Hangin' out in Walla Walla…and on to Portland.

As I mentioned before, I settled in Walla Walla for a couple weeks and rested after the 2500 mile trip down from Fairbanks. Visited with family, took the kids out for dinner and drinks a few times, and got some minor work done on my RV. Like replacing the bad tires, repairing the awning, removing a large window to clean up and replace the seal around the outside, etc. Most everything in or on the RV works fine but this is a moving house so there are always those repairs that need to be done.

Right now, I have a non-working heater in the pilots & passenger area, the CB antenna is always whipping into the frame whenever there is a slight wind, the oil gauge doesn’t work, there is moisture between the panes of a couple of my windows, the cruise control stopped working on the way down, etc., etc..

So I worked on some of those items until the wanderlust set in and I felt the need to wander on to Portland. I lived in Gresham, an east side suburb of Portland, for 20 years and developed many friends there. This trip to visit them, after two years in Alaska, would be, it seemed to me, a chance to catch up and renew the bonds I had with many there.

It was now Sept. 23, 2009, got together with the kids for a dinner and some night time carousing in the local bars. Couple of nights later went and heard Mush sing at a deli. She was able to get them up off their duffs to dance.

Had a great night, didn’t find anybody to talk to but that’s OK. The music was good, the beer great, and the crowd interesting.

When Oct. 5 rolled around, with my feet itching badly, I got back on the road and headed for Portland. I’d already called TJ and arranged to visit her at her place. She’s in a wheelchair because a few weeks before, she’d stepped over a low fence, hit the ground wrong and ended up with a broken heel. She tells me that it’s one of the most difficult items a human can break, because it just does not want to heal properly, even when you do things right. Given that they had had to cut out some bone and insert a cadavers bone in the slot to help it become strong & heal faster didn’t help keep her out of the wheelchair. That’s how serious the injury is. She lost her job a few months before so this didn’t help her economic situation either. Luck intervened on her behalf and the company that made the machine she needed to keep the wound clear, clean, and healing, donated the use of it to her, along with all the supplies she needed, free.

Anyway, on Oct. 5rd, I left Walla Walla and traveled up the ‘Gorge’ as we call it. It’s the Columbia River Gorge and much of it is a National Scenic Area. Since I have lived in this area for so long, and traveled this road so often, I’m kind of bored with it but I did manage enough enthusiasm to take a few shots as I headed due West.

I took a short detour to Pendleton, Oregon.  Famous for the Pendleton Woolen Mills, and the Pendleton Roundup, this area has miles of fertile bottom land of which nearly every inch is farmed. Off to the east are the Blue Mountains. Dry and lightly forested, they are mostly just large bumps when compared to the Rockies, which are further east. I would eventually cross both ranges if I stuck to my plan of visiting Taffy in Illinois before going to Mexico.

Note that Pendleton is not really a very large town, it’s world wide reputation for wool products and the rodeo make it seem larger. Back when I lived in the Tri-Cities and then Walla Walla, we all referred to it as a cow town. More farmers and ranchers then businessmen could usually be found on the streets.

About an hour later, the highway parallels the Columbia River. Once a mighty ribbon of blue all the way from the headwaters in Canada to the Pacific, now it’s just a series of placid lakes. Dam after dam sucking as much energy as possible out of it. A series of parasites, massive, gray parasites.

———Flashback Alert—————–

One Saturday morning, when my brother and I were kids, I remember dad walking into the house from working on the car, announcing that we were all taking a trip. Ready to get away from boring old home, the four of us, mom, dad, Dan, and I, piled into the car that seemed to break down all too often, mom grousing that we could not afford trips like this on the spur of the moment. I think this is one of those things that turned me into a spur-of-the-moment guy. Or it’s in the genes. We traveled the two lane road from Kennewick, Washington, which coincidentally passed just a block from our house, to Umatilla. We usually stopped in Umatilla because in Oregon, kids are allowed to accompany their parents into the bar and play pool, at least they could if the bar served food. But we didn’t stop in Umatilla like we usually did but headed West out of town, soon passing through Irrigon, and then miles later we stopped at Celilo Falls, Oregon. Here where the Columbia narrowed to only 250 feet, there were falls. Probably higher then 25 feet, they were spectacular. On the Oregon side where we had stopped, there were natural channels where there was mostly swift & roiling white water. White water foamed the surface along the channel as it met underwater rocks and pushed it’s way upwards, but always headed down, down to the sea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celilo_Falls

There were many channels on both sides of the river that the Indians had fished for several millennium as it represented to the fish a safe and easier way up the falls. The Celilo Indians and other tribes had rights to take as much salmon as they needed from here as part of their 1855 treaty. The Indians that were fishing that day stood on rickety wooden contraptions that seemed suspended by magic over the raging water that cascaded through the natural and narrow channels. It seemed they would fall into the raging water anytime the fisherman moved this way or that as it swayed from his weight. As they stood on their platforms, not trusting the railings, they lazily dipped their long poled nets into the water, or simply stood them on the bottom waiting for a passing fish to blindly swim into it, occasionally scooping up nothing but thousands of water drops falling from the net like diamonds in the sun as they moved the net to a more promising site. But once in a while, amid the thunderous noise from the falls all around, a shout would go up as a fisherman raised his net in triumph,  displaying his catch to all the others, then gingerly passing the net to a partner standing at the entrance to the platform, who would grab the flapping fish with wild staring eyes by the gills and hoist it out of the net. The women busied themselves on shore working at filleting the fish quickly then hanging the carcasses to dry on wooden racks. Many were sold to passersby who had left their cars, like us, to enjoy this assemblage of humanity surrounded by ancient history. We stayed there for a couple hours watching the fishermen and women do their chores, like they and others like them had done for over 25,000 years. And, at Dads insistence, trying to absorb a soon to disappear tableau of ancient life.

Dad had told us on the way down the river that these people wouldn’t be doing this much longer as the Dalles dam would soon fill this area, and the fishing channels, with slack backwater. The fish, if they could get past the dam, wouldn’t need to seek out the slack water here in the channel, but could take any route, the fishing here by net would die out, unworkable. And that, it turned out, was the reason for this trip, Dad had traveled this route for 20 years and loved the river in it’s wild state. He hated that the dams going up along the river would ruin it forever, as he told us several times on this trip. And he showed us why a few miles further along. There crossing the river was the largest & widest fall I’d ever seen in my young life.  The Dalles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalles_Dam

The dam was undergoing construction but there were still cataracts to see and enjoy as none of the rivers water went over the soon to be completed spillgates. The power of the river here was amazing as the riverbed dropped 50 feet in just a couple miles. Two miles of white water foamed over the surface.

We spent another couple hours looking at the mighty cascades while Dad cajoled us to never forget how they looked as they would never be seen again…at least in our lifetimes. Then we went home, and did not return for a couple years at least. When we came back, to see how it had changed, it made all of us sad. There are now no cascades along the entire length of the Columbia in the US where before there were thousands. The Columbia is now just a series of slackwater lakes, slowly filling up with silt. And here is something I learned years later as an adult. Up in central Washington is the Grand Coulee Dam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam

This dam was designed and built during the depression and on into WWII. There was no provision for fish ladders made in its design. There was a species of fish, the Emperor Salmon, that was so big, averaging over 150 POUNDS that over the 25,000 previous years, only one tribe along the Columbia had learned how to catch it. Those fish traveled another 800 miles up the river to their spawning grounds. When the dam was built, without a fish ladder, several species of migrating fish died out. Including the Emperor, which for 5 years after the channel was blocked, put on quite a show for tourists as they fruitlessly beat themselves to death at the base of an impossibly high dam trying to sail over it. As far as I know, no one collected eggs or sperm from these fish. And I’ve never met anyone that lives in the Pacific Northwest that even knows they use to exist. Imagine if you could go to the fish market and buy a 150 lb fish, have it cut up into steaks, put it into your freezer and serve it for meals for months afterward. A natural resource lost to shortsightedness. Imagine if you could just see several of those fish jumping over the cascades at Celilo Falls. Bigger then the average man.

Over 1,000 miles of spawning areas were now devoid of salmon and several other species, thanks to the blindness & ignorance of our ancestors. Sometimes I think it was willful ignorance in order to destroy the Indian culture and people. And 10’s of thousands of Indians that depended on them fell on hard times, and some tribes came to extinction, like the fish they loved.

——————Flashback over————————–

The trip from Walla Walla to Portland takes only four hours so I arrived near TJ’s place early in the afternoon. Since we’d planned a trip to Seaside, and it had morphed into leaving the day after I arrived, I just stopped at the nearby Walmart to pick up a few things, then went to visit with her. She quickly organized a mini-party and called her sisters (and my friends) sweet Jackie and Ronnie to have them join us for dinner and a beer at ‘Wings’.

I’d learned that Jackie was preggers a couple weeks earlier so I had to rub her belly.  She was showing a little.

The place wasn’t that comfortable. Too tall bar stools, no carpet so it’s very noisy, over priced everything, hot wings that had very little meat on them, and so many TVs on and showing different games that it was hard to concentrate. I wanted to talk to the girls anyway…but it was so noisy that it was hard. Not my kind of place.

Got to talk to everyone a little so that was fun, but I’d rather have gone to a little lounge with a quiet stereo and fewer TVs.

The above shot was after I’d started to take her to the bathroom, I was feeling the beers and started out too fast, bonked her broken foot into the table, so she shooed me away and had Ronnie wheel her around. No spirit of adventure.

The barmaid and I got really close very fast. I offered to take her out after her shift and she told me to come get her at 11. I was already with 3 women and as much as I wanted to comfort her, she seemed to need it, couldn’t extricate myself from my happy reunion with the girls. Harrumph, disappointment.

That night I stayed at Theresa’s place, leaving the rig in the Walmart parking lot and keeping my fingers crossed that no one would feel like robbing it. Since she lives in a double wide in a mobile home park, and no parking is allowed overnight on the private streets, I had to leave it there.

The next morning, after breakfast, I head over to Walmart, do some more shopping, then just hang around, waiting for TJ to be ready to go to Seaside with me.  Something else we’d planned over the preceding couple weeks.

We finally left around 2:30pm arriving in Seaside round 4:30. Stopped at the local RV park and reserved a space for two nights. Then we headed back into downtown Seaside. Parked the rig in a large public parking area and rolled her to our favorite bar, BC’s.

The weather was a little chilly, sometimes cloudy sometimes sunny, but for the couple days we were there on the coast it was quite pleasant. I walked around in short sleeves most of the time, but carrying a jacket was necessary.

We’ve been here to Seaside many times over the years for a couple reasons, we like each others company, and we love Seaside. One of the neatest coast towns in Oregon. It has a tourist style of downtown with plenty to buy if you’re looking, lots of good places to eat with many nice little bars and a couple fancy lounges.

Since it was already getting dark after our first beer, we didn’t walk (or roll in her case) around much the first night.

We like BC’s allot. This little bar is just a block off of the main drag in downtown, and a few years before there was a dog who worked here as a bar-dog. What would happen is, you would walk in and sit at a table. Bartender would yell out, ‘What can I get you folks’. You would call back your favorite beer. A couple of seconds later a dog, German Shepard, would show up at your table with a beer in it’s mouth and upright it on the table before releasing it and trotting off to get the next one you’d ordered. He could do unopened cans and bottles but not wine in a glass (snicker). A few seconds later the dog comes back and sits, looking at whoever ordered the beers. We are sitting there laughing about the bar-dog when the bartender tells us to just give him a dollar and see what happens. So I hold out a dollar. The dog growls and refuses to take it. Then I hold out a five, the dog grabs it in his mouth and trots up to the bar, jumps up with forepaws on the bar and drops it for the bartender. Brings back the paper change. Then trots off to the next customers. The bartender yells out that he’ll bring the silver later, but the show was so great, we just had him keep it. Saw this dog in action several times when I was down in Seaside.

Well, the dog is long gone now. The owners tried to train another dog to do the same things but it never took. But those memories keep us coming back to this little bar. Gone but not forgotten.

After hanging out downtown for a couple hours we head back to the RV park and set up. Didn’t want to get there too late for fear that we’d wake the neighbors so we got back around 10pm.