The Best Laid Winging-Its
Eugene, OR is filled with flowering azalea parks, adorable hilltop neighborhoods, and abundant drug addiction clinics. Oddly enough, it is the azalea parks that are the most disturbing. I blink back puffy eyelids and search google for the nearest pharmacy.
“Take a right at da nex ligh” I say.
“Whad?” My mom says.
“Dorry. I’m do duffed up righ now!”
Fortunately, my mom spots it.
“Rx!” she says.
“Daved!” I say.
We walk in expecting the usual pristine, white light, impeccably organized, antibacterialized drugstore. What we get is a dusty, half-lit, troll cave that is 75% dollar store seasonal arrangements, 15% porcelain dolls and 10% combined pharmacy/hardware counter. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling a little uneasy about prescription drugs and paint thinner being mixed behind the same counter and I begin to wonder exactly what combination of drugs all those drug addiction clinics we’ve passed are actually treating.
But they also have Claritin so we pop some pills and set off for Mount St. Helens, the most famous active volcano in Washington state.
Aaaaaaaand we make it as far a Tulip festival outside of Salem.
If you’re thinking our newly claritinized selves got cocky about flower fields you are correct, but let’s be real here, what’s the point of a road trip if you don’t indulge in a few questionable side quests? I mean, okay, yes, it was a slightly overcast weekday morning, the tractor ride to the far fields (seen above in the (what passes for) distance) wasn’t running, and none of the doors on the porta potties locked, but when you can stand in a field of flowers and still speak comprehesensible English, every moment is a festival.
Had we known what an ordeal our quest to see Mount St. Helens would be we might have just stayed in the tulip fields all day drinking wine, eating kettle corn, and guarding each other’s porta potty doors, but the quest called so off we went.
For, like, a minute. According to the cop redirecting traffic at the first exit for Mount St. Helens State Park, a rock slide has deposited “a half a billion dollar boulder” in the middle of the road.
We backtrack for an hour and try the western entrance to the park but here, too, we are foiled. Despite the fact that my weather app clearly shows sunny skies in the area it is without a doubt raining on us. Hard. We push forward for another hour in the hopes that the skies will clear closer to the park. Which they might have done but we’ll never know because the last two miles of road to the visitor center at Mount St. Helens State Park is blocked off. The official looking person standing guard tells us that “the visitor center is still snowed in from the winter. This is as far as you can go. Besides, visibility is only about 150 feet right now.”
“Skies still clear?” My mom asks both dryly and ironically, referring to my weather app, which is still mocking us with an unobstructed sun icon. “All sunshine all day,” I say, wiping raindrops from from my face as we stare in the abyss-mal direction that we think might possibly be the direction of the volcano.
Determined to see some mountain today we try our luck at Mt. Rainier, which is the next door neighbor of Mount St. Helens but through some unexplained geographic feat is a 2 1/2 hour drive from where we currently stand.
“Isn’t the drive from Eugene, OR to Seattle, WA only 3 1/2 hours?” My mom asks.
“Yup.” I say.
“And on any other day you can easily see Mt. Rainier from Mount St. Helens?” she asks.
“Yup.” I say.
“Huh.” She says.
I nod and buckle my seatbelt.
It’s nearly 10pm by the time we reach Mt. Rainier and the last rays of sunlight are fading from the sky. I had already started looking up hotels in the area but hadn’t had any luck by the time I lost cell service, which was still two hours out from Mt. Rainier National Park. We are officially in the northwest’s Appalachia. We pass by decrepit closed motel after decrepit closed motel and when I finally spot one that’s open my mom doesn’t even slow down. “No way in hell am I sleeping there,” she says. The neon open sign is flickering and I’m pretty sure one of the doors is off it’s hinges so I don’t put up much of a fight.
We drive on through thick fog down a narrow road lined with tall, emaciated trees and a few more derelict buildings, one of which is called Hobo Inn, which is just an actual train car lit with one electric christmas candle. As we pass by we hear a strange sound coming from the backseat of the car.
“Mom…I’m scared.” I say.
“Me too sweetie, me too.”
Desperate to take our minds off of the weird crackling noise, dense fog, and flickering signs, we somehow end up on the topic of whether or not there’s a human mating season but it’s not until we are deep in conversation about the length and width of a professional football field- in which we’re both doing the math in our head for what size track would go around a 100 yard long football field- when it occurs to us that neither of us care what the answer is. At all. We don’t follow sports and I, personally, hate doing math and yet here we are calculating track sizes around a football field. We decide to make finding a place to sleep a higher priority.
We drive the strip of road I’d located an inn at before losing service but the inn is nowhere to be found. We stop at a bar to ask directions.
“Do you have a reservation?” The woman asks.
“Not exactly,” I say.
“Oh, well, everything closes here around 9pm. I can call my friend Alexis though, she’d probably wake up to give you guys a room at her place.”
My mom has already started backing toward the door so, sensing that couch crashing with Alexis is not an option, I politely excuse myself.
“We’re driving back to Tacoma,” my mom says.
“That’s 2 hours back the way we came,” I say.
“I don’t care,” my mom says.
Hereinlies the difference between roadtripping alone and roadtripping with a mom: moms require beds.
It’s after 1am by the time we get to a hotel. My mom parks the car while I get us set up with a room. I ask the receptionist, Maddie, if she has any recommendations for seeing Mt. Rainier tomorrow and immediately regret it. For someone working the graveyard shift at a Candlewood Suites Maddie is obscenely bubbly and full of ideas, and by ideas I mean pontifications about how much snow is going to be blocking our way tomorrow. I have zero patience for this effervescent negativity and am getting desperate for my mom to return . How long has she been parking the car for? There’s a buzzing in my ears that tells me I’m about to pass out from exhaustion and boredom when, seemingly hours later, my mom walks in.
“Mom!” I cry, pulling her toward our room before she, too, gets sucked into a deadly late night vortex of chit chat.
“You came back.” I whisper.
“What happened to you?” she asks, stifling her laughter.
“I’m just glad you’re here.” I say.
We may not have seen a volcano today but at least we didn’t get murdered in our sleep in an poorly lit railway car or Alexis’s living room. All in all, I think we’re making some good choices.
