Over Santiam Pass

"We've entered the beginning of peak mind-losing," I said.

Rick liked the phrasing of it.

We were inside the little wooden hut, in the 8-by-8 room with the small classic wooden bunk beds. The door was open, facing out to the lake only a few feet away. I was leaning against the wall by the open door. From where I was standing I could see out the front door and across the water, past the little islands and the sunken dock, to the beach by the main lodge, and to the other side of the lake where the trees came down to the shore.

"Remember when we said this was going to happen. Now's it happening."

It was good to be out of the city. Once on the road on Saturday morning, I felt Portland rapidly slipping behind me. Once you turn off the Interstate south of Salem, and get past the little towns there and into the foothills, each mile up the highway towards the pass makes you feel like you are shedding cares. It had been that way a long time ago, this same road. Many years had passed, but it felt the same way, only more profound, with more at stake, although my own role in the world seemed so diminished in my mind compared to those days. Gestures of healing, including pilgrimages great and small, had manifestly deeper effects in the soul, the more one stripped them of the garnish of romantic pretension.

Now, up here in the Cascades, on the other side of Santiam Pass, in the deepness of the dry-side forest, in an old WPA-era camp beside an isolated lake, I felt blissfully unplugged. There was spotty Internet but someone had taken the hot spot router out of the camp office, back to their cabins, and it would remain unavailable all weekend. Cell phone reception was zero for my iPhone. No texts to other folks. They would understand.

I certainly didn't want to be connected to social media. It felt disgusting, to think about how connected I had become to that. I suddenly felt like a real human being again, the way one used to feel, present in a particular place and time on earth, before all this distributed hivemind took over. The frenzy of the world seemed suddenly so unnatural.

Standing by the doorway, twisting my torso and stretching limbs as I talked with Rick, I could feel how rotted my body had become in the city, even with the regular exercise of walking to work many times a week. The city had been a confinement in more ways than strict physical motion. Somehow it contracted one's range of motions on multiple levels in a subtle way that one didn't even notice, until it built up.   I thought of all the time I'd spent spending down in the city lots underneath the overpasses of the Interstate, checking out how the city works on that level, and immersing myself in a reflection of what used to be there, at various eras of time.

Now I was far away from that, in the paradise of salubrious nature. It felt awkward that my body was coming back to life. But it was a pleasurable awkwardness.

Then there was Rick, sitting on the chair next to his radio, by his miniature fridge. He would look up at me from time to time, and crack up, in a funny way, as if to say "How the f@ck did we manage to wind up here? How weird is this?"

It had been that way between us already, multiple times in our lives, when we would find ourselves in each others company in some new location, in an uncanny place that neither of us could not have anticipated by dry logic, but which made perfect sense in retrospect. This was merely the latest example. We'd gotten used to it, in a way. Each new twist seemed a breath of fresh air on some level---in this case literally.

I thought of the place where he had been living until January.

"Well it sure beats Fresno," I said. We laughed together.

On the way up to Santiam Pass. I-5 near Woodburn. Late Saturday morning, Fierce Saturday traffic getting out of Portland. A crawl getting off I-84 and going south. The storms were coming in fierce over the Valley when I got south of Wilsonville. I was lucky it wasn't raining all the way up. The downpour was mercifully brief while I was on the road itself.