Coast, Mountain, Valley
A slow roadtrip: California & Oregon & back.
A long overdue road trip with one of my best friends from high school, as compatible as ever. If diversity of experience is a good thing. and it is, our long friendship proves it. Destination option: Oregon, about 7.5 hour fastest. But that’s a stupid way to travel. A quick background on these two post-WWII Sacramento Valley kids. Picture the film “American Graffiti,” except my hotrod was a 1959 Ford Galaxy convertible. We skied on water in the summer and snow in the winter. Betty still skis; I quit in ’93.
Coast: Fort Bragg
Day 1_4-27: Sunday morning May 27. North past rice fields and nut trees. West over the lip of the bowl, the Coast Range, to the ocean and Eureka, the first of charming towns. This is commercial fishing country, all up and down the West Coast. Dungeness Crab, King salmon and more. Abundance in peril. A room at the sea too wonderful for just one night.
Day 2_4-28: It’s only now at the sea that I can open my brain after too many years of forced priorities: Covid, divorce, fear, politics, too much business, not enough creativity. Bottoms of feet in lush grass still cool from night, sun overhead, grass and Cypress bent from breezes, beach, waves, horizon, so much fresh air. One dead pelican.
6 pm: Sun far from setting, hot on my face, beach with river flowing to sea bringing driftwood in piles, high clouds, chapped lips, late lunch, wharf with fishing and private boats, nothing exciting to shoot except a field of yellow.
Brookings, Oregon
Day 3_4-29: Beachfront Inn, after a curvy drive through redwood and birch forests. Klamath River, newly wild again, wide mouth at the ocean, a critical thoroughfare for treasured Chinook salmon, to a room on a driftwood strewn, black sand beach–Chetco Cove. No sirens, choppers, texts, phones, streaming, audio podcasts or books, talking humans, barking dogs, lawnmowers & blowers, traffic. Just wave sounds all night long.
Alone on the beach except for one fly.
Watching the tide come in.
Day 4_4-30_11:30am: Listen. Breeze from the right, sun from the left, tide coming in at 3pm, sunset low tide at 8:14, 71 degrees high, 45 low, winds 14 mph NNW, down to 9 at sunset Called the front desk with a Freudian slip. “I’d like to extend for another 30 days,” I said. “I mean I’d like to extend for Thursday.” Fresh Dungeness right off a local boat, one glass white wine.
Day 5_5-1: Foggy day obscures two surfers appearing and disappearing. Sun hovers optimistically, casting feint shadows at best.
An eagle lands not 10 feet from me with something yummy in its talons, tearing at flesh. Two crows chase it away, look for scraps. This is what I wanted: sit on the beach and do almost nothing. Opening a real book–can’t make it past the intro.
Where are the shore birds?
Day 6_5-2_9:40am: It’s only on this 6th day that I can take my eyes from the sea and turn attention to endless flat rocks and worn drift. If there are no birds, there is no food.
An array of geologic color from iron to oxide, cad yellow, deep grey, streaks of quartz, granite, and serpentine (California’s official state rock). This is after all, the Ring of Fire, a subduction zone, tsunami zone. Road signs point to higher ground.
Weather coming, heading inland tomorrow, but first, Mount Shasta surprises us to the east, the last snow of the season until next year. First siting 1:08, and later at 6:30.
Mount Shasta City Park, a small pond terminus of fifty years of snow melt filtering down through volcanic rock to emerge as pure as water can be. Who can imagine that this unassuming pond is the honorary headwaters of the Sacramento River flowing 380 miles to the San Francisco Bay?
Day 7_5-3: Heading south a bit then east along the Redwood Highway, Oregon, California, Oregon, and south on California’s main north/south artery. Miles of burn.
Lake Shasta. Hundreds of houseboats await spring, jet boats, watercraft, booming speakers and human density. I can’t imagine summer fun, though it is a very large lake. The southern end boasts Shasta Dam and hydroelectric power. I wrote about Shasta for the Bee, but the link is gone.
Then south to home, past all that Sacramento River irrigated agriculture.
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