Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

In the morning I take one last swim and take one last look at the cliffs– still no mountain cat, only the eternal rimrock, its upper faces edged with a band of orange that descends to cover the deep blue evening cloak.

Today is the long, hot drive across Oregon; we keep the picture of the Gorge in our heads, its basalt headlands and pale yellow slopes, the vast ocean of the Columbia studded with whitecaps– because it means cool, a release of the heat that presses down until there is nothing else. We stop in La Grande; the next filling station is there; we are at the quarter-tank mark; and we are famished. There is a distinct lack of cafés and we settle on a modest storefront called Joe and Sugar's. We have sandwiches and drink about a gallon of iced tea and check messages on our phones. Then it's through Pendleton and the fields of Hermiston and up over a grassy shoulder of the land and down into the track of the Columbia.

Here the long descent begins, down into a different kind of plain, a river that is a prairie itself, a desert of chop and howling wind and sudden violence. The pickup feels like a wagon on a rutted road and I'm constantly correcting as the hood veers to the centerline or the fog line. My back is hurting again as we take the sweeping overpass into Hood River– after a few futile turns I find the filling station and we hold chilled Gatorade bottles to our heads.

The wind has become a thing observed again, a thing that knocks hats off and shows us the silvery undersides of the cottonwoods– and we take shelter behind the shoulder of Hood River Mountain when we turn south on Oregon 35. Then it's up the valley of the Hood River, climbing the shoulder of Mt. Hood and rounding his south side at Newton Creek. At Barlow Pass the road turns around an outcrop of Barlow Ridge and we drive straight at the glaring peak.

It's the view of the mountain that as a child I associated with the Paramount splash in a darkened theater– a region of cerulean perfection that nevertheless existed, but in parallel to the here and now of exhausted rocker seats and squicking soft drink syrup underfoot. So here in the stinking cab and behind the pitted and grimy windshield we peer into the region of snows– a region we must enter by this winding track.