Our visit to Portland began Wednesday with a pilgrimage to a major spiritual center of Western civilization – Powell’s Books. For those uninitiated to the Powell’s experience, the bookstore takes up an entire city block, with several annexes nearby.
The City of Books
In Search of Lake Missoula
The Lewis and Clark Trail
The Trans-Canada Highway
Coffee Update
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Our visit to Portland began Wednesday with a pilgrimage to a major spiritual center of Western civilization – Powell’s Books. For those uninitiated to the Powell’s experience, the bookstore takes up an entire city block, with several annexes nearby. |
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I spent a happy hour browsing the shelves. With so little time, and so little space in the van for my purchases, I spent the time wandering up and down interesting aisles, brushing my eyes across the titles, occasionally flipping through a book. I learned a little bit about methods of knitting hats and grammatical rules of Spanish, and read the blurbs on the backs of many novels. |  |
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At the end of the hour, I walked back onto the streets of Portland with a couple of books and a slightly dazed expression. |
We left Portland and drove east along the Columbia River, finally heading east after our northern route. The small scenic highway took us through a deep, wide, gorge molded through what one can imagine was only a shallow riverbed millions of years ago. Now the halves look mismatched, geologic evidence of nurture over nature, the twins separated long ago now different in their appearances. The Washington side is more gentle and rounded, the Oregon side showcasing sharp, butting cliffs up against the floodplain.
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Driving along the old highway, we stopped to see waterfalls making their own changes to the current landscape, various falls carving trenches in the sides of mountains. I recognized the descendants of such trenches further along the highway, where the landscape turned drier as we entered the eastern half of the state. The lush, green foliage was replaced by smaller, shrub-like bushes that collected on the sheltered sides of the hills, the windy sides covered only by dry grasses. |
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The wind was fierce. Driving a bus on these roads is like driving a sailboat without a centerboard to help maintain a straight course. The same wind that enabled the windsurfers to skate quickly across the water made fierce concentration necessary to keep the van on its course. To our left, the bright sails skidded lightly like tropical birds over the surface. We stopped to eat our lunch at a riverside park, anchoring our paper towels to keep them from flying away to the seagulls circling us. Moving up into Washington the landscape changed yet again. The terrain appeared to have been shaped by water, with high bluffs sitting like islands above a nonexistent lake, through which we drove. The contours of the land were emphasized by the fields filled with vineyards, corn, hay, and sugar beets that sat upon them. They curved to follow the natural lines, one crop sitting on top of the island, another the level below, curved contours like a weather map. |  |
Arriving at Palouse Falls State Park, a 30-minute drive off the main road, I discovered that, once again, water was the culprit for these patterns. Towards the end of the Ice Age, as many as hundreds of catastrophic floods caused much of the Northwest to become Lake Missoula. Within one day of the ice sheet that held back the waters breaking, thousands of acres were submerged under water, only to have the water flow out to the gorge and the Pacific, leaving a muddy mess behind. For many years, scientists disbelieved this theory, partially because they had not actually seen the landscape, known as the Scablands. When one of its most vocal opponents finally visited Palouse Falls, and saw the contrasts that only such dramatic events could cause, he is said to have remarked, “How could I have been so wrong!”
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I saw my own proof the next day, when we got up early to hike around the waterfall. There were no official trails, just dirt paths worn into the dry grasses covering the tops of the hills. Looking down into the chasm, a waterfall plunged down into an circular pool, the craggy sides rising to a height demonstrating that it originally must have been a far larger flood of water that created it. Walking along the edge, we could stare down the craggy, dark walls, rock looking like giant crystals, to the water below. We followed it up the river, seeing the pool from which the falls emerged, and the wider, calmer river, before packing up the van and turning back to the Route 12. |
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When we started our driving day, continuing east through Washington along Route 12, our way was marked with signs announcing this as the Lewis and Clark Trail. Riding along, I couldn’t help thinking that the Jane Austen novel I had started the night before was hardly appropriate. The ordered country gardens of her proper British heroines were nothing like the rugged landscape surrounding me as we wound our way around the hillsides. |
We pulled into a convenience store in Pataha, Washington, for some coffee. Wandering around the store, with its basic groceries, plenty of beer, and assortment of other goods to supply a town where this is its only store, I found a shelf of books on Lewis and Clark, in honor of the 200th anniversary of the expedition, 2003-2006. I selected a Stephen Ambrose book, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, putting it on the counter with our other purchases. The clerk found the combination hilarious – a Coke, beef jerky, a mocha from a machine, a bandana, a bag of chips and a history book – hilarious, laughing and shaking her head as we refused a bag and carried our finds to the car.
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As we continued driving and I flipped through the book, looking for the portion of their journey that carried them through this region. I discovered that they too came the way of the great Lake Missoula, as distant in the past to their journey 200 years ago as to mine today, although the land they traversed would hardly be recognizable as the same landscape. Their route followed Native American paths long before selected for their relative ease over mountainous terrain and selected 200 years later for the same reason, our ’76 VW bus only slightly better equipped for mountains than their horses. |  |
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The path the expedition weathered took them through thick forests along the rivers. Now a paved road flattens this terrain, curving along the banks, the two black lanes carving through the landscape that challenged them. The thick forests to the left only hint at the difficulties they endured to arrive at the place we left yesterday morning. We found a campsite along the river, just inside the Montana border, preparing to continue trailing Lewis and Clark the next day. |
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Stopping at one of Alberta’s many, well-staffed tourist information stations, I saw a postcard that said “I drove the Trans-Canada Highway and all I saw was NOTHING.” It’s apparent how one could have that sentiment. After leaving the majestic mountains this morning, we headed into the Great Plains of Canada. Mile after mile there’s nothing but field after field, soybeans or wheat or barley waving gently, or cut hay sitting in neat, compact, bales, or grazing cattle. Most of the towns marked on our map turn out to be a gas station with a few homes surrounding. For a few we could see no town at all, only a road going off the highway, making me wonder if a small settlement existed farther away than we could see, or if the house we passed down a few kilometers was the town.
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My grandmother was born outside Medicine Hat, Alberta, and lived there before moving around a bit and settling down in Kansas for a while. As the landscape of Alberta flies by my window, I imagine Kansas seemed quite comfortable to someone accustomed to these expanses. While slight hills keep the land from looking as though it were steamrolled, the terrain has a certain sameness to it, four or five variations to fill the fields alternating like home designs in a modern suburb. Occasionally we pass a field decorated in the yellow flowers of canola, from this distance a neon coating over the green. |  |
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Even this sameness has a beauty to it. Gentle hills ripple as the breeze passes through the wheat, like wind rippling the water on a lake. The different colors – reds, yellows, tans, greens – form their own designs on the landscape already shaped by hills and valleys. An occasional cluster of trees leads me to wonder what they shield from my view, and large farmhouses speak of a different era. Moving into Saskatchewan, determined to cross two provinces today and camp in Manitoba, the landscape’s much the same. Ignore the freeway and the occasionally large pieces of farm equipment, and my grandmother would have recognized it, I’m sure. When we told the tourism workers in Alberta where we were heading, they smiled softly, and said, “Well, there’s not really much there,” pointing to Moose Jaw, 250 miles from the Alberta-“Sascatch” border. So it is to Moose Jaw that we set our sights, letting the meditative passing of the road take its effect, dreaming of my grandmother riding through this landscape 80 years ago. |
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The Good News: I saw my last Starbucks 9 days and 1587 miles ago. Unless you count the towns of Starbuck, Washington, and Starbuck, Manitoba. Small town Washington, Idaho, and Montana, like southern Oregon, are lands of the drive-up coffee stand. For those unfamiliar with this genre of caffeine-pusher, the coffee stand is a small trailer sitting in a parking lot, often the lot of another business. There are windows on either side for ordering, menus posted next to the windows, and the inside is filled with all the usual accoutrements – espresso machine, flavored syrups, metal pitchers – leaving just enough room in the middle for an employee to make the drinks and sit on a stool when waiting for the next car to drive up. |
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The Bad News: We’ve been camping in remote areas, often leaving early after eating a bowl of cereal, the waffle maker we bought in Portland as yet unused, with no time to brew a quick cup in my combination press-pot/travel mug purchased for this adventure. As a result, even a small drive-up coffee stand is often not to be found, and for the last few days I’ve been drinking coffee purchased at gas stations and convenience stores. For Bruce, who added five hazelnut creamers and four sugar packets to his 12 ounce cup this morning, this is not such a hardship. I have been reduced to adding cream to my usually black cup, and am hoping to find that coffee stands are popular in Canada as well, to provide me with a soy iced latte sometime soon. |  |