The house feels like an oven and everything is tainted with the odor of sweaty shirts and baking sidewalks. I try to take our drive in my mind, but every which way I turn I turn the corner on the old apartment house on 9th, then the early morning at the place on SE 37th, the puff of exhaust by the street, where the cab was.
There is no escape from a past that's recast over and over across an electronic craps table, rolled and rolled again by everybody you knew whenever they speak... Because when you type a message and send it into the great wide world it is usually talking, but with a terrible kind of permanence.
So these goodbye images are all I can see and I have a feeling in my lower gut like a kick in the nuts. And before I can collapse into an alcoholic torpor I must attend a wedding reception for a good friend, whose role is important enough that I must make a showing of it, even though it's the last thing I want to do right now... His own buoyant humor and willingness to make the best of it invades on my steady walk into abject self-pity and I force myself to get up.
The reception is well-attended and glad, with lots of people either too busy to emote, or happily distracted by the excellent food and drink, and for a time I am lifted out of this terrible gorge... My friend is relaxed as usual, in this as constant as the Northern Star... And in a way he doesn't necessarily know he gets me through the next couple hours. But after all, this is a wedding reception and the significance becomes grindingly heavy. The image of successes to come and successes achieved becomes a funhouse mirror on my own history and I must get the fuck out of there, no matter what. I wish the groom well, sincerely; and from what I have seen there is every indication that things will be well for them. I feel a little sad, even, that I can't stay and that I will miss the broadleaf maple leaves' change from yellow to orange in the angling sun.
But it is no good; and later I am alive with the need to drink away these suddenly vivid images from those days, that last summer that ended so many things... And damned if it doesn't work pretty well; the pictures are replaced by a technicolor present, amped up by powerful cider and my own drunken, sentimental commentary. I become a blind fool again, my sight replaced by gorgeous mattes of carefully-retouched historical scenes.
Sometime in the night I resurface and throb through the bends of awakening, then reenter a normal, workaday sleep that leaves me only slightly groggy at 7:30 the next morning. No time for sorrow now; time now for a shower and to arrange my things in groups on the dining room table. Dick Cheney is promoting his book and Celeste is shouting at the television.
Presently she disappears into the basement to start a conference call and I load up the truck and drive to my mother's. As usual we bring too much, but it all seems to fit and we drive down Taylor's Ferry to I-5. I navigate the usual rush-hour nonsense without too much impatience and manage to find the exit for highway 138 in Roseburg. We eat a burger near a big red-faced man wearing a tight cap and headset who won't stop bobbing his foot. Presumably he is interacting with his wife and child at the same time, and indeed he seems to do this without too much trouble.
After a nest of lane changes the 1930s storefronts and filling stations move aside and show us gold hills like folded fabric cradling dark triangles of oaks. The hills close in and the road descends to the Umpqua River, rushing through its canyons of yellow-green pine and gorges of leaning basalt, stained with lichens and the dark lines of bygone seeps.
We turn at a sharp corner and under the trees to a long parking lot and trailhead marked by several massive wooden signs. This is one segment of a trail about 79 miles long, the entire length of the North Fork of the Umpqua. Here the water changes from a silver blanket over the cobbles to a deep, rich green where the river has carved a basin, and the surface is networked by thin, curving ripples like the fissures in the rock above.
We return through the woods, an endless arcade of orange pine trunks. The squares of orange powder and beargrass between the trees seem to glow. The sun is still high but we have a long road to travel. Before long, potholes and heaving cracks appear in the road, then the first of the orange signs. All the way to Toketee Falls and beyond the normally quiet shoulder and ranks of trees are screened by crawling equipment and bored flaggers, some of them talking to their knuckles as another flagger many rods away listens and waves at traffic. The pavement shelves onto a layer of thick tan dirt and crushed rock and we smoke our way through the zone.
In the gap between Trap and Elephant Mountain somewhere the construction dust is replaced by great banks of pumice and stands of lodgepole interrupted by silver snags, jutting out of the forest like serrated knives. Behind a high stand of pines we see bars of glittering blue: we have reached Diamond Lake and its pumice hills. We stop here and study the placards that describe the world-ending cataclysms that left the scars grown over by the trees and rubbery succulents. Mt. Thielsen stands behind us like a wizened finger, upraised in a permanently arrested warning. The sun is high yet and it seems barely possible that we are just a few miles from the park, yet before long , at the end of a long, straight segment of the road, I can see the familiar squat shape of the guardhouse at the north entrance.
The ranger hands us the park "newspaper", really another iteration of the brochure and its digest of hikes and common-sense things to avoid, the slick Park Service brochure with shaded relief map, and a pass taped to it. We drive into the low hills and pine barrens of the park and I am surprised and pleased to see a quiet road and no sign of other vehicles until several miles ahead, and then the car is coming towards us. We drive through a buff plain, a place called on the map the "Pumice Desert". I pass a large pullout with wooden barrier and placard, determining to visit later, and pretty soon a range of jagged rocks rises from the plain and we follow their base and up the west shoulder of Hillman Peak and onto the crater rim.
Incredibly, inevitably, we round a shoulder of pines and yellow rock to see a cord of blue and pull over as if we were thirsty and rushing to drink. We look over the low rock wall into a sea, distant and perfect, complete with island and flashing whitecaps. We see from above, somehow outside the oikoumene, staring down like adepts that somehow found the route up the golden chain and the sight of what had been forbidden. There is a trail that leads to a green/blue beach on the north shore, but I would almost rather the surface remain as a map, blue and only slightly modelled, as solid as the crater rim under our feet. This is the nature of dreams: even when they become real you cannot touch them.
Eventually the thought of our bags sitting in the car and our fatigue intrudes and we climb back in the car. The road leaves the crater and leads us through another pine forest. On the other side the bulk of the gift shop and café screen the trees and closed campground behind. Suddenly the landscape is all cars and steel recycling bins and we're all purpose again as we navigate through the parking lot to the lodge.
The lodge is a fantastic monument to stubbornness: we will build this place in the middle of nowhere, the cognoscenti will come, they will wear their furs and order their martinis, we will do this year after year without end. The half-mad conception is lost but the solid reality remains: an improbably grand, indisputably splendid, totally impractical reality. The eaves are a nest of massive dark brown braces, the roof peeling pale-green shakes and shining copper valleys; the walls are picked out with row on row of white double sash windows. A broad concrete stair flanked by massive stone balustrades leads to two sets of broad double doors, mostly glass; then you're inside and everything is pine log posts and broad slabs of pine with the bark on, a stone fireplace with a fire inside and the sound of the concierge quietly explaining to a guest. We blink and blue spots tango in front of our eyes; the hall is dark and we are used to the blinding yellows and pinks of the badlands outside. We walk up a well-varnished fir ramp to a hall behind the front desk and an unusually punctual elevator car dings and opens the moment we push the button.
The room is tiny, with sloping ceilings pierced by two dormers that look onto the lake. In the morning I would see the west crater still dark, huddling under thick banks of fog that seemed about to spill down. Beyond these banks the sky glowed green and sharply limned the giant lodgepole pines and noble firs that stood guard there.
We take the paved trails that hug the rim, watching the progress of the sun in the fans of ash and rubble down the crater walls. A tour boat, creeping like a tiny white insect, approaches Wizard Island and we can hear the voices of the passengers as though they were a few yards away. Still further, standing before another notch, we can hear a sound of water running, and we pace back and forth, trying to discover the deception. The lake is absolutely isolated from any stream or spring, fed only by rain and snowmelt. The sound whispers up the notch; running water, quiet, unmistakable. I look down. A vast funnel races down to the water, carrying silver snags and jagged boulders. At the beach the water ramifies in the rocks like a carefully-drawn shoreline on a map, complete with bands of green grading to the deep blue where the walls of the crater make their final dive.
I go down with a hunk of breccia that tumbles down the crater and into the depths. We contract with the cold, seeing only dim shapes, gauzy bars and Ls of ancient logs, then the huddled shapes of the talus... Still deeper we fall and bounce, released into the cold space of the crater, descending into a permanent blackness, maybe riding a long-waterlogged tree down some freezing valley, finally rolling to a slow-motion stop in a cloud of ash and exotic bacteria. Yet even down here, in eternal night, the bacteria blooms on shores of internal lakes, oceans within the ocean, warmed by some vast furnace below.
We return to the lodge slightly groggy; we are up around 7000 feet here and we must get used to it... We must work a little harder, in our action and our thinking. I resist the satisfied feeling, shake myself by the shoulder. The sun slants through the baroque of the window muntins and builds braces of light that support the stone walls. Black- and burgundy- aproned waiters and desk workers pad back and forth in black leather court shoes with thick, gummy soles. They are never still, weaving around each other and the massive log posts with a busy grace... Their greetings and clipped directions to each other stream through the lobby and dining hall as the eternal cold breezes that travel the lodge.
A slightly insolent young guy who looks a bit like Gary Collins takes our name after explaining to us that there are no early seatings, not even a minute before time. It is of no consequence: the great hall is filled with massive leather couches and rustic rockers with expensively-woven cushions. We sit down and watch the guests drinking, greeting and disputing in the glow of the fire and the massive cylindrical iron lamps that hang from the ceiling beams.
A pretty waitress with long black hair in tight curls and pale brown skin who wore an air of deeply controlled exasperation took our order and we enjoyed the fact of our being there and drinking icy, deep martinis as the night fell outside and the lobes of snow deepened to blue, then violet and the marten filled his den with sharp, animal disappointment. Meanwhile the cognoscenti and relaxing businessmen and trim women all a-whisper in their expensive outdoor gear drink sweet white wine and garishly-colored drinks and talk about some minor thing they left behind. The dinner is satisfying and not too complicated and we determine to go outside for a nighttime walk.
The chill is profound and challenges our resolve. The lake seems to take in the light of the star dust and swallow it completely, returning nothing but a black uncertainty. Wizard Island is a dim lozenge of gray and the trees on its slopes are merely a deeper black in the broad darkness of the lake. We take a path down a stone stair and end at a rock shelter built into the side of the crater, closed with a small wooden door. The outer walls sweep in a semicircle capped by a circular flat roof that cuts into greater arc of the crater. The wind scours the ash of the rim and sends it into the joints of the stone walls, the cracked deadwood of the snags, the diamonds of the whitebark pine cones, the pinholes in the pumice gravel, the porch of a squirrel burrow and finally into our eyes. We blink and walk on to find a harbor behind a grove of pines.
The hall back to our room is silent and bright, arrested permanently in its watch for the normal daytime rustle and squeak of bag trolleys and cleaning carts. For all we know the softly shining five-panel doors marching on either side of us close on empty rooms. There is a tiny white lamp on the smoke detector above our beds and it blinks through the night like an endlessly circling jetliner.
The couple next to us at breakfast, I suspect, is from Massachusetts and the man, a compact sort with grey, curly hair, heavy glasses and a friendly face, makes gentle fun of my gravy-drenched plate. He probably thinks of us all as quirky yokels who do nothing but eat biscuits and gravy and shoot sea lions. Still, he and his wife are friendly and indulge my mother's questions about their food. He has the french toast stuffed with loganberry cream cheese. I have that the next day and it is good.
We explore the disused campsite behind the parking lot and see the trolley, actually a modified bus with glittering brass accents and great racing green panels picked out in antique gold striping. The driver, an energetic and cheerful Asian woman, is bantering with another worker about the chill in the air. Behind the bus is another bus covered in blaring red and white graphics: a blood drive. I regret the loss of the campground and imagine a tent half-hidden in the island of trees.
Eventually, everything we need for the day is in the car and we loop out of the parking lot and down the park highway. I turn the wrong way and have to turn in a gravel pullout. The sun is high and fine and every outline is hard and sharp; it is hard to be frustrated or put out about anything on such a day.
In a tall, heavily-shaded stand of pines we turn into a parking lot and read a trailhead sign. We are near a wildflower trail that I chose in deference to my mother, who, when we used to camp yearly on Mt. Hood, would stop often to handle a blossom and list out loud colorful common names: monkey flower, rocket, lupine, spurge. Sometimes, if the blossom was plentiful, she would pick it and press it in a heavy book at home. Months or years later I would open the book and find the browning ghost of that long-gone summer and find that it was still there in some mysterious, important way. This meant that whatever certainty I felt, also, about any past success or failure was not so secure: because if that summer was still breathing here and now, still blowing its currents of alpine dust and heating sap, when I was so sure that it was gone forever, then how many other things would I have to reexamine?
And in fact, the trail through the dense mats of huckleberry and glittering rocks robed with rich ferns and mosses took me back there, too, to the bottlegreen flats and buzzing fields of Clackamas Lake and the endless halls of fir trunks like sandstone pillars of an ancient temple, the slanting sun ramping not down, but up, up into the canopy and the fierce blue above and whatever dreams hovered over the rim of the world and the next day, marching back into an infinity of shimmering mornings, beginning in my nine-year-old eyes.
We stop often and search the galaxies of monkeyflowers and glittering pebbles for new colors, new blossoms, the quick arhythm of an insect or the silver snag that points to a hidden stream, another way to go for another day. For this place is a spring, in every way that is important: magically it renews itself: just like that mossy, broken-down cylinder of basalt, the object of several childhood hikes, shaded in its gazebo of tall, grey firs and orange stumps going to powder and dripping with the lunar green of spanish moss and the emerald of true moss, this long-abandoned well that should hide a whisper of leaves, bleached bird skulls and white limbs, lives, is brim-full every year, every new, blazing summer. It does not speak or demonstrate belief, it is belief.
And we do believe, we walk in the spell of the place, treading on the needles and pavers of the here and now and that dusty trail on Mt. Hood in the summer of 1980, the bright orange and red packs on our back, the flimsy cotton flannel digging into our underarms, the sun forcing its way through our caps... The water rushes through the years, disdaining our human certainty, and we let it carry us.
Down the road we stop at Vidae Falls, a gravel pullout perched on the edge of a dense stand of rowan bushes and myrtle, and behind a neck-cramping spray of water leaping over a vertical slope of diamonds of rhyolite and breccia. At a landing on the slope we stumble and weave over the compacted rocks to a brake of shrubs and white and violet wildflowers. Immense bumblebee mimicks hover and light, long enough to display their odd fly heads, all eyes, and their too-active legs, constantly rubbing in some secret relish. Farther down, the fall dissipates in a broad, pale-green pool like a mirrored tray.
The closer we get to The Watchman, the more vehicles and knots of sightseers appear in the pullouts, the more farting motorcycles and lumbering Tiogas, the more expensively-outfitted bicyclists on their million-dollar machines. The park is becoming a park again, an image of the place I expected to see when we arrived the day before. At The Watchman the crowds have attained Rocky Mountain National Park proportions, with larking kids, shouting adults and even a few dogs. The wind, however, mutes any human assertion, and the Watchman looks down with easy contempt; it is thousands of feet of talus and ranked cinder, with a tan trail like a tightly reticulated rope laid up the shoulder, all the way to the tiny but sharply-defined lookout shack at the top, crowned with the black needle of an antenna. Below stretches the vastness of the crater, the blowing desert of wind, pumice and twisted whitebark pines.
We finally find a picnic area forgotten by the crowds and trudge up a dirt trail across a meadow. Off to our right we can see orange netting and the low cubes and shafts of earth-moving equipment. Somewhere a radio plays softly and down the slope and back in the trees a worker in olive green swings a Pulaski. We keep going, toward the trees and the rectangles of light blue between them. On the other side there is a dirt and gravel path that, at places, crumbles into the crater. We drop our bags and sit on a dirt step with our feet on a sill and beyond that the sweep of talus and the dark blue of the lake below. While we're eating my mother's voice becomes a stage whisper and she tells me to look left. It's a female mule deer, chewing on the wildflowers and bunchgrass by the trail about fifteen yards away; she glances at us in a bored way and keeps eating. We wonder if she will stay content with her greens while our picnic is laid out in plain sight; and we tense to pack up the bags when she takes another look at us and trots our way, slowly but purposefully and unafraid. She changes her mind, as if she couldn't be bothered, and passes silently through the trees behind the trail.
At the lodge a Tioga waits for a big group of trim, professional women who clump across the fir floors in their modified bicycling cleats and enthuse to each other in loud voices. We escape to the trails outside the lodge, lingering around the walls and posing for a timer picture, then down to the Sinott Overlook to see the inside of the mysterious half-round shelter. Some Norwegians, a man and two young girls who look like Bo Derek, stand around a big terrain model talking excitedly. I watch video of a remote-control submarine that explored the bottom, sending endless footage of looming sills and cloudy mats of bacteria.
After dinner my mother determines to sit out on the balcony and have hot drinks, so that we can stargaze. The air is frigid and we sit in two of the rockers with coffee and hot chocolate with a car blanket on our laps and stare up at the sky. The Milky Way is clearly visible, a grey band across the deeper fabric of sequin stars. Occasionally the lodge door bangs open and someone paces out, with perhaps a muttered comment on the cold, and disappears around the corner of the lodge. Later a big man looms out of the dark, without the customary fumbling at the permanently locked door of the pair. He comes closer and speaks to us: it is one of the waiters, indeed, the plate captain, who politely requests if we are finished with our glasses. He has a latin accent and my mother engages him the next morning, remarking on his presence after working late the night before. He admits that it is hard, but that he does not have to work such back-to-back shifts often.
We stir ourselves to walk down the ramp off the back porch and into the meadow on the east side of the lodge. We stand in the center of a vast globe of stars, with the Milky Way the seam. An asian man joins us presently and can't contain a glad and astonished comment. My mother replies and he echoes her earlier idea of finding the main panel and switching out all the lights in the lodge, the better to see the stars. Momentarily a young couple walk up behind us and the woman asks out loud if that is the Milky Way, then relents, saying it doesn't matter and how awesome it is. Pretty soon it's just us again, but we don't last too much longer. That night I have no problem falling asleep; I try to write some lines in my journal, but it's no use.
The next morning someone calls my cell phone while I'm in the shower and I check the call log, but there's no new entry. When I call my voicemail I hear the message greeting and not the check-in greeting, because I'm in some foreign trans-Cascade network, and this wrecks my morning; what news could it be at 7:45 in the morning but bad news? So runs the logic of humans harassed by their technology. After some futile experimentation and overly-solicitous questions from my mother I settle down, just as much for her benefit as mine; and after all, if this were a true emergency, wouldn't they call me again?
We sit in the lobby and drink coffee from styrofoam cups while we wait for our table. The hall today is crowded, happy, with guests shucking off extraneous layers and shuffling around in flip-flops and sandals. A crowd of immense rural types troops in and the head of the group talks turkey with the concierge. He is direct but polite and shortly they all troop out again. A Japanese family comes down the bark-clad staircase, the mother looking like some kind of Special Ops soldier in all black and a sleek leather phone case on her hip, striding purposefully, and the son and daughter trailing, looking bored.
My mother reminds me of my earlier promise to stop at the Pumice Desert and I force myself out of my thoughts of hurrying through all the stops between and cruising by easy stages past the familiar exits: Woodburn, Wilsonville, Tigard... And force myself to see the pines, the endless pale blue, the desert of the now. We pull out and face into the wind, standing behind the dark brown barrier around the gravel pullout. Some soft peeps sound from our left and we see a pair of wren-like birds hopping on the posts and stretched cables. They come closer and closer, eventually lighting not three feet from us and tilting their heads to look up at our faces. One is a bright green, the other a rich red. They are crossbills, oddly friendly, and more, curious about our presence there. A full-sized red pickup roars into the pullout; a stocky guy climbs out, shoots a couple photos of the desert, gets in and roars out of the pullout. At this time a caravan headed by a slow-moving RV comes up the road and a van screeches out of its slot not twelve inches behind the car ahead and passes several cars in the oncoming lane, cutting in front of the RV unnecessarily close. The whole noisy mess recedes into the distance and we stand looking out on the desert and the crossbills talking softly to each other and feel the wind.
At Crescent Lake we take a road that snakes through the pine barrens, past a few resort cabins, a railroad, a few more cabins and finally a shaded turn into a forest road that opens into a clearing of parking lots and a bait shop fronting a vast forest lake, glittering and backlighting the sailboats and small aluminum fishing boats on its surface. On the right, behind the bait shop, is a concrete superstructure jutting out of a placid swimpark defined by a chained arc of logs on one side and a broad gravel dam on the other. On the other side of the dam a swift stream rushes through a valley of white boulders and crossing dark orange logs. A few voices make it over the water, dissipated by the distance and wind, and the aluminum boats to our left scrape gently at their moorages. The air is close back of the lake, and all the cabins are on the other side of the lot, well-shaded and covered with weathered dark-brown paint and dark green trim. Parked behind the bait shop is an immaculate Apache panel truck, lovingly restored to its mid-sixties splendor, even down to an odd, green-white color that was popular then, but, unfortunately, has since fallen out of favor. It speaks the pale green of the moon on clear nights, the sides of rockets, the interior of thoroughly modern kitchens with clean, well-thought out lines. As we take a look around we determine to go home now in our minds too.
In Albany we stop for lunch; I find a city park under a grove of oaks and we watch some local types talk in and out of a grimy white van parked below the hill. The van leaves and one half the party remains, walking slowly toward an ivy-covered pedestrian underpass in that vague way of a barely-formed purpose that makes most people nervous. Later a crowd of teenage boys come striding up the hill in shapeless, baggy shorts and puffy caps with the bills out straight and turned at an angle. As we're walking toward the underpass to explore the park on the other side one of them walks into a portable toilet and shuts the door; as we're walking under the ivy at the entrance a second runs at the toilet and leaps onto the side, laughing as his rushing body makes a hollow plastic boom and the one inside shouts.
On the other side there is a large pond, about a quarter mile long, populated by several paddle boats. We watch a profusion of light-blue skimmers with bright green eyes loop in and out of the reeds and basalt boulders on the bank. I had never seen such a color in skimmers before.
Once home I open the vast tarp of a map I found and my mother insisted on paying for: Land of the Umpqua. Crater Lake is pictured, in its square of purple, but I don't study that part. I see the dark green wilderness just to the west, its chain of mountain lakes, the grid of red squares, the stubborn rectilinear assertion of the townships and ranges on the equally stubborn forest of hogbacks and impassable undergrowths and dream of rising dust and revolutions of yellow to orange to green and back again without end and myself, in the limbo between, safe there from withering.
