We left Waldport in the afternoon and headed south down the coast for a bit then turning inland at Reedsport. The road from Reedsport to I5 is one of the prettiest as it follows the Umpqua River through forests with trees arching cathedral-like over the top. There are pastoral farms with Black Angus grazing and bales of hay lying in summer blond fields. In summer, the river flows slowly though a wide bed of exposed, worn-smooth bed rock which has been carved into a plethora of two-dimensional mosaic landscapes. I am sure that there are many wonderful places to camp, fish, and tube along this section of river, but we have never explored it as we are always in a hurry to get to someplace more distant and exotic.
We connect with the freeway just north of Roseburg, a town whose only claim to fame is that it I was born there and a decade later it blew up when a semi filled with nitrate fertilizer caught fire. I don’t think the events were related. Lucky for me I was living in Medford at the time, but I do remember the radio reports of the explosion, the subsequent fire and something about a teenage girl with a bolt driven into her skull. But I was only 11 at the time so I am a bit fuzzy about the details. The citizens of Roseburg rebuilt the town, which managed to regain much of its former prominence, winning them recognition as Recovery Town, USA, at least until the lumber mills closed in the 80’s. Somehow it is still there today, but what people do there for a living I have no clue. It is just one of those places that Judy and I look at though the windows of the RV as we push on though.
Well after dark we stop for the night at a roadside rest area or Wal-Mart parking lot somewhere in southern Oregon or Northern California depending on how late we left Waldport, or more importantly what the weather is like. If it is summer, it is best to climb up the mountain pass out of Ashland, OR and park at the summit of the Siskiyou Mountains to escape the heat of the Rogue Valley. In the winter it is best to stop in Medford or press on through to Red Bluff, CA as it can snow like a bastard up there. Every few years it is bad enough that the freeway closes for part of day and every few decades people must abandon their cars before starvation forces them to eat their young. On this trip we spent the night in Medford and just made it up and over before they closed the road behind us. The snow had turned to rain by the time we got to Mount Shasta, CA and the lake beyond it, another one of those places we have always mean to visit but never do. South of the lake the sun came out and we were happily motoring through Redding, then Red Bluff, places that we never intend to visit.
The next 500 miles of I5 is not much to talk about. It is just plain boring. Better to take highway 99 which parallels I5 about 50 miles to the east. That route is mostly freeway but at least you get to look into the back yards of poor Latinos who eke out a living as field menials or in the fast-food joints that pollute the high rise downtowns of cities that seem to erupt pimple-like from the surrounding corporate factory farms. I am sure that there are lots of really wonderful things to do and see here, but then I am just sure that there are lots of wonderful things to do and see in colorful and exotic Kazakhstan, a place I also never intend to visit.
I drive on and on in silence. The only thing that keeps me going on stretches like this is Judy’s stimulating conversation, driving suggestions, and her pointing out various scenic roadside attractions.
“Look there, that guy is taking a dump by a tractor!”
I snap fully awake. Was she just testing me to see if I was really listening or hearing the wha-wha-wha that some husbands do after years of marital bliss? Nope, there really is a guy squatting with his pants around his ankles not 10 yard off the freeway. Oh! The scenic wonders of Central California.
Heading east into the Mohave Desert we pass through Barstow, an oasis in the sand. I have seen lots of cities and towns over years that had a moniker of fame: Detroit, ‘The Motor City”, New York, “The Big Apple”, Reno, “Biggest Little City in the World”, Waldport, “Wife Swapping Capital of the Central Oregon Coast”. For Barstow it would have to be “Not Much, Move On”. It looks like the kind of place that even the guy in the old cartoons who is marooned in the desert and crawling on his belly would pass up.
Next on the route we pass Needles, CA and are amused by a billboard offering “lubes and laities”, now there is a specialty shop you don’t run into on a daily basis. There was also a billboard advertising “vasectomy reversals”, at which I comment to Judy,
“Well dear, it is Needles”.
Judy groans at that one, then gets that misty look in her eye. Twenty-six years ago after number two and in the ninth month of gestation on number three, I caught Judy in a moment of weakness. She gave me permission to have myself fixed. I had been unsuccessfully lobbying for this for a bit as I thought that three was more than enough and being that she had the Ogden fertility gene in her, no half measures were going to work. I probably would not have succeeded on my own but LoriAnne was kicking her in the bladder using the “in utero” school of karate, causing Judy to wet herself, so she reluctantly agreed. At the time I was in grad school and Planned Parenthood was having a garage sale on the surgery; $20 bucks and a lecture. I wanted to skip the lecture and go right to the snipping as I had seen these kinds of deals before where they lure you in with a cheap price then switch you through high pressure sales into a more expensive option.
“For just $10 bucks more, we will provide for you a surgeon who has actually done this before, and if you decide right now, free color photos of the procedure will be thrown in at no extra charge”!
But as it turned out the lecture was low key. They just wanted to make sure that both Judy and I knew what we were getting into. The instructor took one look at Judy as she waddled into the room, found out this was to be our third, and zip the lecture was essentially over. We both signed a piece of paper, I wrote out a check for the $20 bucks and two weeks later I was shaving my own balls, wishing I had taken the naked Japanese nurse option. The surgery went well, I felt almost nothing, and as a bonus I got to listen to the doc and his assistant as they pulled and bisected my vas deferens, discuss the current status of OSU football which seemed to entertain them and also served as a supplement to the numbing effects of the local anesthetic. I am happy to report that the surgery worked as we had no more biologicals, although we adopted Delda later. However, I did spend the next week or so defrosting frozen peas as there was a bit of swelling due to my pretending that nothing had actually happened to my hangy down parts for a day or so after the surgery.
Judy, as it turned out, was not pleased with the finality of my sacrifice, as a few days later while holding our still wet daughter, the first word she said to me in the delivery room was “reversal”. Lucky that neither I nor the OBGYN was holding LoriAnne at the time, as we would have dropped her.
Passed Needles we go through Lake Havasu and I was am not impressed. Moving a bridge brick by brick from London to that place had to have been the pinnacle of a-fool-and-his-money-soon-parted cliché. What made it even worse is that we drove out of the way just to see it. We were idiots and knew it.
The highlight of this leg of the trip had to be Death Valley. Our first stop was Scotty’s Castle which is not really a castle nor was it owned by Scotty. Death Valley Scotty was a con artist who sold fake gold mining claims to eastern greenhorns. One of them, Albert Johnson, a sickly Chicago insurance magnet, got suspicious as the only mineral product coming out of the valley at the time was borax. I have no idea what the hell you use it for, but it must be pretty bad ass shit as it took teams of 20 mules just to move it. Eventually a suspicious Albert came out west to meet Scotty and check where his money was going. Scotty must have had a real gift as Albert liked him so much, even though he had to know he was being conned, he built a vacation estate in the hills above Death Valley and moved Scotty in as a permanent resident and story teller to his house guests. Years later Albert’s wife, Bessie, who was so religious that she gave weekly sermons to household staff, died in a car accident on the way to the castle. Albert lost interest in the property and willed it to a religious foundation with the stipulation that Scotty, who must have been the antithesis to Bessie’s religiosity, could live on the property as long as he wanted. Scotty died in 1954 and the church sold the estate to the National Park Service in 1970 which now gives guided tours for a few bucks. The tour was a lot of fun and the tour guides dress in period costumes which enhanced the experience.
Death Valley itself is awesome. It is probably one of the few places on the planet where you are standing in one of the driest places looking up 10,000 feet to snow on the mountains that tower over it to the West. Funny thing about Death Valley is it is not really dry. There are numerous springs and bogs and creeks in it, however, the water is saltier than the sea. To me the saltwater creeks were especially fascinating. Judy and I followed the meanders of one of these looking at the fish and salt tolerant plants that live there. We hiked into one of the many small canyons that cut though the soft rock surrounding the valley floor but turned around after a mile or so as it was obvious that it was going to go on for miles. We camped for the night near Furnace Creek, the only “town” in the Valley which has a store, hotel, and apparently even a bar.
The next morning, I was up at dawn as our dog, Hannah, woke me up doing the poo-poo dance. When we primitive camp I just let her out and go back to sack-city for another hour or so, but we were in an organized campground with camp hosts and rules about dogs and leashes. I got out of bed, put on my socks, sweats, and shoes, which is my usual fashion statement, got a leash on the now desperate Hannah, and got her outside. Once outside Hannah of course totally forgets about her full bladder and begins to smell everything in leash radius, while I beg her to hurry up as the cool air on my over filled bladder has me doing my version of the poo-poo dance. After what seems like a half hour, Hannah finally does her thing and I begin the process of dragging her back to the RV so that I can relieve myself. Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with using the world as a urinal, however, I have an inkling that campground hosts even in this God forsaken desert, prefer that you use a toilet. I still might have done it but being that this was Death Valley there were no convenient groves of tree or even bushes for concealment. Although it is theoretically possible to piss in public without concealment, I have not yet mastered the Papa Day (Camp Safety?) public urination technique which consists of waving both hands over your head as a distraction while wiggling your ass back and forth to break up the stream. Anyone looking in your direction from a distance would assume that you are a member of some bizarre religious cult and immediately head in the opposite direction, and even if they did figure out that you were pissing, would assume that this was part of the religious rite, or that you were fucking nuts and quicken their pace. Brilliance! Even though I occasionally practice the method, and have the hand waving part down, my ass wiggling must be missing something as I always manage to get more piss on me than the ground. Perhaps circumcision would improve the aim of my no hander.
Deep into my “must relieve myself quickly” thoughts, I get the prickly uneasy feeling that we are being watched. Above us on a bluff is a coyote the size of a large German Shepherd. Later while talking to our campground host, I found out that this was a common site and that it was likely that the coyote was watching for an unattended pet to pick off for its breakfast, and being that this was a national park, they could get away with it as they, and not your pet, are the protected species here. From the size of the coyote I saw, there must be a lot of nutrition in poodles.
We had one serious problem in Death Valley. We had a motor home. RVs and all other two-wheel drive vehicles are not allowed on the side roads where you can really explore the area. Although we had enjoyed our visit immensely, we were not allowed to partake in the off-road, jarring your kidneys loose fun of a one-way road full of ruts and boulders. Right then and there Judy and I decided to get a tow vehicle for the RV. This by the way is the real reason I own a 4 X 4, and not the made up one I gave you back in my Angel and the Badlands blog.
No sooner had we gotten back to Oregon and I was surfing the web looking for 4 X 4’s. It was time to replace my beater work car, an 87 Nissan Sentra which leaked around the driver’s door so badly that I had to drill a hole in the floorboard for a drain. But what to get? Judy wanted an SUV, but these were running around 30K at the time, most were too heavy for my RV to tow. My first car was a ‘51 Jeep and as I still get a tear in my eye thinking about the day I sold it; Why not a Jeep?
On a rainy day the next fall we were in Portland looking at Jeeps. We picked up LoriAnne to direct us, who was then safe and happily divorced and living in the area. Stopping at a lot that sold new Jeeps we soon attracted the attention of a young and hopeful sales shark who guided us to just what we were looking for, a new, cherry red, Jeep Wrangler with a hard top. Perfect! I had a dream of exploring Death Valley the way it was meant to be explored, four wheeling at Baja rally speed, in air-conditioned comfort with the “Stones” on the MP3 player at full volume. Unlike Mick Jagger, I was going to get satisfaction!
Judy being a bit more practical when it comes to things that I want, first wanted to test drive it. She opened the passenger door and started to climb inside the cab. Judy is short and a bit on the round side, earning her the nickname Short Cakes. She managed to get one leg up and into the cab. She hung there for a bit bouncing on her grounded leg while trying to pull herself up the rest of the way, getting first her hands, then arms to the elbows inside the door. Somehow, she managed to get her other leg and head in the cab as well, but her well rounded posterior was still hanging out into space and looking sort of like the Jeep was trying to blow a bubble of Levi flavored gum. With near Herculean effort Judy managed to get the rest of her body into the cab and landed with an audible smack on the seat which according to her was a vinyl covered slab of concrete. LoriAnne and I were snickering under our breath by this time, trying to hide it from Short Cakes, which made it even funnier. Reversing her action, Judy tried getting out of the Jeep. She managed to swing her legs out, then while trying to let herself down to the pavement the back pocket of her jeans snagged the door lip, suspending her in still a foot shy of the ground. She wiggled and jiggled for a few seconds till the pocket gave way releasing her to fall flat on her ass in a rain puddle. I was trying not to laugh so hard that my eyes were tearing but totally lost control when the salesman said,
“Shall I start the paperwork?”
To which Judy replied in a matter-of-fact voice, “Does it come with a hoist?”
So that is the reason why my first 4 X 4 was a Ford Ranger. It was less off road than a Jeep, but has bigger doors, a running board, cushy seats, and for Judy’s sake was a bit closer to the ground. So, my dream did not come totally true. Sometimes dreams are impracticable, but I did get AC and the mandatory MP3 player. Sadly, we never made it to Death Valley with the Ranger. By the time we got back we were pulling a travel trailer behind a diesel Ford F-250. It was 4 wheel drive and we did off road with it. But that is a scary story for another time. Hope Steven King can read that one.
