Desert to Mountain: Washington and Idaho

Harry and Lake Coeur D'Alene from Mineral Ridge

I think prior to the moment I turned east and headed into the rising sun, the Road Trip (in capitals as I see it in my mind) was still plausibly in the realm of fantasy. I had a long route plotted out with many exciting stops all neatly organized in on a road trip website and scribbled in the margins of my Rand McNally atlas, but in some ways I can’t really explain, I felt detached from the reality of it. Maybe there was some small part of me that doubted my ability to go through with it.  With the passage of every mile east on highway 90, I felt a change in my heart, like a tide pulling back at ebb, slackening and then rushing forward. Yes, just like that.

The high desert of Washington is beautiful. I am fond of the grey greens of brush cadmium-yellow washed by the bloom of rabbitbrush. Our first stop was in the heart of the desert, at a place that was lush forest and glacier well before the time of man. Just off the highway, near the promisingly named town of Vantage, is the Ginkgo Petrified Forest which provides a window back into that time. A forest of ginkgo trees has transformed from wood to mineral, crystallized trucks now strewn about at the edge of a canyon that cuts deep thought he layers of history beyond imagining. While fossilized leaves of the ginkgo tree are common, petrified trunks are rare.

Petrified ginkgo trunks

Fossil of a ginkgo leaf

Petrified wood Rorschach? Baboon? Really?

Perhaps akin to star gazing, to stare at the layers of time in this geological cross section has the power to render the trivial concerns of daily life utterly irrelevant. As Dr. Degrasse-Tyson says, “We are a speck on speck on a speck on a speck…” And even on our speck we are but a grain of sand on the edge of a canyon. 

As we leave the Petrified Forest, we through a herd of bighorn sheep ewes and lambs. They kindly pause prettily in the sagebrush before moving on to greener pastures at the nearby golf course.

Bighorn ewe and kids, Vantage, Washington

The drive across Washington into the Idaho Panhandle to Coeur D’Alene is a long one for a slow little truck. Pagoo traversed many passes, although not joyfully. The steepest inclines reduced her 4-cylinder engine’s top speed to 40 mph. I was grateful that the slow truck lanes kept me out of the way of impatient drivers. After such a drive, the sight of Lake Coeur D’Alene was cool draught. The highway runs just along the lake’s north edge and we get our first look at the indigo basin wreathed with conifer covered ridges. Our camp is nestled a few miles up Beauty Creek from the lake---it is quiet and bright with late summer flowers and butterflies. My neighbors help me back Pagoo into her spot (although I am getting quite good at this) and instantly congratulate Harry and me on not being a college fraternity or other such bothersome neighbor. They are on their way to Yellowstone for five days of kayaking. My upstream neighbor seems aloof at first (as perhaps do I---I’m working on that) but comes by to chat the next morning as we are both packing up. He is from Chicago and is at the end of a road trip from Spokane up to Banff, Southeast Alaska and back down to Idaho. In his mid-60s, he has been planning this for years, he speaks of the journey with obvious devotion: “I kept waiting for someone to come along, and no one would, so I decided to go anyway.” He gives me tips on Yellowstone (everyone seems to have these) and suggests that I should not miss Devil’s Tower (“Ya know, da one from dat space man movie…”).  

Campfire breakfast

After a breakfast of campfire grilled bagel and local smoked salmon (I may never be able to as thoroughly enjoy a conventionally toasted bagel again) Harry and I take a quick tour along the dry cobble bed of Beauty Creek before heading for Montana. We have missed the peak spring wildflowers but the fruits are ripening on wild strawberries, Saskatoon, elderberry and Oregon grape. Sadly, the most common bloom in the camp is an invasive Centaurea, a relative of cornflowers. Pretty purple but, *sigh*. A chipmunk gives Harry his dose of S-Q-U-I-R-R-E-L for the day and we say goodbye to Idaho.

Centaurea meadow, near Lake Coeur D'Alene, Idaho

Red-tailed chipmunk at Beauty Creek, Idaho

Friends, Food and Farewell to Familiar: the Pacific Northwest

The Coquille Lighthouse, at the mouth of the Coquille River in  Bandon, OR

In my personal history of road trips, the Pacific Northwest was the feature and the destination. Now, in the greater adventure, it is the first chapter. My time there last week was an odyssey of friendships that spanned nearly every decade of my life, meals that fed my stomach, heart and soul, and the last touchstone of the familiar before the road turned eastward and into the unknown. It felt every bit the prologue.

Entering Oregon was like stepping into a warm bath of memory. It was home for my reawakening as I passed from the last years of a failing marriage into the wonder years as a zoology undergrad at Oregon State in Corvallis. I chose Bandon from among the many alluring coastal towns of Oregon, a sentimental favorite due not only to its charm and exceptional beach, but its proximity to Wildlife Safari in Winston, a drive-through wild animal preserve where I was a ranger for 3 years back in the 90s. It was my good fortune, while working and living in the hot interior, to have Bandon as my nearest breath of cool ocean air.  The long drive out to the picturesque Coquille Lighthouse filled me with anticipation: I think now this was the first reunion with an old friend among many I would find during these travels. I would be utterly content to know that the end of my journey, upon returning west, would be a tiny house on the wild, driftwood tumbled spit where this lighthouse finds prominence. I believe Harry would also approve.

Harry contemplates Bullards Beach near Bandon, OR

The tides polish a treasure of shiny pebbles

The drive from Bandon to that night's destination in Corbett, just east of Portland along the Columbia Gorge, was when I first noticed the great discrepancy between predicted travel time (whether via a map or road trip app) and the actual pace of Pagoo. It seems I need a setting for "slow on hills" and "will stop frequently for signs promising butterfly pavilions and fresh cherries". So 11 days in, I now know to add two hours to the app-predicted travel time. I feel a bit proud of that.

Monarchs at the Butterfly Pavilion in Elkton, OR

In Corbett we arrive (two hours late) to a familiar home filled with the friends who have known me since before the days of otters, before the days of college, before the days of zoos and marriage, and even before the days of adolescence. Of all those chapters they have been a part or watchful, but of my youth, they were every bit the story. Harry and I are greeted at the door by a tumble of hugs--- friends, their husbands and children. An errant goat gives Harry an instant opportunity for utility before he enters the interior and the domain of Seamus the chihuahua mix and a giant grey cat named Shadow. Seamus is forgetful and rules the moment---Shadow remembers and rules all ("Rumor grew of a shadow in the north..."). Shadow stalked the spaces under tables and between legs, swelled to twice his normal size, in hopes of a good crack at this invader. Seamus merely launched the occasional surprise attack. Harry finds mercy under the protective watch of  my host and her daughters and the safety of my lap. It is his nature to submit to tyranny. This is not my nature, but I marvel at the peacefulness of this choice.

One final note on childhood friends--a quote from the end of the film Stand By Me, where the writer asks: 

 "[typing on computer] I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"

Decades may pass when we don't see each other and are reduced to Christmas and birthday cards. But when we reunite, I am reminded that know one will ever know me as well as they do. And so by crossing the great Columbia, I leave behind the memories of childhood and coming of age and head for Seattle where family and and a new era friends await.

The view of the Columbia Gorge from the Vista House near Corbett, OR

                            

The road from Portland to Seattle was a whirlwind. I was quickly breaking one of my road trip rules to stay off of main highways and commuter corridors. But I had been so traumatized by the relentless traffic that mired my passage through Portland, and warned of similar between there and Seattle, I hurried up I-5 to beat the urban snarl to Puget Sound.

Under the Fremont Bridge looking toward Lake Union, Seattle, WA

It was with the broad and varied brushstrokes of the diversity of my Seattle connections that I would this time experience the city on the Sound. Through the eyes and hearts of a bright, single urbanite (my charming niece), a biologist and mother of young boys, and an impassioned graduate student the city sparkled in a thousand hues. I was treated to two memorable meals in Seattle as different as they were exceptional: The first with my biologist friend and her young boys, sitting cross-legged on the shore of Puget Sound at sunset, eating  paper-wrapped Caribbean fish sandwiches, dripping messily into the sand as her sons dug with mussel shells nearby; The second a sampler of the best of Seattle's seafood with my great friend, Kate at the Ballard Annex Oyster House where we met the perfect combination of lovingly prepared seafood, cold beer and good company---all during happy hour! Some meals embed themselves in memory in a way that transcends simple nourishment. "Eat to live, don't live to eat...?" Whomever uttered those words has not experienced such a pairing of food and spirit.

Selection of oysters at the Ballard Annex Oyster House

Friendship also afforded me the most suitable of lodging on a quiet street in Ballard complete with chickens and a perfectly tended garden, while kinship gained me a tour of the hipper neighborhoods by my niece who shared some of the experience of being young, recently relocated and single in Seattle. In this way I had a taste of a few of Seattle's flavors and a proper immersion into things urban to send me off into the lands of big sky and open spaces. As I drove eastward from the city and up and over the Cascades, I was filled to the brim with that sense of freedom and adventure I had so craved. So ends the prologue---perhaps what I needed to leave behind, was the familiarity and safety of the Pacific. 

My niece, the Seattle urbanite, poses with Harry and the Fremont Troll

Detox

Spiral mosaic in Bandon, Oregon

I had a fantasy about our first day on the road. I'm behind the wheel with a long straight, empty road ahead, Harry is scanning the roadside for cows and squirrels, John Denver's clarion call to abandon, "Sweet Surrender" is playing on my iPod, and I burst into song. "It's just you and me, pup," I'd say while patting Harry on the head. I'd feel utterly free. What I learned about myself this week, is that being unchained in today's society is not as simple as that fantasy. I learned that I am addicted to worrying and it's time to kick the habit.

One of the reasons I chose to undertake this journey, is to reconnect myself with real places, people, situations and challenges. I have responded to our crowded, busy, clockwork society with emptiness and withdrawal, and a profound sense that all that we consider so important in our busy, busy day is artifice. I am sick from stress and worry and have treated myself with the medications society has made most accessible---sugar, alcohol, WiFi.  What I have discovered these first days on the road, is how pernicious worry can be. I have become accustomed to its presence and so it lingers like a ghost. On each day I have found myself bothering over neglected details or dilemmas that belong in the vanishing point of my rear view mirror. The voices of anxiety have awakened me at 3 AM, even in the cozy loft of Pagoo. They demand that I concern myself with being here or there at this time or that, that I do what's expected and fix what's been broken.  But with every day on the road those voices are quieting and the sound of the highway is rushing in.

Perhaps it's fitting that my adventure began with a visit to a cemetery. There are habits that grow because the ground is disturbed and they are the first seeds that gained a hold. What I am asking of myself now, is that Worry and Stress and Doubt may rest in peace among the lambs of St. Mary's.

St. Mary's Cemetery, Oakland California

As I crossed from my home state of California into Oregon today I got my long straight road at last. The worries aren't wiped clean but I can feel my brain clearing and feel freer than each day before to bear witness to joy and beauty. So, for those awaiting me, don't be surprised if timetables become murky and soften. Perhaps my route may grow to resemble the ramblings of a beetle on the underside of a log. It's all about finding my center, after all, and who knows where you might find me looking.

Harry is centered

Perched on the Edge of Wide Open

The empty nest

Tonight will be our last night sleeping on this central coast bluff. The sea is sleepy and calm, the clouds soft grey canopy, and I hear the sea lions bark the song of rocky shore I have heard my whole California life. Harry and I are exhausted. Today was the final day to break down and pack up our life in the TARDIS and funnel what I can of it down into my tiniest space yet. The last week has been filled with visits to mechanics, RV specialists, storage units and hardware stores to ready my new piggy-back vessel for our trip across the nation. We are propped up, shocked up, sealed up, packed up and, loveliest of all, newly painted up with the most perfect name. My good friends and fellow invertebrate nerds Mike and Esther suggested the name Pagurus, which is the latin name for hermit crab--the undisputed inventor of portable housing. I modified it a bit in homage to a favorite childhood book that featured a Paguran hero named Pagoo, and our vessel and home are christened. Thanks to the artistic enthusiasm of the attendees of a farewell gathering this weekend, Pagoo now wears his name proudly, in bright oceanic letters, on the port and starboard sides.

Port side

And starboard

While I was busy with cleaning and packing up the TARDIS, Harry was trying his best to send us off with a bang by relentlessly harassing the local skunk that lives in the woodpile by the trailer. Chemical weaponry was discharged---there were no casualties. All of TARDIS's rusted parts that were supposed to move, were convinced to move by the end of the day. I can take credit for some of that, but had a lot of help from friends who hammered and cranked until everything was moving as it should. She is ready to return to her home in Hollister, far from the corroding effects of the sea. Add to that the felicitous disappearance of my couch from the curbside (where it languished all day with a shocking pink "Free" sign) at the final hour before we were to concede defeat and haul it to the dump, and I'd say we are off to a lucky start!

What I have left is my first pass at "necessities" for 2 1/2 months of travel. As I sit writing at my table in the center of Pagoo, it is all around me. I am impressed and grateful for the fit of it all. The next few weeks will tell how well I have estimated my needs (do I really need 7 pairs of shoes?). I imagine I will have it all rearranged before the first week is done.

Inside Pagoo

Tomorrow when we awaken, there will be time for coffee and breakfast with friends, some last minute packing and stowing, then Harry and I will be driving away from our little perch on the bluff. The whales are breaching as I write just now, and I can hear the tapping of the a sea otter's snail on a rock--this has been a kind home for this beagle and me. But the fledglings have flown and now shall we, and what a powerful foundation from which to launch.

She's Got the Urge for Going

View from the TARDIS on a foggy summer morning

Maybe we all remember our lives in chapters---I've rarely met someone who didn't classify their life in this way to some extent. My timeline is tick-marked with the openings and closings of stories: My Life as a Wife, My Life in Hawaii, My Life as a Zookeeper, My Life in College and, for the last thirteen years, My Life Studying Sea Otters. Some of these stories gracefully smudge over and across one another; others are divided by the widest of oceans. Today, in this moment, I find myself straddling two worlds.

Over the last week, I've felt the transformation acutely. One foot is still mired in the world of science and manuscripts and otters and the foggy glimpse of a kelp bed from my doorstep. The other is on the gas pedal of my own Rosinante with nothing but road and beagle and old friends and new friends ahead.  Clouding my world this week was the pain of pulling that anchored foot up from the safe and familiar and swinging it around with relief and gratitude to join the other in emprise. I say pain because there has been discomfort, confusion, and so many questions about where I belong and where I am going. But in the last days of this week, I was given the greatest boost I could imagine at this transition: collaboration with respected and loved colleagues on a fascinating and illuminating tidbit of animal behavior. I'll wear it like a fragrant flower lei around my neck into the next chapter, reminding me that where I've been was as beautiful as where I'm going. Thank-you to the muses of scientific discovery and to our own shared ingenuity for this bon voyage!

And so the balance shifts over the divide and the momentum pulls me forward, where I know I must go. It's all packing, and moving and camper preparation and the hugging of friends until the nestlings fledge and the TARDIS returns to Hollister and Emmy and her backpack begin the drive north.

She's got the urge for going, and she's got the wings so she can go...