4. The Northwest

1450 854.6 drive 82F -> 61F

We headed for the north exit of Crater Lake National Park and were soon eastbound on 138, a cut through a tall forest, back to 97 on which we would head north.

We said we would try not to miss lunch tomorrow – or put it in a different time zone. He said, “What if I eat in all time zones?” I said, “You’d be fat.”

I commented to John that we needed to get control over our eating schedule. We should either eat regularly for our time zone or intentionally switch our schedule to another time zone. But, I was not feeling well because we were getting busy and skipping meals.

Soon John was napping.

Had to wait a long time for wreck to clear, maybe half an hour.

We came upon a big backup of traffic, the sort of backup that has people stopping their engines and getting out of their cars. And walking their dogs.

I didn’t write down when it started but we must have sat there for half an hour. I asked John if he’d ever been in anything like this before. “Yes, when we got the jaw bones.”

We had jaw bones from a coyote or some similar sized animal under our bedroom window that had come from just such a “let your kids out of the car to explore” stop in traffic like this once. That had been a long time ago. Had John even been four or five? Was that the trip through fifteen or sixteen states when we went by “the faces” (Mt. Rushmore) on the way home and stopped for John’s fifth birthday at Chuck E Cheeses in Denver? I didn’t remember if it was an accident or construction. Seemed like construction.

1600 905.3 82 Traffic moves after wreck stop

Finally traffic started moving again, slowly. There was some back and forth for a while as one lane from each side of the road was allowed to pass, but by the time we came to the accident scene, the threshold of a bridge, everything was cleared and gone

1650 932.3 La Pines DQ 88F $10.75

At nearly five in the afternoon we stopped for “lunch” (see “eating on schedule” above) at a Dairy Queen.

1723 drive 83

It was warm out as we continued up the road.

1800 called mom and Katy at 10 & 405 -> Joanne, dropped

rush hour in Bend, OR

We got into the rush hour in Bend, Oregon. As we left town on 97 North, we had lots of bars on the phone and called Viann, finding her and Katy visiting Joanne in the hospital in Santa Monica. The call dropped in the middle of a story, we had gone back out of range. No outdoor antenna for the cell.

Bend was big enough and had enough industry for a rush hour.

1815 Redmond 76 974.9 = 88736 85F full serve

$55.55 = 17.925 X $3.099

Stopped in Redmond for a fill up. Before I could get out of the car a kid was there to take my card, run it, and do the fill up. Someone also washed the windshield. When done, he knew how to press “no” for car wash and “yes” for receipt, something that had gotten me a few times in prior fill ups. Now that’s full service.

1821 continue

talked about ministry:

doesn’t know anything – needs a survey. Admires James, Kyle, Kristen, Joan.

Needs to learn a lot – and how to live on little.

This ministry makes a new relationship although Joan pointed it out in 3^rd grade.

I told the story of Pat Boone – then Debbie.

But – “Don’t worry about it dad. Nothing changes.”

Two weeks before this trip John had gone with the church youth group to Knoxville, Tennessee for CHIC, “Covenant High In Christ”, the triennial retreat for Covenant high school students. He had been asked to say something about it from the pulpit in church. He had related a few stories, including the one about Christ being like a moose and then said that he was one of those considering going into ministry.

I asked him what he knew about ministry. “Nothing.” Then why the interest? I pursued. Well, many of his role models had been his pastors at church and church had been a major part of his life. Thinking back I realized this was true.

He said he liked the speakers at CHIC who told stories and that he might want to be able to do something like that.

We agreed that he was in the “story collecting” stage of life right now, but that learning how to speak in public formally might be helpful.

Seeing that he really didn’t have much vision about what his next steps might be, I suggested a survey of many types of ministry. Thinking back, I realized he had already been doing this. He had been involved in children’s choir and youth band, had spoken from the pulpit more than once, had been with the youth to help at Church of the Redeemer in south central L.A. and had also participate in that group’s nights at the bad weather shelter that was hosted by our church. He was planning to go on the international mission trip with the youth next year, and had been in church and Sunday school as long as he could remember. Joan Reeve Owens, his children’s choir director and now music pastor for the church, had mentioned to me that he had ministry potential when he was in third grade. He had also been named Bank President, the top role in his third grade class at school, not necessarily a ministry role, but a leadership one.

It occurred to me that this new information meant a shift in our relationship. My image of John, my expectations, in part a reflection of my own image and expectations, would need to change. I’d need to think about this.

A useful skill in ministry was to be able to live on nearly nothing. I had not taught him this and was unlikely to. Maybe he should spend time with his grandmother who had spent her life living on very little, one of the costs of many ministries.

I told John the story of Pat Boone, a famous actor who had gotten rich selling Chevrolets when I was little. Then, as I was getting to be college age his daughter, Debbie, became a famous Christian music star. He quipped that he had gone on a long walk to think about the difference between being Pat Boone and being Debbie Boone’s father.

John said, “Don’t worry about it dad, nothing changes.”

He slept some.

Not tired of talking about stuff.

When he woke up I asked him if he was tired of talking about stuff so much. He said, “No.”

… ok.

1858 talked to Viann and Katy at hospital

Viann called back. They had worried when the call dropped and we hadn’t called back. Kind of like yesterday but the other way around. We were fine. They were still at the hospital.

1908 1002.9 Best Western, Madras, OR, Room 217

The next goal was Mt. St. Helens in southern Washington, but to get there today would break our rule of driving after dark. We decided to look for a hotel with a pool.

In Madras we were planning to switch from the Highway 97 to Highway 26 and proceed via Portland. Going to the freeway (I-5) appeared to be the only way to get to Mt. St. Helens from here, or possibly anywhere. Studying the roads through that region, it appeared to be fairly isolated.

Before we got to the Highway 26 junction, we saw a Best Western and pulled in. The area and the clientele looked blue collar. Three men were getting in a car, probably to go eat. Some people were in the pool. The young desk clerk was irritable.

We moved our stuff into room 217, on the end upstairs and went down to the pool. There was a sign with a long warning about not getting into the chlorine if you had dyed hair. I made a joke about this with a man in the hot tub who appeared to be older than I was. He didn’t get it. Back in the room on the computer, Google maps, from our APRS position, showed some interesting quarry-looking areas just west of town. We could see a high railroad bridge over a road going that way.

John made a friend in the pool – a freshman from North of Vancouver (OR?) here with his grandfather – looks like – and mother – at a camp digging rocks for something – has a lapidary tumbler (but didn’t call it that).

John made friends with a kid in the pool and, without learning his name, did find out that he was going to be a high school freshman at some Vancouver (Oregon? Washington? Canada? We thought maybe Oregon) this fall and was here at some rock digging camp. He had a device that I recognized from his description as a lapidary tumbler, a machine like a small clothes dryer in which rocks were tumbled to polish them against each other. He had hair down in his face. The man in the hot tub was with him, perhaps his grandfather. His mother, a rather large woman, was in another room upstairs, looked like 215. The boy wanted to stay in the pool until it closed at 10:30 but the adults, like me, were more interested in cooling off, calming down, and moving to the next restful activity, like TV watching.

I did a couple of the cold pool to hot tub cycles then gave up and went in to the showers. John stayed a while longer, talking to his friend.

Watched some TV – none of it all way through. Too hyper.

John would turn on the TV and flip around stopping whenever something looked interesting. Anytime a scene would get boring or turn sexual, he’d flip immediately before it got too steamy, or bogged down. Around midnight he turned off the TV and went to sleep.

He’s asleep now. I’m tired.

2006 August 4

We got up late, around 9:30, the latest of the trip so far. By the time we got to the hotel-provided breakfast there wasn’t much of anything left. It was being tended, loosely speaking, by another young woman. It looked like the whole hotel operation was run by five or six people who were about 20. Inexperienced to say the least, but the guy who checked us out was pleasant at least.

John wanted to go white water rafting. I got a brochure, hesitated, and kept it.

check out $98.99

1045 1002.9 88764 82F

1050 1004.0 Safeway 77F $49.01

We stopped immediately at Safeway for ice, and hamburger fixings. We’d known about “secret shopper” since Viannah worked at Von’s (owned by Safeway). Looking for three hamburger patties, we did a real “secret shopper” on them. You could buy them in boxes of 25, which we didn’t want. You could buy frozen pre-made hamburgers in ones or twos in another place. There were no individual patties anywhere. It took discussions with several employees in two places in the store to establish this. At last we bought a pound of ground beef and planned to make our own patties.

1142 drive 77F

This all had taken nearly an hour.

My history with girls

We continued talking about … things … while traversing the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. The Deschutes River gorge was quite deep. John took a few pictures while we rolled.

My history with girls

My dating history was so sparse that I could remember it all, at least in outline.

I just listed all the names to start. Sixth grade, Gwen Burns. Seventh, Debby Krenek. Tenth through twelfth, Susan Hight. Freshman homecoming at Baylor, Carol Holck. And there had been a few refusals, but I didn’t have the strength to relate much of that.

And then there was your mother, but part of our story was that we had never dated.

So, in sixth grade, this girl Gwen kissed me by surprise at the creek near her house. We were “an item” for about a week. As it happens, it was below freezing all week and my mother wouldn’t let me go over there again, though I was cleared to ride my bike that far ordinarily.

One week to the day later, she came out of class on somebody else’s arm. I think his name was Ronnie. She was snooty about it. I had ignored her. Later, somebody, maybe Ronnie, stole my flute out of the band room. We had replaced it with a used one before I found it, bent and smashed up, in a field between the school and our house.

This was all in Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Dallas, and all this drama occurred at John Ireland Elementary. Some good things had happened there too.

That’s where we had three types of drills: fire, tornado, and atomic. For fire, you evacuated the building in an orderly fashion while room monitors closed the windows and came out last. For tornado, you went out in the hall and crouched with your head against the wall between knees and arms. For atomic, and I always thought this was funny, we went out on the playground and were dismissed to go home. Presumably to go die with our families.

Anyway, we moved from there to Taylor. Robby was at Taylor, he ended up being salutatorian of his class. The valedictorian was Debby Krenek, daughter of an orthodontist. Neither Rob nor I could ultimately best her at anything though we were both quite competitive. For example, she played flute and always made it up to first chair while I made it to second or third.

Between eighth and ninth grade Debby and I had (incidentally and independently) attended Band Camp at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. I had also gone after seventh grade, but this year several others from the Taylor High School Band had attended. This was a generic band camp, not for our particular band or school but for whoever wanted to go to camp for a week.

Band camp was fun in many ways. We played like we were in college, sleeping in the dorms (under supervision of course), going to rehearsals, clinics, and classes, having evening activities. On Wednesday evening every year there was a dance and I wanted to take Debby to it. Stupidly, I allowed word of this ambition to get out and so any shyness I had had that might have motivated me to just stay anonymous and forget about the whole thing was no longer possible. Thirty people ended up setting up the occasion where I would “ask her” for this date, just before a sectional. I was at least clever enough to “pop the question” while most of them had not yet started paying any attention, kids always being more interested in whatever’s in front of their nose in the minute than the program at hand. She quickly assented, I think just in order to get it over with, and we both left the scene in different directions.

We had gone in a group of two or three other couples and had danced, more or less, and had sat around drinking punch while loud music played. There were some other names from the THS band and this camp…. Jack Rainwater, David Holloway…. I didn’t remember much else. Debby was a famous journalist now, living and working in brutal New York. She was up to it if anyone was, I thought, based on my own limited experience.

Then we moved to Hubbard where there was Susan. I didn’t have much to say about Susan. I had moved to town late, tenth grade. She picked up strays. She liked having me around as kind of a guaranteed date, but when anything better came along she was gone quick. She permitted no formal “arrangement,” except at her convenience, and then its extent and meaning was interpreted in whatever way she wanted. This lasted through the rest of high school. We went to both proms together. My parents were unhappy about the potential. Her father, Joe-Paul, was a great guy, but potential in-laws, as important as they might be, are secondary.

After graduating from high school I had gone to Baylor and in the process, as I had always done before when moving, had ended nearly all relationships in the old place, certainly that one, ditching all that pain and starting completely over. Susan was offended by this, but eventually married someone else, then divorced and married someone else again. She had four children now, late teens or beyond, in fact she might be a grandmother by now. And the chaos continued. Her husband worked in Missouri, but she wouldn’t leave her folks place out in the country between Hubbard and Dawson to be with him. She had a job at Baylor now; that was potentially inconvenient for me.

Carol Holck was a fellow piano major, a student of Michael Ard. She had played in Music Hour the first semester. I was not so honored until second semester, after it was determined that I was working out as a piano major after all.

My roommate David Dunaway had called Pam Bjork’s number at Collins Hall and asked if anyone within earshot of the telephone needed a date for homecoming. He ended up taking Viann in this way. Somehow I managed to ask Carol. We even went on a practice date to a movie or some sort of performance at Waco Hall the week before. She was tall, quiet, and nice, but she didn’t like Baylor; it was too large. In the spring she went to a smaller school closer to home, somewhere in the Midwest. At homecoming 1974, she had little to lose on a relationship at Baylor.

We went to the game. It was against Texas A & M. Baylor lost 20 – 0. This was the only game I attended while at Baylor (football or otherwise). It was the only game Baylor lost that year. They won the Southwest Conference title, the first time in 50 years.

My high school journalism and geometry teacher, Jack Cisco, had played on the winning 1924 team. When I saw him in the homecoming parade, I had run out in the street to shake his hand. That was the last time I ever saw him. From the middle of the street roommate David had taken me over to the steps of Penland to meet his date Viann (for the first time). She came out from her job in the cafeteria there for about a minute to watch then had gone back in.

I thought Carol and I had double dated with someone for dinner that evening. It might have been John Colson and someone I didn’t remember or it might have been David and Viann, but I didn’t think so. Or maybe they were in the same place but not with our party. I couldn’t remember anything else, or even this very well.

Viann dated many people during her first two years at Baylor. She and I never formally dated, we just went places together, beginning in the spring of our sophomore year. We had Psychology and Sailing (and Canoeing) classes together. Then we fell in love and got engaged, and after that did a little dating. But that was a different and much, much longer story.

1327 Wall Street Pizza, nearing Portland 1096.0

I thought we were in Portland, but we were actually in Sandy, which looked suburban to me. We looked for a pizza place and found “Wall Street Pizza”, a quaint, homey non-brand place run by three guys who looked slightly older than college age. It was late for lunch again, but we were inching back towards a normal eating schedule. John wanted a 16” pizza. We had lots of leftovers for our ice chest with the block of ice in it.

1415 drive $26.00 = $21.85 + tip

The deal with cars and driving, put him to sleep through Portland.

Katy was wanting a car of her own. I took this opportunity to rehearse my “costs and responsibilities of cars” speech for John. Looking over during the liability insurance portion, I noted that he was sleeping.

The costs and responsibilities of driving cars

Katy wanted a car. John did not want to learn to drive, but did want to drive, eventually anyway.

The main problems with cars are that they are expensive and dangerous. When you get into a car for any trip, across the country or to the neighbor’s a block away, it might be your last trip. This is a risk we take. Forty or fifty thousand Americans don’t come home from car trips every single year. That’s a hundred or a hundred and fifty per day. We all know people who’ve been lost in this way but it’s rare enough, and living without a car is so impossible the way we have everything set up, that we all take the risks several times a day.

Viannah was trying to set up her life on the east coast to where she would never have to own a car. Public transportation was better there. It might be possible. She had had tickets and wrecks, and a lawsuit from one of them that had just been settled this year. Like me, she would just as soon avoid dealing with all that by not being involved with automobiles. We’d see how it went.

But for those who do perceive the need of a car and aren’t troubled by these things my policy was to temper the freedoms of driving with the real costs. As each kid started driving I would ask the insurance agent what the difference was when adding them to my coverage, and I would have them pay that. This is only part of the cost of a car, but a major one, enough to get your attention.

The kids would see cars on the street for $800 or $2000 and wonder if they could buy them. “Do they run?” I would ask. Any car going that cheap has to have some story. “Do you have any idea what it would cost to get a car like that running, or keep it running for six months, or even get it to pass a smog test on the sale?”

Well, I didn’t either, but it was not going to be zero.

So, when you had a car, you had its initial cost, several thousand dollars, plus the cost of financing that if you borrowed to buy it. Then there was the cost of inspections and maintenance. Things would break, like a windshield or a window motor and require a bunch of money to fix. Or do without, but you couldn’t do without a windshield. Or wipers….

Then there was insurance, oh, and of course, gas and oil.

For the 1996 Astro that preceded this Safari, I had kept careful records over the hundred and four thousand mile life it had with us. It had been fifty thousand dollars and change, fifty cents a mile. People argued with me about counting things like insurance or amortization per mile, but I argued that I paid fifty thousand dollars for a hundred thousand miles, any way you accounted it, I had gotten a mile for every fifty cents paid.

This put the cost of gasoline in perspective. At that time gasoline was about ten cents a mile. Now it was around twenty, so the total was probably more like sixty cents a mile.

This put a bus fare of $1.25 for a ride of four miles, or twenty, in perspective too.

Yes, there were ways to reduce this. Buy used. Haggle with the mechanic more. The IRS only allowed thirty-two cents a mile, or now it might be thirty-four or something.

The costly miles rolled by under us….

Anyway, I was all for kids having cars, but I couldn’t afford to just provide them for free. Clearly you had to be bringing in good money to afford to own and operate the car that took you to work and back.

John was asleep.

[Editing note, 1/29/10, cbd. I had intended to trade that van when the 72 month / 100,000 mile warranty ran out, that is, about a month after this trip but it was cheaper to just keep it. It served in increasing decay for three and a half more years, to 116,444 miles total. Last month Katy was driving home from swing dancing with the car full of people (eight) when the right rear tire blew out and shredded. They changed to the spare and got home safely but that was the last straw. I just this moment got off the phone with Cars for Causes http://www.cars4causes.net/ arranging to donate what’s left to Elizabeth House http://elizabethhouse.net/ .]

1500 1093.0 80F Washington

John awoke briefly as we crossed into a new state, now on I-5 with lots of cellphone signal bars.

1556 1179.1 Mt. St. Helens Visitor Ctr. 77F

Wetlands walk

Taking the well-marked exit, we drove up to the Mt. St. Helens Visitor Center. The air was clear today and there was a pretty fair view of the mountain. It looked like there was a viewing area upstairs in the building, but it was just architecture. As it turned out there was not a publicly accessible upstairs.

The cost was $3.00 for 16 and up. John had less than 48 hours of being 15. I paid and got an armband. John got to be a kid.

We watched their movie and walked through their exhibits, learning about Mt. St. Helens, its history, its famous 1980 eruption, some of the personal stories of death and injury from that poorly predicted event. We bought a puzzle and postcards in their store.

Outside was a wetlands trail that advertised being a mile. With the camera on ready, we started down it. Soon we were on boardwalks walking over a swamp. I tried some flower pictures. Then the trail switched to an abandoned railroad grade, a little out of the water. Then it returned to built up boardwalks and led back to the other side of the Visitor Center. They were closed now and we were passing the employee exit and parking area on the way back to our van.

Some people were just arriving with fishing gear and cameras. I thought they might be locals who knew the fishing drill but their license plate was Alabama.

1831 drive – Toledo Vader

Right at the exit from the Visitor Center was a campground. A sign was up in the middle of the road, “Full.”

We drove back to the freeway. The exit for Highway 504 that we were on had two hotels. Neither looked good. The plan was to spend the night here somewhere, then go out to the actual mountain in the morning. This could be done on either of highways 504 or 505. I wanted to find a better hotel so we drove fifteen miles up to the 505 exit.

It was totally rural.

So, we drove east on 505, looking for town. The exit was “Toledo – Vader”. We kept chanting “Toledo Vader, Toledo Vader” (like Darth Vader). We came up to Toledo. There was a high school football field, busses, and students. No hotels.

Having “wasted” over half an hour, we went back towards the 504 exit.

1920 1215.6 hotel

1934 Room 212 Smoking 76F 1215.6

We were late arriving at Timberland Inn & Suites. There was a line at the check in desk. It was moving slowly. The overhang nearby was seriously, but only cosmetically, damaged, possibly by a recreational vehicle.

They had no rooms left except one smoking one. The people in front of me declined. I took the room. We went up and opened the door. It was a wall of old smoke smell. We turned on the air and opened the window. No pool.

No thumbs up, several signs. Another stopwatch….

Signs along the road were pictures of a hand with a thumb up with the universal “not” symbol over it. I’d seen dozens in the last couple of days.

“Ahh, no hitchhiking.”

John stopped another stopwatch.

Mexican Food

We shut the window and went to the generic no-name Mexican Food place next door. It was here just for this. The place seemed to have more adult supervision than we were used to, but we did train one waitress; it was her first night.

Talked about John being 3^rd like momma. And his son.

And my mother’s three pregnancies and the religion of life placement.

While eating we talked about John’s placement in the family. Third children seem to be more easygoing, at least judging from John and his mother. First children have it tough, they train their parents who over- or under-react to everything. Second (or “middle”) children have to fight for their space. Third (or “last”) children go along and get along.

My mother had had three pregnancies and had nearly died from the first, a tubular pregnancy. Dad had told the story that the doctor (Dr. Courtney Townsend, who also delivered me, breech) had told him that she had about 45 seconds to live when they operated. I never knew when that was exactly, but it was from Roxton to the hospital in Paris, so it had been at least a twenty minute drive into town and it had been sometime within the year or two before I was born.

All such events have profound and seemingly random effect on who we are and whether we exist at all. In the statistical way of looking at it, no one has hardly any chance of existing at all. Some think that there are “life forces” that exist separate from corporal bodies and are only placed after the physical bodies are established. This was a religious belief. All religions explain the unexplainable, the religion of science included. I didn’t really know what to think myself; it all seemed fantastic to me.

Played Cattan – he won 10-7

Viann works days tomorrow – probably cancelled

We played Settlers of Cattan again in another format. I was still losing.

We talked to Viann. She was supposed to work at Huntington tomorrow but thought she might be cancelled and hoped so. She was planning to resign, just needed to find the time to write the resignation letter.

Hotel number 360 274 6002 – earthlink 967 4001

Need a 6’ RJ-45 cable for rooms like this – and nail clippers.

I got on line and did my usual chores. Brief e-mail, check APRS; see where it thinks we are.

This room had high speed internet but in the form of “bring your own network cable.” The room in Madras had a network cable with a big instruction placard on it, making it undesirable to steal. I didn’t have my own network cable. Added it to the shopping list, and nail clippers.

2006 August 5

Went to the 9:00 IMAX show $12

The hotel was right next door to a big screen I-Max or I-Max-like theater. It was a different movie with slightly different treatment of the same Mt. St. Helens material. Outside there was an extensive gift shop. This was, I supposed, the “right off the freeway” for profit version of the official Visitor Center.

0952 1215.6 = 88976 65F $93.95

0959 1215.7 66F Shell $3.059 X 12.048 = $36.85

added air to all tires, high 20s to low 30s

1014 drive

Immediately after the show we checked out, filled up, and got on the way out to the vista at the very end of the road. There was a small slash in our right rear tire that I’d been watching. No problem yet, no change. All tires were about five pounds low so I paid $.50 to fill them up.

1119 1268.2 Johnston Observatory $3.00

At the end of the road, 50 miles inland, is Johnston Observatory, named for David Johnston, the 30 year old geologist who was on duty there when the big eruption had occurred in 1980. He was among the dead. He had been among those who believed that the bulge on the side of the mountain would result in a lateral blast but conventional wisdom, “established scientific fact” at the time was that volcanic blasts only went up from the top. This, despite other volcanoes in the world that had experienced side eruptions and looked very similar to what Mt. St. Helens looks like today.

This was an important official error. The red and yellow blast zones had been defined in terms of a projected upward eruption. Even then, the government had not taken the initiative to clear out even the red zone in places where it happened to be private property. Spirit Lake lodge owner Harry R. Truman had famously said that the mountain didn’t have enough oomph to have a big eruption. The lodge, most of the lake, and Mr. Truman were all now permanently buried under hundreds of feet of debris.

An amateur radio operator reporting from an RV in the red zone had also been lost, after giving a last report of the eruption in progress.

We learned all this while watching yet another movie about Mt. St. Helens and it’s recent history. When the show ended, the screen was pulled up to reveal a large window viewing the mountain.

I had paid $3.00 again to get in. John was still 15 today.

Several seismographs were part of the exhibits, as well as detailed versions of the stories I’ve just told and many others. The seismographs were live. John had learned that earthquakes and landslides registered differently and had learned to tell the difference.

We stood by for a ranger talk out on the observation deck. The mountain was only a few miles away and, we had been told, was reopened for hiking. The open side where the explosion had removed a cubic mile of rock was clearly visible as was a new cone forming inside. Barring other catastrophic eruptions, this tiny cone would eventually build up to another mountaintop similar to the one lost, in one or two hundred years. A little steam was venting, otherwise it was a very clear day.

We went on a hike to the east and saw guard rails heavily infested with termites. Some distance away was a granite monument to those killed in the eruption, about thirty in all. We scanned the names looking for people we’d read about or seen in the shows. Most names were not familiar.

One of the presentations had featured a vulcanologist who was worried that any of the ten or so volcanoes in the Cascades could erupt catastrophically in the near geological future, that is, possibly in our lifetimes. This included several mountains with much more development and population nearby like Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, even Mt. Shasta. Major events there would be much more deadly than the 1980 eruption of St. Helens.

This was all driven by the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate burrowing below the region, about seventy five miles deep at this point. I described Sea Floor Geodesy to John, a technique developed in part by my old boss Larry Young in which sonar devices were placed on the ocean floor which transponded to buoys with sonar and GPS on the surface. Some such had been placed off shore up here, on the Pacific side of the Juan de Fuca plate, to compare with other sites on adjacent land. I described how I’d been on one of the early Sea Floor Geodesy test runs, off of Catalina back in 1990. That was the trip on which two of the three sea floor transponders had failed, and we had circled the working one at two knots in “sea state four” for a couple of days. I had thrown up immediately on departure and hadn’t eaten most of the rest of the trip. For ten years, diesel odors had brought back the nausea. Ughh.

I thought about the middle-of-the-night earthquakes in the Los Angeles area. “If this had happened during the daytime,” commentators would say, “there might have been ten thousand people in that shopping mall.” How long would we be lucky?

saw an eruption, hiked around

other people heard “two distinct pops

The loop trail ended up back in the parking lot but John needed to go the restroom before we hit the road so we went back up into the observation area. The crowd was astir. There had been a minor event on the small cone. People had heard two pops then smoke started pouring out. I got pictures of our little “eruption” to match the “before” pictures I’d taken earlier. Fascinating.

1345 drive away amongst big and increasing crowd

1350 68F

It was Saturday and the crowds were building fast. Several tourist busses were arriving. We drove away, sudden experts on volcanoes in the Cascades.

1455 1318.8 80F stop in Toledo to consult map

listening to Saint-Saens 3 concertos

John fell asleep in 1^st movement of piano (4)

And awoke 1^st movement of violin (7)

As we drove back down the long road it was my turn for a CD. John pulled out the three concertos of Saint-Saens, Cello (Yo-Yo Ma), Piano, and Violin. The story on this one was that one of my classmates at Baylor, Mack Sawyer, had played the first movement of the piano concerto with the Baylor Symphony when he was a senior and I was a sophomore. I could still visualize the performance and, afterwards when our teacher, Jane Abbott, had stopped by my chair on the way out to say, “Your turn is coming up.” Two years later I would play the first movement of the Khachaturian Piano Concerto to close a similar concert.

Winding through the valleys scorched by the volcano, many of them replanted since 1980 (according to the roadside signs), John fell asleep just as the piano concerto started only to awake during the much less familiar, more edgy, and longer Violin Concert.

We took 505 when it branched rather than staying on 504 that went south where we’d already been. I stopped in Toledo to consult the map. I wanted to proceed to Mt. Rainier today without returning to the freeway if at all possible. It would have been possible to hike from Johnston Ridge to roads that would make this a much straighter trip, but there was no driving route. We cruised through town, seeing a police car parked on the other side of the of the river bridge. We saw many police cars and motorcycles on the trip. I was never in danger of being stopped. I was always going at or less than the speed limit, never being familiar with the roads or where I was going on them.

We pulled over for another long consultation with the map. I was on the Jackson Highway. This looked like it went up to Highway 12 without returning to I-5. That would do.

We passed airports, some of which featured skydiving. We passed by and over lakes, many of them with Saturday afternoon recreational enthusiasts on them in tubes, skis, and boats. Some were just swimming. At Morton we turned north on 7, a more winding road then, a few miles along, east again on 706 which passed many resorts on the climb to Mt. Rainier National Park.

1615 1386.- 75F Mt. Rainier NP $15

no camping spots in the whole park

Right there at the main (Nisqually) entrance it said “Campsites Full.” I asked anyway. How on earth could a person come to Mt. Rainier on a random Saturday some August not having planned the trip a year or two in advance so as to get a reservation for a campsite? The clerk thought probably not. The big Mazama-like campground was Cougar Rock with hundreds of sites and they had not called the entrance to tell them to take down the sign so there were probably no vacancies.

We paid our fees and drove into the park. The entrance had a very National Park like flavor. A big entryway made of logs, signs made of logs, narrow, crowded roads.

1642 continue around “Now you’re worried” (even John)

It was nine miles up to Cougar Rock, a long way to drive on these mountain roads on a long shot that we could get a site. I drove up to the station there and asked the college-age kid about the possibilities. Without a reservation there were none inside the park. Outside of the park there were several national forests with campgrounds that usually had some room for overflow. Also, outside the park it was permissible to put up your tent on the side of the road.

We discussed our options.

1734 1415.1 stop at box canyon

The big tourist attraction in the park is Paradise. Much of the Paradise area and its roadways were under construction. We took the one-way loop through the valley but did not stop. The visitor center there, and the lodge and other facilities, were situated in a very scenic spot with great views of the snow-covered peak above to the north. Doubtless the first site to be swept away in a 700 degree 700 mile per hour heat wave followed by a pyroclastic flow, I thought.

There was even a complicated shuttle bus schedule for those who wanted to go to Paradise but wanted to park elsewhere.

We drove along slowly, collecting a few new license plates. By this point we had forty-something states and were looking for different categories. For instance, “Do we have Oregon in a three unit jet-ski trailer?”

We stopped a few places for scenic pictures of the mountain and forests. John asked how much a billion was. Were there a billion trees out there? From up here maybe we could see a billion trees. I estimated. A billion would only be 30,000 square, that is roughly 30,000 on a side of the area. That might be a few tens of miles square. Yes, maybe. Certainly a significant fraction of a billion, like a few hundred million. We argued about the arithmetic.

This carried on through vast vistas and then we went through a tunnel and came out at a box canyon. Parking, we got out and walked on the bridge to see the creek 180 feet below and take pictures. There had been a box canyon at the Grand Canyon too. It was supposed to be the last three or four miles of the hike on the first day but it had seemed twenty-five miles long the day I was there.

1743 go on (to Seattle)

Going on down the road we thought we might just drive through the park and around the east end of the mountain, then go on into Seattle tonight. It wouldn’t be that far and the twilight was long here in the north. It might be possible without driving after dark, or we could just break the rule.

The road descended switchbacks with tight turns at the end of each. Cars would pile up behind me. I couldn’t go as fast as a low, road-hugging sports car, nor did I want to.

1840 drove through Silver Springs overflow

On Highway 410, we passed a campground, turned around and went back. The host said they were full but had some overflow space down in the picnic area by the river. We drove down and looked at it. Two tents were already up on the end and there would be space for one more comfortably in the middle. John was ready to go but I wasn’t. We left and continued north.

Now I was ambivalent, wanting to camp again but wanting to stay in a hotel again too.

Why does everyone say veeunuh (Viannah)?

Suddenly without provocation, John blurted out, “Why does everyone say veeahnuh when pronouncing Viannah?” It was irritating, a lifelong problem, training every person in the world one at a time to properly pronounce both Viannah and Viann.

I half thought about some answers but didn’t have the mental strength left to argue the points.

1856 The Dalles Campground, Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest Site 4 1454.0

nice pit toilets, use “Bounce” for de-oderizer

The next campground did have a few places. We paid one night and bought a bundle of wood. Although it wasn’t close to getting dark yet, we were on the shadow side of the mountain, so it was getting dark for us.

Neighbors blasting Rap. John is blasting Stravinsky “The Rite of Spring” and later “West Side Story”

We put up camp, got water, the usual things. A well-equipped outfit across the road from us had maybe a dozen people and was playing rap on a big boom box or worse. John knew the song, hated rap, got out his CD player and put on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” For the next most of an hour they were going “thump, chi-boom, thump chi-boom,” we were going, “whump Whump whump whump / whump Whump whump”. After that ran out, he put on the soundtrack for West Side Story.

Our camp lantern was malfunctioning, blowing out its mantels. I would have to work on this.

By flashlight, we divided up our ground beef into four patties and cooked two of them over the stove in the pan. I didn’t want this meat from Oregon to get old and dangerous.

The Dalles campground was on the White River.

2006 August 6 Sunday 56F

1530 = 0830 DSP-10 group on 3815 LSB 0846 QNI

W7PUA 55 Bob Strong

KD7TS 53 Mike

W7SLB 54 Bob 59 but Q3ish

W7LHL 57 Ernie –

Bob recommends Port Angeles route. Rest of coast is “boring.” Ferries can be busy. Reported N5BF-2 to them.

0902 QNF

I got up and checked into the DSP-10 net for a second time. They were calling for me every day, but I had only been able to configure for 75 meters on days of repose like this where we weren’t in a hurry to do something else.

I had good copy on the four guys who were there. Two of them were reading me. Man made noise levels are much worse in town where all of them were, then out in a campground on the east side of a big mountain, where we were.

The group was aware of APRS but had never used it. There were misunderstandings about the N5BF-2 reference, the APRS on-air address we were using. QNI means the time that I checked in. QNF means the end of the net.

Bob had more useful tourist tips.

Tore down the lantern and cleaned it. Shrader valve needs replacing and I don’t have one of them so don’t expect it to improve.

I didn’t have the part needed, something else for the shopping list.

Highway 410 is loud – especially motorcycles.

Our row of campsites was on grade and about fifty yards from the road. Occasionally a herd of motorcycles would go by, few with any kind of muffler.

1109 Success at the pit toilet!

Those sheets of Bounce hanging around everywhere made it nearly pleasant too.

Now going to have church and fix John’s bike.

Church. Matthew 5:1-12.

Poor in spirit

Mourn – dad

Meek

Righteousness

Mercy

Pure in heart

Peacemakers

Persecution

I gave John the assignment to read the Beatitudes for us. He got out his own student Bible for this. We discussed each one. What does it mean to be “poor in spirit?” Who is a “peacemaker.” We talked about what each seemed to mean, what we’d heard in preaching that they meant, and what we thought from experience that they meant.

When we talked about those who mourned, it brought up the memory of Virginia Thompson’s funeral at Henrietta. Virginia was 14 and on the way to a high school basketball game when she was killed in a car wreck. Dad had preached the funeral. He had sometimes told the story that he had been in the study, behind the pulpit, unable to go out and begin, when he felt someone behind him. He turned and no one was there. He had believed that it was Jesus who had given him the strength to carry on. I had attended that funeral. It had been a hard week on the whole town. I was eight at the time.

I started crying.

I told John about the process of mourning. When someone important is gone, you mourn. Eventually you get back to “normal” but it is a different “normal” from the one when they were there. To reach this, I had found that you have to do everything new, without them. Eat, sleep, go to church, have Christmas, go on a trip.

Once you’d done this, the new “normal” was established and you could go on, but you would always miss them. I was pretty much over dad’s loss now, in this fashion. It had taken about a year for me to get to the new “normal,” but there were always a few new things that would surprise you and bring up the mourning again. Conducting church in a campground for the first time since he was gone, for example….

Along the same lines, funerals are not for the dead, they are for the living. They are something you can do, inadequate though it seems, to begin to move along. All who remain here must move along.

1230 fix flat

We got the bikes out of the van. John’s had a flat. This was about the third flat in the last ten riding miles.

We had all the equipment, and the good pump, to work on this and so the flat tube (it had torn around the valve) was soon replaced and we were able to ride.

Ride all around campground in swimsuits. Wade in water up to knees freezing numb. Went up and down. Others there not “swimming.”

We rode all around the campground and came to a place on the day-use end that was close enough to the White River to get off and wade in. We had worn swim suits and sandals just for this possibility. (John always wore sandals, at least I had mine with me on this trip.)

The water was cold, snow runoff. We crossed a stream to an island in the middle of the river. Others were walking around on shore, bundled up though it was mid-day, collecting rocks and flowers and things. No one else was swimming or seriously wading.

We traveled quite a ways upstream like this, making several crossings then turned back and made them all again on the way back to the bikes. People were setting up picnics for Sunday afternoon.

End 1327 0:15:51 9.8 av, 2.61 12.81 4728.5 23.5 mx

This was my standard notation entry for the biking log. It had been 2.6 km, about a mile and a half.

Lunch – other hamburgers. Need mustard, ice, nail clippers.

We cooked up the other two hamburgers for lunch, discovering in the process that we were out of mustard and needed ice. … and nail clippers, yes.

John had been reading a book, Dairy, a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club. So, that had to be edgy. Finally he finished and gave it to me. He wanted me to read it and explain some things to him. I had started in, read the first few chapters here and there, but when we were in rooms the TV was too insistent and eventually the book ended up on the big pile with everything else by the bed at home.

1518 change -10 to mic-e, echo wide-2, 180 offset 40 enroute

Frustrated with the non-performance of N5BF-10 on 30 meters, but realizing that I couldn’t complain without starting a bevy of “you should have done thus-and-so” replies, I fired up the computer, connected the interface to the Tiny Trak 3, and changed the parameters. First, it was changed to a briefer binary format. This was supposed to increase the chances of packets getting through. Second, I changed the times of hour it would transmit. It had been on the 2s and 7s, that is :02, :07, :12, :17, etc. Now it would be every three minutes at 40 seconds past the minute. This was to prevent packet collisions that I thought I was hearing when I had been monitoring before.

So, we’d try another day of this then evaluate again.

1528 1454.0 80=27C drive

The bikes back in the car, and camp struck and reloaded, we drove away from the Dalles Campground. The plan was to drive into Seattle on 410 and start looking around. I wasn’t worried about finding a room on Sunday evening. John was navigating.