On Friday afternoon, in the swell of the arriving heat wave, and while sitting in my open-windowed car in the parking lot outside Starbucks, I picked up my phone and called Red.
"Hey, you wanna get out of town this weekend?" I asked. "I was thinking of going to the coast."
She had been thinking the same thing, as it happens, and thought it was a great idea. The next morning we packed up her Ford Focus with a few overnight things and got on I-5 heading south out of Portland, with her behind the wheel and the air conditioning on full blast.
She had wanted to cut down 99W through wine country. I told her to take the Tual-Sherwood road as a shortcut to avoid the horror of stoplights in Tigard. In a half hour we were zipping past berry stands in the lush hills on our way towards Newberg and the coastal ranges beyond.
In addition to driving, Red was in charge of the music selection, something I was glad to let her do, using the Spotify list on her IPad. My musical tastes are incredibly feeble compared to many of my friends, upon whom I have long depended to enlighten me about great songs and artists. For example, I've shamefully never used Spotify or any such service. As we entered the narrow section of highway in the coastal hills, her play list had me tapping my foot and singing along to Joss Stone's "Fell in Love with a Boy", Dar Williams' cover of "Comfortably Numb," and "I bless the rains down in Africa," the last two of which I knew the words to.
Getting out to the coast from Portland is incredibly easy, if you compare it to, say, going out to Cape Cod from Boston and other urban-to-ocean day trip routes. It's yet another reflection of the slow-to-modernize, slow-to-populate character of Oregon that the highway that day wasn't jammed with more cars than it was. But in this case, the comparison was much in favor of Oregon.
In the passenger seat, I had the Oregon Delorme atlas in my lap open to the page for this section of the coast, like a treasure map. But this was only for fun and curiosity. I knew this route quite well. As we wound our way through the Van Duzer forest corridor, where the identifying signs along the road brought back overlapping memories of many trips to the coast over the years.
I reminisced to Red about how one time in college, on a sunny spring Saturday, my girlfriend let me borrow her car for a day to go back to my place and do laundry. It was a little BMW sedan. Once I had the keys in my hands, I couldn't resist taking it out on the open road and heading straight for the coast along the same route we were now driving. It is one of my most pleasant and vivid memories from my years in Salem, one that foreshadowed a lot of my life to come.
After twenty minutes of winding through the forest and the clearcut patches that had been recently logged (this is a "working" forest, after all), we came down the valley of the Salmonberry River and into Lincoln City, a place I had visited two years ago when I was looking for a job in the Portland area. I recalled sitting in the Starbucks there sending out resumes in response to Craigslist ads. One of them worked, as it happens.
Part of me always expects Lincoln City to look like it did thirty years ago---a working timber town with a lumber yard on the edge of town. Now there is a robust commercial strip of modern tourist conveniences catering to the flow of visitors from Portland.
I made Red stop in the quaintified, touristy downtown along U.S. 101 as it goes through town to peruse the stacks in a local used book store. The instant we stepped out of the car we could feel the cool swaddling breeze off the ocean, just a few hundred yards down the hill. That alone was worth the drive.
Perusing independent used book stores is one of my all-time favorite things to do while traveling around the country. Each one is unique its own way. It's part of my balancing act of how I spend money and time, granting myself permission to work out of Starbucks and stay at national-brand hotels.
In such places, I have to strictly limit myself in regard to the number the books I purchase. When I'm in the right mood, a few moments in either the foreign language or history section can leave me loaded up with a stack of prospective purchases, performing a triage operation on the floor to bring the number of books down to the level of "what I really have to have right now." I have to remind myself of the "Rapid City Massacre" last July, when I dropped over fifty bucks on an armload of books within twenty minutes of going inside, all while "just walking around downtown for a few minutes."
These precious purchases then wind up accumulating in the foot well of the passenger side of the Bimmer while I travel, making a mockery of my hyper-minimalist philosophy that I strive to keep for my mobile lifestyle. I tell myself "I'll just put them all in a postal shipping box and send them to my sister," who would happily keep them for me until I return to her place. But that never seems to happen. So now I tend to be much harder on myself as to what I let myself buy.
Tally this time around in Lincoln City: one trade paperback, a couple postcards for my nieces, and some indulgent snacks for Red and me.
Now the challenge will be: can I read the book straight through this time, as I say I'm going to do, to get the gist of it, instead of getting bogged down taking voluminous detailed notes in my tiny handwriting?
1 comment:
This is cool!
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