Glorified Bathrooms and Legal Advice
I wake up at 5am and wonder why. Oh yeah, because it’s 8am on the east coast and I’m usually up at 6am to teach cycling classes. I silently thank the powers that be that I don’t have to motivate anyone to move this morning but myself and I hop out of bed, lace up my sneakers, and go for an early morning walk around Corin’s neighborhood. Spring has just arrived to Portland and the streets are paved with cherry blossoms.
I stroll through residential side streets, past the famed Blue Star Donuts, and past an apartment complex that has both an in-building gym and an in-building music studio. Is that normal here? In Philly, we barely have a regular trash pick up day.
I gently wake my mom up at 8am with a soft-voiced, enthusiastic rendering of the day’s packed agenda. She mumbles something incoherent and pats my arm. So much for not having to motivate anyone to move this morning. My mom is notorious for her skill in sleeping in and while I certainly don’t want to deny her an opportunity to hone that skill we have a lot to do today so I give it one more go. Much to my surprise, she is up and dressed in fifteen minutes. This is… unprecedented. Seriously. I can’t overstate how shocking this is.
We say our goodbyes to Corin and co and head out for the Colombia River Gorge, a swath of nature 45 minutes east of the city that has the highest concentration of waterfalls in the lower 48 states. Our first stop is Vista House, which was described by our waitress at breakfast yesterday as a “glorified rest room” right after she said we shouldn’t miss it.
We leave Vista House and drive down the scenic byway to Latourell Falls where we are utterly mesmerized. I tear my eyes away from the falls to see the rock cliff swimming before me. “Mom… are the yellow lichen waving at us?” She looks away from the falls. “Ohhhh yeah,” she says. “They’re waving alright.”
The effects of the waterfall high gradually wear off and we hike to the top of the falls. This is my first hike in the Pacific Northwest and I feel like I’ve stepped into Fern Gully.
Hiking season is upon us! And in anticipation of that, there’s a search and rescue training session in progress at our next falls stop, Multnomah Falls. My mom and I watch from halfway up the trail as a trainee hangs from two ropes suspended across the falls, both of us hoping he’s already pretty well trained.
“Please don’t ever get yourself into a situation where you need to be searched out and rescued,” my mom says.
“Me?” I say, feigning ignorance of the times I’ve come down from mountains with broken legs or open gashes on my knees, or that time I thought I was staying in a bunkhouse but it turned out to be an open air shelter and I almost froze to death.
A little further up the in the hike I get yelled at for not staying on the trail by the first mean Portlandian I’ve met (for the record I was on the trail, just at the edge of it) and I scold him for his meanness, which only made him meaner and me madder. We part ways in a huff but luckily for both of us I’m headed up and him down. And yes, I do mean cosmically.
I meet back up with my Mom at the bottom of the falls. We’re fully sated on waterfalls so we backtrack through Portland using all of our considerable will power to not spend the rest of the day at Powell’s Bookstore. Instead, we continue on toward the Oregon coast to dip our feet in the Pacific ocean and marvel at the number of weird, mesmerizing little creatures washed up on the beach. Never having seen abalone, we suspect they are abalone. We suspect wrong. They are Velella Velella jellyfish, more commonly known as the Portuguese man o’ war.
My phone rings and I pick up a phone call from my siblings back on the east coast.
“How’s the northwest?” They ask.
“We’re looking for a rock,” I say.
Silence.
“A, like, really, really big rock.”
“Huh,” my brother Kevin says. “So, uh, the vacations going well then?” (“She says they’re looking for a rock.” “A what?” “A rock.” “Why?”)
“Um, I can hear you guys!” I say. “And it’s not just any rock. It’s Haystack Rock.”
“Can’t wait to see your trip photos!” ::muffled laughter::
Back on the road, we pass a bald eagle perched on a tree no more than fifteen feet from the car and shortly thereafter stop to watch a herd of elk who also stop what they’re doing to watch us. Honestly, they’re worse than sheep, these elk. One of them turns to look at us, they all turn. One of them looks in the opposite direction, they all look in the opposite direction. One of them starts grazing, they all start grazing. It’s pretty funny, really. Funnier still is watching a guy come jogging up the road in unlaced shoes, see the herd of elk, say “oh maaaan,” and jog dejectedly in the other direction. Maybe the group glance mentality is less paranoid than I thought.
We’re still laughing at that kid’s bad luck in losing his elk herd when we see flashing lights behind us. It’s not until later that night that we learn that cars with CA plates (like ours) are singled out by Oregon cops as perpetually in season. Which explains why we were pulled over mere minutes after getting our rental car at the airport the yesterday. The cop last night let us off with a warning (we ran a red light on a deserted road after waiting there for over four minutes) when we told him we were from the east coast. This time we’re not so lucky. Fortunately, we’re on our way to Salem, OR to see my friend Katie who happens to be a lawyer.
In addition to being a lawyer, Katie is a co-host of a floating Sunday Night Wine-d Down happy hour that rotates between the houses of its members. My mom and I pull up at her friend’s house well past dinner time, both of us in need of a drink. Katie hands us two beers from a local brewery that another college friend of ours works for and commiserates with us about the speeding ticket. She also puts things in perspective by showing us photos of her house, which she purchased a few months ago, that caught fire two weeks ago. The story is insane and involves her roommate’s dog pulling a Lassie to get her out of the burning building.
My mom starts talking local politics with two of Katie’s former roommates and Katie and I head out to the front porch with another one of her friends where we regale him with more fire stories, namely the time our friend Paul accidentally burnt Katie’s dorm room kitchen down while baking me cookies as an apology for a game of Halloween slap ass that went to far. I tell them the story of how I accidentally burned my friends kitchen down with an overly ambitious scavenger hunt and we agree that none of us can be trusted with fire.
Katie is, in additional to being a fellow fire-challenged individual, the kind of person who is always helping people and before the night is out she has provided not only beer and chillness but also sound and much needed legal advice to both me and my mom in regard to two totally separate work related incidents. I don’t get to see this lady nearly enough and I’m bummed to leave her but grateful to have had a glimpse of my friend’s life here in Oregon and even more grateful that that glimpse is of good, kind, happy hour loving people. We hug goodbye in the warm Salem night air, promising to plan a hiking trip together before the year is out. I’d love to stay longer but it’s past midnight and my mom and I have two hours left to drive tonight to make it to Eugene.
We’ve been all over the state today, from accidental waterfall drug trips in Portland to big rock hunting in the Pacific Ocean, to a legal advice happy hour in the state capital of Salem. Was there a more efficient way to get from place to place than to make a zig-zag “T” shape across the state? Yup. Most definitely. Would I change our route for anything? No I would not.
