as a professor of dance at the University of Utah. He is 74. He’ll retire next June, and let’s say he’s earned a bit of a rest. (That's him, shucking oysters, at right.)

And Joy! Where to begin? She’s a former dancer with the NYCB, where she met Conrad. Her dinner menus made us feel like we had suddenly been mistaken for the Duke and Duchess of the Traveling Minivan. Trout almondine, garlicky spinach soup, heirloom tomato and fresh watercress salad. Babyback ribs with spicy Chinese barbecue sauce, onion rings, roasted baby purple potatoes, fresh corn on the cob. Chicken baked in grits, roasted carrots in dill, broccoli and onion soup. Every time we opened the front door, a delicious aroma welcomed us into the house. I kept telling Conrad what a lucky man he is. And I kept thinking, “If I lived here, I would be waddling around, weighing about 300 pounds.” I couldn’t restrain myself around all that incredible food. (That's Joy, at left.)

Guests for dinner one night were neighbors, a young couple from Romania, an engineer and his wife, a doctor, both working at the university. Really interesting conversation about Romanian politics vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

Lynn's granddaughters and his great-granddaughter also visited us. (More on this from Lynn, below.)

Notable: The birdbook says that a fossil about 10 million years old that is structurally identical to the sandhill crane, making it the oldest know bird species. So how cool is that, that we saw the cranes near the Dinosaur National Monument?

Notes from Lynn:

Mary Ellen Miner is a former math teacher in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her specialty was helping kids with learning disabilities. After she and her attorney husband retired, they put on the khaki uniform of volunteers with the National Park Service. That’s why this knowledgeable, outgoing and very patient guide was helping me with my learning disability regarding dinosaur bones.

With Margo and two other tourists, I stumbled up a canyon in the Dinosaur National Monument and marveled at the riot of color in crooked layers of shale gray, purple, yellowish red and dark brown. The guidebook has a name for this banded pattern of the Morrison Formation: Neopolitan ice cream. Mrs. Miner took us past fossilized plants, fish parts (hard to see without a graduate course in paleontology) and the gleaming edge of a dinosaur’s femur that protrudes through the gray wall of the cliff. (At left, Margo takes a look at the femur.) The poor beast was buried about 150 million years ago, we were told by the math teacher, give or take a few million.

I tried to make a joke about my own life in a dinosaur park, the newspaper business. Not a laughing matter. Will someone in the future establish a National Newspaper Monument to display the corporate fossils who were buried in the mud of the Internet epoch along with the daily papers?

During our too-brief visit in Salt Lake, we greeted my beautiful granddaughters and my ultra-beautiful great-granddaughter, Elliot. She’s almost 2 and, according to her mom, intelligent and a bit feisty. Jenna Lynn Ludlow (at right) is working for a high-end clothing store. Her smile is just as lovely as her sister's, but we caught her in a pensive moment. Lauren (at left), is working for Overstock.com. Both young women want to emigrate to the Bay Area some day.

Here are snapshots of Elliot (and her pensive mom).


Mileage from Salt Lake City to Dinosaur National Monument: 188

Total mileage: 2,935

The Indian Hater

Notes from Lynn:

After 132 years of Montana weather, the inscription is almost illegible. The tombstone is planted among the Mitchells, Hulls and Schwabs, just a few feet from my mother, in the Corvallis Cemetery. It marks the grave of my 19th century relative, C.L. Mitchell. He died a violent death when he was only 28 years old, unmarried, handsome, energetic and enraged, we are told, by hatred. Chiseled at the bottom of the stone is a lugubrious prophecy chosen by his grieving family as a kindly threat to the living.

Remember friends as you pass by
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now now so you must be.
Prepare for death and follow me.

* * *

Patches of early-season snow greeted us when dawn came to the May Creek Campground which, left open by the U.S. Forest Service, is only a few miles on State Highway 43 from the Big Hole National Battlefield (at left) in southwestern Montana. It was warmer in the Visitor Center, which overlooks the bloody ground of 1877. Tipi frames mark the encampment where the 7th Infantry surprised 800 sleeping Nez Perce Indians, indiscrimately killing 60 women and children and burning the tipis with families inside. But across the Big Hole River are the rifle pits and trenches where the same soldiers, who broke and ran from the infuriated warriors, spent 24 hours besieged and helpless in fear of another Custer massacre.

Bitterroot is named for a pink flower, Lewisa rediva, but as metaphor it evokes the story of young Campbell L. Mitchell. My branch of my maternal grandmother's family had emigrated by wagon in the 1860s from Missouri to the fertile Bitterroot Valley. By 1877 the Army had just expelled all but a few of the Flathead (Salish) Indians from their historic homeland. Then came panic among the white settlers. Desperate bands of the Nez Perce nation, its reservation cut by 90 percent in eastern Washington and the midsection of Idaho, were coming across the Bitterroot Mountains. In flight from battles that had humiliated the Army, the Nez Perce were headed for the Canadian border.

Campbell Mitchell, said to be an ardent Indian-hater, had been frustrated. Chief Joseph declined to fight. His warriors, families, baggage and 2,000 horses avoided the armed settlers packed into in a Lolo Pass redoubt (later called Fort Fizzle) and Stevensville’s Fort Owen (immediately called Fort Skedaddle). Col. John Gibbon’s 163-man infantry force soon showed up. In pursuit of the Nez Perce down the Bitterroot Valley and over the Beaverhead Mountains, the troops were joined by 34 civilians. They included Camp Mitchell, my great-great-great uncle, and others of my ancestral relations – five Chaffins, one Hull and two more Mitchells. Gibbon's pursuers caught up with the Indians on the early morning of August 9. In the Nez Perce camp the war chief, Looking Glass, had failed to post sentries.

Forming a skirmish line about 200 yards from the tipis, the soldiers waited for sunrise. An Indian named Natalekin got up to check on unusual sounds from the horse herd. An impatient volunteer shot him dead – and alerted the camp. The shooter, we are told, was Campbell Mitchell (above).

The troops and volunteers stormed across the shallows, shooting low (to hit the sleepers) and burning tipis with children trapped inside. Looking Glass and others organized the warriors, described later as the most effective fighters in western history, to mount a counterattack. The soldiers were forced back across the river, where they were pinned down for a day – long enough to allow the surviving Nez Perce to escape. About 30 warriors were killed. Col. Gibbon’s force was crippled with 29 dead (two others later died) and 39 others wounded, including the colonel himself. Five volunteers were killed. Gibbon and the Army called the defeat a victory. Gibbonsville (see below) was named for him. Seven soldiers received Medals of Honor.

More bluecoats marched into the battlefield the next day. Under Col. Nelson Miles, the new unit defeated the remnants of Chief Joseph’s fighters in another bloody battle on September 30 at Bear Paw. It was only 40 miles from the border. The Nez Perce surrendered.

Campbell Mitchell didn’t go to Bear Paw. For what happened to him, we are indebted to Aubrey Alan Haines and his book published in 2007 by The Globe Pequot Press, “The Battle of the Big Hole.” Haines quotes volunteer Tom Sherill, whose 1916 memoir was written by A.J. Noyes and filed with the Montana Historical Society. Sherill told Noyes, “He (Mitchell) was killed among the lodges near the upper part of the Indian camp. He was lying face down, his arms stretched out full length, with five wounds in his back, stripped of all his clothes.”

Haines also writes that Yellow Wolf, quoted years later in a Caxton Printers book by L.V. McWhorter, said the wounded volunteer had been led past a tipi when shot dead by an angry Indian named Otskai. Yellow Wolf remembered Otskai shouting, “Look around! These babies, these children killed! These young girls, these young women you see dead! Were they warriors? These young boys, these old men. Were they warriors? … Why should we waste time saving his life?”

A different version, according to Haines, comes from Nez Perce refugees interviewed in 1879 in Canada by Duncan MacDonald. “Looking Glass ordered the warriors not to kill him, saying he was a citizen, and they might obtain information from him… (A) woman had who had lost her brother and some of her children came up. She was crying at the time, and on seeing the citizen slapped him in the face. On receiving the blow he instantly gave her a vigorous kick with his foot. He had had no more than kicked her when some of the warriors killed him.”

Campbell Mitchell was reburied in Corvallis Cemetery.

Notes from Margo:

The ride from Battle of the Big Hole to Salt Lake City was two days of amazing geology and scenery down the Salmon River canyon – huge red-rock formations and cuts through layers and layers of different colors of sandstone. You would think of the Southwest, except that the highway followed a lovely river, running wide and shallow, which occasionally opened up into fertile bottomlands with horses, cattle, sheep and llamas grazing sleepily. And in the distance rose jagged, snow-dusted peaks.

We slept in the Guppy two nights running at campgrounds with snow on the ground – one near the Battle of the Big Hole, the second at Craters of the Moon. The snow was just in patches, but it was enough to make us nervous about winter coming on, and plenty enough to make it so we weren't really camping. We didn't use our campstove to cook dinner in the evening or make coffee in the morning. We just looked at the snow, and headed out for the nearest cafe or espresso bar. Both mornings, we drove for a long time before coffee appeared. There just weren't any towns big enough to have coffee perking for the few travelers who might be driving down Highway 93 on a fall morning.

We stopped at Gibbonsville, named for Col. Gibbon, just as we passed into Idaho from Montana. In the 1890s, it was a booming mining town and girlhood home of Lillian Hull Schwab, Melda Schwab Ludlow's mother and Lynn's maternal grandmother. Now it's a creek hollow with a string of houses, many of them looking a bit wearworn. Some appear to be log cabins that have been repaired and added on to over the years, and are still habitable. Some were newer structures, some were mobile homes. No businesses of any kind seem to have survived. But the historical marker said that back in the day, there were at least two banks, six to eight saloons, sawmills, a newspaper, the whole works. Melda once told Conrad, her son, that Gibbonsville was also the loneliest place in the West.

On that drive, maybe 150 miles, we saw numerous log cabins. Some were caving in or falling down. But some were clearly still in use, having been updated over the years with modern windows, or more rooms added on. We saw some that were being used for livestock shelter, some being used as outbuildings for newer homes – an interesting note that they are still useful all these years later. Solid structures, I guess. There is also a booming business in new log cabins, but they have a totally different look, with newer, yellowish logs, and big, modern layouts. But that's a different kettle of fish.

That scenic, one-day drive for us was most likely the cutoff from the Oregon Trail that Lynn's forebears took when they immigrated to Montana from Missouri in wagons during the 1860s and later. How would they have managed this pass or the next, and where would they have settled their stock during the nights?

As the sun went down on jagged, snowy peaks in the distance, we closed in our goal, Craters of the Moon National Monument. We had been cold enough the night before that we decided to eat dinner at the nearest town, stay in the restaurant for a hour or so after dark, and then make camp late enough so we could just go to bed. Once we're in bed, we're warm; it's just the time in camp before bed that can be uncomfortable. The nearest town was Arco, “The Atomic City,” the first town in America to be lighted with nuclear power. And so we went to Pickle's Place, "Home of the Atomic Burger." As far as atomic burgers go, dinner was fine. And we stayed warm even though there was snow on the ground at our campsite.

We toured Craters of the Moon the next day, with its amazing variety of lava flows, volcanic formations, lava rocks, lava tubes, the works. It looked like it would probably have been more impressive in the summer, when it would have been infernally hot. But it was pretty impressive anyway, in the bitter cold of the rocky, coffee-less morning.


Notable:

Two bald eagles flew over us on the drive down the Salmon River. I saw the first when we were still quite a ways away, and was thinking, “Man!! That is a big *?*~** hawk!!” As we got closer, I saw the flashing white head. I shouted: “Bald eagle! Bald eagle!!” And of course, Lynn, being such a stickler for safety, was yelling at me to keep my eyes on the road. Jeez!! Yeah, it IS dangerous to birdwatch while you're driving on a winding, two-lane road. But it's not every day that two bald eagles fly over your minivan.


Mileage: from Salmon, Idaho, to Craters of the Moon: 158

From Craters of the Moon to Salt Lake City: 264

Total mileage so far: 2,747

The Montana Ludlow Legacy Tour

Notes from Lynn:

The University of Montana looks as it should: Shady lanes, “Go Griz” sweatshirts, halls of brick, earnest students, “M” whitewashed on the mountainside. As we strolled toward an exhibit of Pulitizer Prize photography, we couldn’t help but reflect on two bright young women who would have walked the same paths 80 years ago. Melda and Cornelia, Cornelia and Melda. They laughed a lot, danced the Charleston, wrote poetry, argued about Scott Fitzgerald, picnicked on the Clark Fork and ignited a friendship that would burn as long as they lived.

They parted after college, rarely to see each other except for all-too-infrequent holiday visits. Cornelia married Hiram Francis and lived the rest of her life on their ranch in the Jocko Valley on the Flathead Reservation lands north of Missoula. She taught English and journalism in Arlee High School and reared Howard, Perry and Emily. Melda married John Ludlow and, after some hard years in the Depression, edited books in Caldwell, Idaho. She moved in World War II to San Francisco. She lived the rest of her life in nearby Mill Valley, at that time something of an artists’ colony, and reared me and my younger brothers, Conrad and Roger.

The two friends were 94 when they died in 2005 within months of each other. In sorting out Melda’s voluminous papers, I found scores of carbon copies of her 70-year correspondence with Cornelia. It chronicles her life in a urban world of writing, music, art and poetry. She had kept stacks of Cornelia’s letters –folksy, literate and acutely amusing. Most describe day-to-day events on the ranch and in her little community. I bundled them up and sent them to the Montana addresses of Emily and Perry (Howard had passed away).
The friendship of the mothers has been reborn for their children, as we discovered when the Guppy left Washington and arrived in the nose of Montana (take a look at a map of the state’s western border with Idaho).

Perry greeted us warmly at his beautiful, well-appointed home in a new upland subdivision south of Missoula. It’s a fast-growing city that has buried its western charm and university identity in chains of fast-food joints, mini-casinos, a billboard on every corner and basic schlock. But Perry’s large windows frame a panorama of the Rocky Mountains and displays of western clouds backlit by the setting sun. Perry’s lovely wife Maria, who comes from Argentina, is responsible for the casual elegance of her home. But she was away. And Perry couldn’t wait to show us the garage. It isn’t tidy. It isn’t elegant. It isn’t up-to-date; in fact, quite the opposite.

Perry, retired from the Bureau of Land Management, showed us a gleaming 1936 Ford sedan, a vision in black and chrome. From the V-8 engine to the mohair upholstery, everything had been restored, renovated and repaired. Then he took us to his next project -- the rusted skeleton and dented bones of a 1953 Triumph, his own sportster convertible in the faraway days of his youth.

Another surprise hit us when we traveled north to Polson to find the home of Cornelia’s gracious daughter, Emily Lennon, who taught the fourth and first grades in Missoula for 37 years, and her husband, Mark, a retired forester for the state. On the southwesterly shore of Flathead Lake, the lakefront house is in my opinion the most wonderful home on the planet. It was a wreck when they bought it in a courthouse auction in 1991, intending the little place as a weekend retreat from their jobs in Missoula. They put as much work and effort into the house as Perry invests in his old cars. Windows open to a view of a lake that is a rival to Tahoe and not half as decorated with neon. Cornelia must have been proud. Melda would have been envious.

Notables:
We paused at St. Ignatius, a onetime Catholic missionary outpost halfway between Missoula and Polson. We needed to drink in the grandeur of the Mission Range (at right), a spectacular spectacle that has somehow been ignored by the travel writers.

Headed at dusk for the Big Hole Battlefield, we ducked into a closed Forest Service campground (May Creek), slept in the van and woke up at dawn to patches of snow. It is a foretaste, we fear, of an early winter that may chill our visits to Boulder, Minnesota, Michigan and points East. Under the quilt we were pretty warm, but the Guppy was an icebox until we turned on the engine and the heater.

Notes from Margo:

We’re in Idaho now, having finished the Montana Ludlow Legacy Tour. We visited the graves of Lynn’s mother, grandfather and a dozen other relatives in a cemetery (at left) with a million-dollar view of the Bitterroot Range. We stopped at the university where Lynn went for two quarters in 1956. We were welcomed by the Francis family, who have known Lynn’s family for three generations now.

Part of my response, as one who grew up mostly in the rural West, is that this is like my stomping grounds in Colorado, only more so. More mountains, more conifer forests, more severe weather, more mining camps, more Indian wars, more trout fishing. But part of my response is to be amazed at Lynn’s roots in this country. His relatives were buried in the Bitterroot starting in the 1870s – the first one to die there was killed at the Battle of Big Hole by Nez Perce Indians – who, of course, had been there thousands of years before then. (More on the battle in our next post.)

I’m a first-generation American on my father’s side, and a second-generation American on my mother’s side. I had no family buried on American soil until 1996. So, I love this territory we’re in, and it feels familiar to me in lots of ways, but I’m conscious right now of how new my family is to this country.

Another subtext for me in the mountains is a continuing consciousness of the trees, as they relate to the lumber I use in my work, and the trees that are the foundation of the dead-tree version of journalism that Lynn and I worked in for so many years. We had the tree plantations of Western Washington, which grow mostly Douglas fir, which is the wood used for most framing, and which I use for most of my indoor projects. And we’re driving through mixed conifer forests now – they’ve been logged for many years for pine, larch, Douglas fir, spruce, the works – lots of woods that I use in my work. I’m just very conscious that this is where all this lumber and pulp comes from, and we should continue to be careful of it.

The canyons we’re traveling through now are all, to varying degrees, showing signs of the pine beetle devastation that’s killing trees all over the West. In some forests, it looks like maybe a quarter of the trees are dead or dying. In others, it’s much less severe, like maybe one in ten trees. But it’s everywhere, and it’ll make the coming fire seasons severe. Mark Lennon, whom we visited with two days ago, worked his entire career in forestry management and fire-fighting. He seemed saddened, and at a loss as to what to do about the pine beetle infestation. The forests are dying, and there is no political will to harvest the beetle-infected wood while it still has some commercial value. The trees die, dry out, and then go up in a conflagration after the next random lightning strike. He summarized the situation: You either manage the forests or they’ll burn. Anyway, it’s something to think about.

Notable:
We read a letter to the editor in the Missoulian newspaper about a fabulous exhibit of Pulitzer Prize photographs at the University of Montana. So, of course, we went. It filled three galleries. It was visually overwhelming, and Lynn actually dropped out at one point. In very stark, large-format black-and-white images, the photos showed one atrocity after another, frozen in time, with the details open to scrutiny. Each one was an important moment, maybe even a summary of some important event of that year. But as a totality, it was gruesome.

There were a few exceptions, like our friend Kim Komenich’s Examiner picture of people who celebrated the fall of Ferdinand Marcos by crowding on a 40-foot statue of the Filipino dictator’s head. Another showed the joy of the women’s Nigerian relay team as they realized they won an Olympic bronze medal in track.

But most of the photos were of starving children, soldiers dying, political assassinations, earthquakes, floods, fires… Pain and suffering, and lots of it. But very beautifully depicted.

Mileage: Missoula to Polson : 70
Polson to Battle of Big Hole: 178
Battle of Big Hole to Salmon, Idaho: 62

Total mileage so far: 2325

Weather this morning: Light snow

Cousin Mark

Notes from Lynn:

He is of two minds – maybe three or more – about his father. Mark Ludlow, my new first cousin, contends that he can’t be angry about a man he can’t remember, the deadbeat who just disappeared without a word and stayed that way. At the same time, he likes saying (like me) that he is of Norwegian descent (from his dad) and (like me) he wears genes that are more German and English than Norski. But he expresses profound regret that he grew up without knowing anything about the responsibilities, obligations and, yes, the joys of fatherhood.

Mark was a toddler 60 years ago when Frederick (Fritz) Ludlow cleaned out the bank account, took the family car (not paid for) and left his wife, Prissie, to rear Mark and his elder sister, Karen. Fritz was the elder brother of my father, John, when they grew up in Eugene and later in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. My father said Fritz and his younger brother, Ernest (Buzz), bullied him so mercilessly that in later life he would have nothing to do with them. With a family reputation of high intelligence, arrogance and dishonesty, Fritz was drafted into the Army in World War II. (Mark says his dad was dishonorably discharged.) He married a beautiful woman, Prissie, and settled down in her home town, Beatice (be-ATT-riss), Nebraska, where he fathered Karen and Mark, ran up unpaid bills and took off.

Mark and Karen grew up without knowing much of anything about Fritz’s family background. At the same time, my brothers and I never knew that we had two first cousins, Karen and Mark. Things would have stayed that way forever but for a note in the genealogical website Ancestry.com, where Karen had posted a note that asked if anyone could supply information about her father, Frederick Braastad Ludlow.

I saw her note two years later while doing research on my father’s family. I wrote to Karen, who came to visit us in San Francisco, but not until now did I meet Mark Elliott Ludlow (his middle name, by eerie coincidence, was chosen by my granddaughter, Jenna Ludlow, for my great-granddaughter, Elliot). (At left, Lynn and Mark.)
With his wife, Patricia, Mark had moved three years ago from Astoria, Oregon, to Olympia, Washington, where he is an engineer involved in one fascinating enterprise after another. He had just returned from Shanghai, and he travels around the world so regularly that he regards his apartment in Lacey, a suburb of Olympia, without affection. Next: Iceland in the dead of winter.
He arrived with armloads of food for the campers from San Francisco. He didn’t spend much time on personal history (three marriages, two divorces, three grown children) but dived instead into conversation about higher education (he’s skeptical about the qualifications of any professor who hasn’t slept under a bridge, as he has) and the future of newspapers (he reads three or more but asserts, with some anger at the bozo publishers who have allowed the daily press to become dinosaurs, that a new model for the serious news media must somehow emerge from the internet). We talked until 2:30 a.m., cousins trying to make up for what is, in a very literal sense, lost time.

We hope to visit Karen next week at her organic farm in northwest Minnesota with the sense that at last we have healed some of the damage inflicted by a father without conscience. But Mark said something that made me realize that the story isn’t done. He found out that Fritz had died in Santa Rosa (I think he said it was in 1965), and that his father may have remarried and started another family after he abandoned the first one. If so, we have another set of long-lost first cousins to track down. I hope the search will produce more treasures.

Notes from Margo:

We expected rain in the rainforest, and we got it – a little. And we expected rain as we crossed the Cascades, and we got a bit there, too. But the first torrential, continuing downpour hit us as we went into the reputedly dry section of Washington – the eastern half. The gentle rolling hills around us were contoured with the burnt gold furrow lines of autumn in dry ranchlands. The cloudscape read differently. Showing rain in the distance, clouds played with us all day with off and on showers, and amazing displays in the sky -- dark blobs and sweeping arcs of light gray. Then around nightfall, as we were looking for our campsite, the deluge hit. We got lost in Pasco. Or was it Kennewick or Richland? In the Tri-Cities region, it was hard to tell. We crossed the Columbia River, then the Snake, then the Snake again. Or was it the Columbia? And then suddenly, in the rainy darkness, we were on a floodlit suspension bridge. The intense light played on the hundreds of silver strands of vertical cables, and for a few minutes we drove through a cathedral of light. The soundtrack would have been a crescendo of coronation music. And then we plunged back into the confusing sleet and darkness of a construction detour off Highway 395 in one (who knows which?) of the Tri-Cities.

Happy ending: We found our campsite, and fell asleep to the sound of beating rain on the roof of our minivan. The rain blew over during the night, leaving us in the morning with a cold, stiff wind over the prairie. We decided to find coffee at a diner rather than brave the wind with our campstove. We drove through a succession of tiny towns, their two-block brick downtowns still fast asleep on Sunday morning. Then we found the Silver Stallion restaurant in Waitsburg, Washington. We didn’t wait. About eight men – most pushing middle age -- with weather-beaten faces, baseball caps, workworn jeans and plaid flannel shirts, sat at a long table, drinking coffee and talking about wheat farming and guns. It was the classic Western men’s breakfast klatch. I felt like we had slipped back in time, and all we needed was a fire buring in a metal barrel on the porch. And bonus! The waitress was friendly and the coffee, hot cakes and eggs were great.

Since we left the western side of the Olympic Peninsula, with its monoculture tree plantations, we’ve seen a succession of mixed conifer forests: in the Cascades and in the Bitterroot Mountains. A hundred shades of green. I didn’t realize I missed them until we met up again. In these forests, at least a dozen different species of fir, spruce and pine are recognizable, as well as a few deciduous trees. And you have trees of all different ages, different heights, different girths. Layers and layers of greens shimmer there, from bright pale green to shamrock green all the way through deep forest green. It’s a markedly different kind of beauty from the rich, consistent shading that goes on for miles in the forests of Weyerhauser.

Notable:
Magpies, by the score. I’ve never seen more than one or two at a time, so I never needed the collective noun. My iPhone’s bird book tells me I’m seeing a charm of magpies, or a mischief of magpies, or maybe a tittering of magpies.

Mileage: From Astoria to Lacey, Washington, to visit Mark: 125 miles

From Lacey to Pasco, Washington: 261 miles

From Pasco to Missoula, Montana: 332 miles

Total mileage: 2,015

Noon temperature in Missoula: 49 degrees F.

Darth Vader Plays the Fiddle

Notes from Lynn:

Travel isn’t just, as they say, broadening. It’s also, as they don’t say, as disjointed as a hip replacement.

In the dark-green dawn Tuesday (Sept. 29), a soft rain bounced BBs on the Guppy’s thin roof. As we woke up in Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula., we looked out to see our moss-embroidered picnic table gleaming wetly at a soggy campsite in the Quinault Rain Forest. It was too damp to fix our own breakfast, so we found a tiny roadside café under redwood-size Douglas firs with green veils of lichen. Oddly, “Goodbye Mrs. Durkin” and other Irish tunes resounded from the kitchen’s CD player. We were still in the USA, damp and trying to count the many shades of green. National Forest fee (half off for seniors): $8.50.

Just 24 hours later, after driving 123 miles, parking the Guppy in Port Angeles and boarding a ferryboat the size of a small town, we woke up in a luxuriously soft bed in the Rose Room of The Cozy Cottage. It’s a bed and breakfast in a very English city, Victoria, which is not in the USA. We sat down to a superb breakfast: Orange juice, eggs over easy, sausage, low-sodium bacon and filigreed hash browns. It wasn’t what the cardiologist would recommend, but who cares? Coffee was poured into delicate cups of bone china decorated with a pattern of white dogwood, the official flower of British Columbia. Shelagh, the owner and sole employee, got up at 5 a.m. to make the scones. She is delightful, bubbling with tips on how to get a glimpse of her home town in just a day. (The Royal Museum of British Columbia, the Legislative Assembly’s domed capitol and walk, walk, walk.) Then she drove us to the museum. The bill: $130 (Canadian, which must be so close to the U.S. dollar at the moment that nobody made a fuss about payment in one or the other).

Disjointed is too weak a word for how we greeted the dawn Thursday, back in the USA and camping in Dosewillips State Park on the east perimeter of the Olympic Peninsula. After returning on the ferry, we drove until dark. It was still dark when we emerged from our cocoon into the autumn chill of a big but empty campground that must have been crowded in July. It was too cold to get out the burner, propane, Melita and Peets Coffee, too chilly even for dry cereal. We got into the minivan and hoped to find coffee on the road. Washington state park’s fee (no senior discount): $21.

I’m certain there is a moral to this tale.

Notes from Margo:

Because we had to return to Astoria to have the car’s sliding door fixed, we had only one day in Victoria, much of which we spent in the amazing Royal Museum of British Columbia. As it turned out, the ferry trip over was also one of the highlights. Tons of birds. Guillemots, murres. I saw a puffin just casually fly by, like it was an everyday thing.

I was watching through my birding binoculars as a black helicopter approached a nearby military ship. All of a sudden, three guys jumped out and rapelled down onto the deck. Talk about unexpected. The helicopter then landed on the ship, and the guys got back in. Then another helicopter did the same maneuver. Never know what you’ll see birding.

Victoria itself is a riot of brilliant flowers, which is the only thing I remembered from my trip when I was a teenager. This time what struck me was the odd juxtaposition of tidy British town with the totem poles and the bold, large-scale, red, white and black artwork of the Haida and other Native peoples. A totem pole guarded the well-groomed lawn of the provincial capitol. In a quilting shop, a number of quilts contained Northwestern Indian designs. A public fountain had several upright slabs that looked vaguely like totem poles. They were covered with tiles that made you think: Native Art. Not surprising, really, that such a beautiful artwork should permeate everything, except that it’s a totally different aesthetic overlaid on this very British town – fish and chips, pubs, very courteous people, tidy houses, tidy narrow streets.

We had just one day there, so in addition to the museum, I wanted to walk around the town. And we ran up against one of the problems of a 52-year-old traveling with a 75-year-old. Lynn just didn’t feel up to it. He has some residual equilibrium issues from his stroke, so his walking pace is quite a bit slower than mine. And he has stenosis in his spine, so his back starts hurting after a pretty short walk. So in Victoria, after some hours of absorbing the amazing exhibits on Vancouver Island’s native people before Europeans arrived, he sunned himself on a bench in front of the museum and read his James Lee Burke mystery book and watched the people parade by while I walked around town. The quilt shop was a highlight. Also – a guy in a Darth Vader suit played the violin for tips.

Some days, like yesterday, present one breath-taking vista after another (we were driving along the Columbia River, returning to Astoria and the car-repair appointment). And after a while, it's just "Ho hum, another fabulous vista." We have to stop and pinch ourselves, and realize that this is what we wanted, and we should really be soaking it up. Yesterday we drove to the very end of the continent, where Lewis and Clark camped at Cape Disappointment. We were disappointed. We intended to camp there, but it was windy, rainy and cold. We came back to Fort Stevens, where we had camped earlier in the week. It was still drizzling, but it wasn’t windy or cold.

It was raining softly while we fixed dinner, so we tried out the little awning that I improvised. There’s still a lot of fine-tuning to be done, but it worked well enough in a light rain with no wind.

Mileage the past two days, Port Angeles to Astoria: 237

Mileage on the ferry, round-trip to Victoria: 52 on the ferryboat Coho

Total mileage (in the Guppy): 1297

Rolling Minivan Gathers No Moss

Notes from Margo:

Change of itinerary: We have to return to Astoria later in the week to have the sliding door of the van repaired, so after several modifications we’ve settled on a circumnavigation of the Olympic Peninsula, north up its west side, a ferry trip from the north end to Victoria, B.C., and then down the east side.

I wanted to see the Olympic rainforest, and we did. It was another of those deals where we drove into a campsite after dark and woke up in an utterly foreign landscape. This time we were not surrounded by whalefish-sized RVs; this time we were dwarfed by moss-covered spruce and fir trees as tall as 30-story office buildings. We were agog at the size of the ferns, in a hundred shades of green. Lace lichen-type moss (that’s probably not the technical term) grew on everything, and – of course – it was raining. Not a steady rain, just on and off pattering of raindrops on the tin roof of our minivan. Enough to convince us that yes, we were in the rainforest. We were by Quinault Lake in a Forest Service campground. It was raining when we woke up, so we just drove up the road a ways and had breakfast in a little diner instead of trying to fix breakfast at our sopping wet, moss-covered picnic table.

Not that we had much of a choice, anyway. Raccoons had pretty much demolished the kitchen our last night at Fort Stevens. We had gotten lazy about packing up the food. We had had no critters at McKenzie Bridge. Our first night at Fort Stevens, the raccoons left us alone. They must have been laying the groundwork for a big kill. We had left the cooler and our food box out, with the cooler weighing down the top of the food box. I woke up in the night, hearing a commotion. My flashlight showed the beady eyes and bandit masks of two raccoons who had retreated to the edge of our clearing after trashing our campsite. I gathered our stuff as well as I could in the dark, and brought it into the van.

In the morning, we assessed the damage. They had tipped over the cooler, which allowed them access to those groceries as well as our food box. They took most of a roasted Safeway chicken, bones and all. The one-pound margarine tub, which we had just opened, was licked completely clean. They ate two boxes of cereal, a box of crackers, and another of graham crackers. They drank or poured out most of a quart of milk. Our only consolation was that the raccoons will be sick to their stomachs. Anyway: Raccoons 1, Victory Lappers 0.

So we had breakfast in a diner while the precipitation alternated between downpour and soft mist. We took a short nature walk during a break in the weather, through a Jurassic landscape of 300-foot trees and green stuff growing on everything, even the concrete bases of picnic tables (at right).

We decided in Quinault to try to make the last ferry to Victoria out of Port Angeles, a 2 p.m. sailing. So we drove most of the west and part of the north sides of the peninsula, through forests that have been harvested several times over. When we had a long view over many hillsides, we could see a dozen areas in different stages of regrowth: some recently logged and replanted with tiny little trees, some having been logged many years ago and nearly reaching maturity again. Every so often there was a recent clear-cut, looking post-apocalyptic with enormous charred stumps and the leftover slash in crazy angles.

We saw signs saying: “Third growth Douglas fir,” and one listing the years that the surrounding forest had been logged, and ending with “Next harvest, 2036.” The landscape is surprisingly beautiful, even though you get more of a feel of a tree plantation than of a forest primeval. It must be the overwhelming greenery of it all. It still looks natural. And it is. It’s just not untouched nature.

Anyway, we got to Port Angeles in good time to make the ferry, found a lot where we parked the minivan, which we’ve tentatively dubbed “The Guppy,” in honor of its stature vis-à-vis the RVs on the road. We had a windy 90-minute ferry ride and were welcomed into Canada at customs. Now we are the only guests at The Cozy Cottage B&B in Victoria, which Lynn had found by surfing the Web in San Francisco, before The Guppy embarked.

Notes from Lynn:

Is it OK to recycle a word already put to use in this journey of the unexpected? “Dumbstruck”? I’ll reverse it. I was struck dumb when Jamie and Joe Brand opened the massive doors of the 7th Street Theatre.

We stopped in Hoquiam, Washington, to say hello to Jamie, daughter of Sherry, Margo’s stepmother. With her husband, Joe, and their three young children, Jamie had moved about a year ago to this blue-collar port (population 10,000) on the forested coast of the Evergreen State. While Joe and Jamie study carpentry, they volunteered to help with operations of what was once the small city’s big movie theater. Now both are actively involved, and Joe is the board. We followed them in the dusk into one of the thousands of downtowns now ignored by residents who shop on the outskirts and go to movies at the multiplex.

The 7th Street Theatre, like the 3,000-seat El Capitan on San Francisco’s Mission Street, was built in 1928 as a combined venue for vaudeville and movies. Like the El Capitan and so many others of the 1920s, it was designed and built by admirers of Spanish Moorish architecture. Like the El Capitan, it was closed after a downturn of patronage in the 1950s. The El Capitan marquee still hovers over Mission Street, but the auditorium was demolished. It’s now a parking lot. You drive your car through what was once the elegant lobby. The 7th Street Theatre was to suffer a similar fate, Joe said, when an angel appeared in 1978. Robert Serredell and his wife, Cheryl, bought the old movie house and spent 15 years in restoration work. They lived in the old dressing rooms. It foiled those who hoped to demolish it for parking. The miracle continued when businessman Ed Bowers donated a fund to allow a group of concerned citizens to form a nonprofit corporation and continued restoration. Joe said downtown businesses are forming symbiotic relationships with the reborn theater where once Will Rogers spun ropes and stories.

How many seats? About 930, Joe said. The lobby was basically unchanged from the days of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton – with Avalon-style decorated tiles framing a water fountain. The website says, “It was the first theatre in the Northwest, and the last example, of an atmospheric theatre, that gives patrons the feeling they are sitting in an outdoor Spanish garden. The curved ceiling is painted to simulate the evening sky, complete with twinkling lights. The auditorium, designed to be acoustically perfect, shimmers with balconies, iron grilled windows, spiral columns, arched doorways, plaster urns, red tiles atop courtyard walls, with ivy and cypress trees.” Jamie said old movies are interspersed with live performances. (Glenn Yarborough played the house last month.)

We walked into the auditorium. Joe said it was designed to look like a Spanish fortress at dusk. It was time travel. We were struck dumb in Hoquiam.

Mileage the past two days: Astoria to Port Angeles, 220

Total mileage: 1060

Graffiti

Notes from Lynn:

A crude swastika, scratched with a sharp instrument, embellishes the inside door of the lavatory stall in the men’s room for Loop A in the campground at Fort Stevens State Park. It shouldn’t be worth mentioning, not if you’re accustomed to the casual vandalism in San Francisco and everywhere else (London, Vienna, Auckland and a lot of places I’ve visited).
In a week of travel in Oregon, from Medford to Bend to Portland and points in between, I hadn’t seen one graffito in the state’s immaculate restrooms. Not in the vault toilets at our camp in McKenzie Bridge National Forest, not in the Multmonah Branch Library in a neighborhood of modest homes in Portland, not in the Chevron gas station in Wilsonville. No tags. No pieces. No gang markers.
Were this a newspaper story instead of bloggery, I would have interviewed someone at Portland’s Department of Public Works or perhaps a Reed College authority on the vandalistic angst of juveniles or maybe a teenager on a skateboard on Burnside Street. But I didn’t. Instead, being a blogger with no obligations but to entertain, I can assert with unattributed confidence that commercial graffiti, also known as billboards, are responsible for amateur graffiti in San Francisco and elsewhere.
In Oregon, as in Hawaii, Vermont and any community with million-dollar homes, billboards are so tightly regulated that the roads are uncluttered with commercial graffiti. And if you don’t believe that billboards cause graffiti, well, you can interview the experts yourself.
As for the swastika, someone else had scratched “my girlfriend is sexy” in the upper right arm and, above the lower right leg of the ultimate symbol of hatred, “God is Love.” Below is a carefully embellished “PEACE.”

Notable:
Thank the Great Spirit for global warming. We visited Fort Clatsop on a perfect September day, the seventh in a series. (The photo at the top of this post is Lynn at Fort Clatsop.) We learned that Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the Corps of Discovery spent four months at the log outpost in a winter of unrelenting rain. Permanent shelters protect picnic tables in Astoria, and umbrellas are handy everywhere in a state where the leading university’s athletes are known as the Ducks. As for our own Corps of Discovery, we need to buy more sunblock.

We visited the wreck of the Peter Iredale, one of 200 ships that have sunk or run aground in these treacherous waters over the past 150 years. (At right, Lynn studies the wreckage.)

Notes from Margo:

We spent a day seeing the sights in and around Astoria. At Fort Clatsop, we tarried over wonderful exhibits about the Corps of Discovery’s time here in the rain in 1805. One notable fact that I hadn’t known before, despite my reading, was that Lewis’ servant, York, was a slave whom he freed a few years after the expedition. The Indians along much of the route were fascinated by York; one tribe thought he might have been a human incarnation of a bison, which they had been praying and singing for. Anyway, that was news to me.

We also climbed the Astoria Column, built in 1926, modeled on Trajan’s Column and set on a hilltop above the town named for John Jacob Astor. The column has the history of Oregon, rather than of Rome, spiraling up the outside. From the viewing platform, we could see for miles – Cape Disappointment, the sand spits on both sides of the mouth of the Columbia River, the hills inland and south. It was spectacular! And we found out how the locals induce their kids to cheerfully climb about five stories up in a steep spiral staircase – they let ‘em throw little balsa wood airplanes off the viewing platform. We watched with the same glee as the kids as the planes drifted downward slowly, circling on the air currents until they crashed in the carefully groomed lawn below.

Notable:
We’re having our first car trouble – the sliding side door of the van is stubbornly stuck open. So today, on Yom Kippur, we're at the Toyota dealership conveniently located near the Fort Stevens campground, getting the bad news about ordering parts and finding an appointment in their service calendar. Our itinerary is about to be modified.

Milage today: 10

Total mileage: 840