landscapes

The rains have started.

I like this. This is why I moved to Oregon. I moved here for the cool and gray and damp and peaceful. And the seafood. Everything is better in Oregon in the “winter:” the beaches are empty, the trails are empty, you can go snowshoeing, less traffic when I ride my bike. All the wimpy people who dislike moistness are indoors now, at Powell’s or McMenamin’s. Which are also better in the “winter.”

It is, however, very dark. People here are pale. And let’s not kid ourselves: it starts raining in October and it doesn’t stop until about July. June if we’re lucky.

The really great thing about having grown up in Nebraska is that I have extremely wide latitudes for what I consider “bad weather.” Nebraska gets Florida summers and Alaska winters. The lousiest winter days in Oregon (sleety snow/rain driven hard from the southwest) are about like a typical March morning in Nebraska.

Oregon gets like five or six days in the summer where the mercury tops 90 degrees. But it’s a dry heat.

In 13 years in Oregon, I’ve never lived in a place with air conditioning, or insulation, or double-paned windows. Or bug screens.

Oregon shorts Fall a little bit though.

Sunday I had my first “long” bike ride since our return. I rode to Iowa Hill, a total round-trip of 58.8 miles, which I finished in a little more than 3 and a half hours. Other than Iowa Hill itself there was precious little climbing; I rode to outer Washington County on the Tualatin-Sherwood Highway, and returned (more or less) on SR 10 and Scholls Ferry road. For me, any ride that tops 60 miles is officially a Long Bike Ride. I can kinda just get on my bike and ride 50, but for more than that I have to bring food, money, tools, phone, and a different attitude.

My average speed these days is about half a mile an hour faster than it might have been a year ago. I reckon I lost 5 to 10 pounds in China, mostly muscle. I’ve put most of it back, but I haven’t weighed myself since January, so this is really all conjecture. There’s a theory that Lance Armstrong’s cancer-induced weight loss abetted his Tour de France winning streak. That’s not as unlikely as it sounds. Five pounds weighs more when you have to pull it yourself.

Oregon treated me to one of its good-to-be-alive Sundays: broken clouds, mid-60s, not too much wind. Perfect riding weather. After I reached, I dunno, Scholls? the countryside opened up and presented one rustic tableau after another. Llamas. Shetland ponies. Red-tailed hawks. Sunflower fields. Handpainted “U-Pick” signs. Red barns. Rolling hills. Woodsy tree claims. Nice. I never take a camera on these rides but maybe I should start.

Tiny agricultural communities used to surround Portland. Most of these (Scholls, Farmington, Progress, Cornelius) have decayed to an intersection and a couple of repurposed buildings. A lucky few (Sherwood, Forest Grove) have blossomed into bedroom communities. I pine for a landscape that would have provided a regular punctuation of small towns for my bike rambles. I gave only one business my patronage outside the Metro boundary, a café at the intersection of SR 219 and Scholls-Sherwood. For the longest time, a pizza and sandwich place occupied the building (vintage ca. 1910); it closed around 2003 and the building stood vacant until sometime this past year.

Four-lane highways, and the way of life they encourage, have no room for places like Farmington. I grew up in a rural state and rural landscapes are my favorite. A lot of West Coast people fairly worship “wilderness,” in my opinion to the detriment of damn near every other landscape. From time to time I might spend Sunday afternoon driving an hour to an old growth forest, there to walk around in a circle with a backpack, then drive an hour back home. It’s like Disneyland, but with trees instead of the teacup ride.

But I see more birdies and bunnies from a bike.

About twenty years ago, my family took a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. This was the first time I had ever seen the ocean (age 14), which happened, to the best of my recollection at Neskowin, Oregon. Certain images from that trip have been burned into my subconscious: banana slugs the size of hot dogs, evergreens silhouetted against the gloaming, sand dollars, snow-capped volcanoes, wet sand. It's hard to overstate how strongly these elements figured in my personal iconography. They joined a row of other icons tied loosely to the west coast: Bigfoot, sunburns, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, UFOs, Rainier beer, hippies with backpacks, fishing lodges, and the smell of rain. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before but somehow familiar.

Some years later (perhaps my senior year of high school), I had a strikingly vivid dream, wherein I rose from my bed, in the late morning, with the sun shining through my window. I look out the window, across a meadow of tall grass and flowers, to a skyline of evergreens, and Mt. Hood in the distance. It was the sort of dream whose realism disorients you when you awake

A little over ten years ago, I moved to Eugene for grad school. I arrived in town perhaps late July, 1995. I had saved up several thousand dollars from my summer work for the Kansas State Historical Society, so I got to live, for about a month, a life of restrained leisure. At the time I called it a "life vacation," but "temporary early retirement" might be more apt. A month spent bumming around Eugene (I didn't have a car), and reading. Every day opened crisp and clear; shivering in my sleeping bag (no bedding either). The cloudless days warmed predictably to about 90 degrees; purple night following golden day, one after the other. You can't see Mt. Hood from Eugene (and all you could see from my apartment was a parking lot), but it held, in protracted form, the essence of that dream.

I've been an Oregonian now (off and on), for almost eleven years. We can round that down to a cool decade. Oregon and the Northwest never fails to disappoint. I've never seen Bigfoot, but I did see Mt. St. Helens venting last year. I can pretty safely say I'm "from" Oregon, at least as much as I'm "from" Nebraska.

Last week (or maybe the week previous?) I walked Bismarck through Spring Garden Park near our apartment. This is a pretty notional park...mostly a large unmown meadow with a Portland City Parks Dept. sign. At the top of the hill along the southern margin of the park, you get a clear view to the south-southeast toward Mt. Hood. The hills between our neighborhood and the river block the intervening distance. As I walked Bismarck through the overgrown grass and weedy wildflowers I looked over the evergreens, standing against the sunrise and Mt. Hood hazy above the horizon.