When I left Portland yesterday morning, downtown was socked in with fog. The streetcars were noisy out my motel window. I walked out to get coffee and had to pick my way through a crowd of bundled up workers getting off the train. By that time I'd already put in a bunch of work, answering emails.
As I sat in the coffeeshop looking out into the grey city, I felt a complete happy inertia. I could have been perfectly happy just staying in Portland through the holidays, in the same lazy way that I had simply kept extending my stay in Santa Barbara last December, and then meandered down the coast to San Diego. There is something so nice about just letting yourself go on cruise control this time of year.
But that wasn't my plan, of course. The road awaited, even if I wasn't so keen on getting underway, and the many miles that lay head, over multiple days.
I drove out to Troutdale, on the east edge of Portland, and put in a few more hours at the day job at a Starbucks. I checked the oil in the Bimmer, topping it off with some STP, following the advice of Luther Hune, the octogenarian in Marieta, Ohio who had saved my car the day in overheated in 2008. Later that evening he invited me to dinner at the VFW. I wonder how old Luther is doing, if he's still around.
Then I drove across the street to the Shell station, telling the woman in the orange safety vest to top it off. It was the first time I'd put gas in it since early October. That's how little I'd driven it lately.
I headed up the gorge on the Interstate, where the road winds along the very edge of the river, which was slate grey under a sky of the same color. The clouds were so low that you couldn't even see the tops of the cliffs above.
Then just as I got to Hood River, about an hour later, all at once the sky cleared. And by all at once, I mean just that. Within a quarter mile on the freeway, the sky went from completely overcast to clear blue. The river was sparkling blue as if it were mid summer---even better because the leaves were off the trees allowing a better view. The cliffs on the Washington side were like a post card.
By this time the Bimmer had warmed up. It takes a while on the road, but when it gets into its groove, there is nothing like it. It's a whole different kind of experience to drive it.
I was glad I was on the road. Inertia is like that, isn't it? Newton's First Law doesn't really apply to human beings, as I used to tell my class back in Austin. It only applies to passive matter, which has no volition of its own. If it's valid in any respect in regard to human behavior, it is by analogy alone, of course, as so many things in physics are. Sometimes that can be a hindrance, when you are trying to understand mechanics. Momentum and energy are, after all, terms coined by physicists for measurable, observable quantities. But everyone uses those words before they ever study physics.
But it's fun to invoke those rules in a popular sense, isn't it?---a body at rest...a body in motion. Sometimes it seems like the perfect thing to say. And it certainly was a good metaphor for my state of mind yesterday afternoon, as I raced up the gorge in the Bimmer, weaving along the base of the cliffs, heading towards east The Dalles. Even when I got there, and was hungry for lunch, I really just wanted to keep going.
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