Here I Go Again On My Own, Part One

So this post is going to function (unintentionally) as a counterpoint to my previous post. I failed to realize, when I wrote all of that shit about how I can't function by myself in polite society, that I would be travelling pretty much entirely on my own for part of July and early August and that my survival would hinge on my ability to successfully interface with complete strangers on a regular basis without any comforting intermediary whatsoever.

I've survived these experiences (so far), and am re-heartened by my continued ability to drive really long distances alone and sleep on the ground and eat plain-as-fuck camp food for a week at a time without losing my mind.* Of course, for much of my recent trip I was in the middle of writhing crowds of thousands of people who were all high on all kinds of drugs as our senses were peppered by laser light shows and improvised music that was funky, jazzy, spacey, and downright spooky by turns, so it's actually entirely plausible that I was completely insane the entire time and just thought I was sane compared to my surroundings.

I was at Phish, is what I'm trying to say. I went to the Phish. I drove down the west coast following a band from city to city with a bunch of hippies. Except nowadays, they aren't hippies anymore. They're all forty years old and travel from show to show in airplanes and rental cars and stay in hotels. They still all party like the asshole frat boys they used to be (or wish that they used to be, or whatever), but people who legitimately drive from show to show, camping on the ground and scraping by, seem few and far between. I understand why, though: it's pretty hard on a guy. But still, I was surprised to find that the people who follow Phish around the country (nowadays, at least) are not My People as I thought that they might be. No big deal, though: the people (in general, not in total) might have sucked, but the band was amazing, and far better than I had even hoped they might be. I saw eight shows, and if there had been more after that, and if I had more money and more free time (and no desire to spend the rest of my summer break climbing mountains, I guess), I probably would have kept going. But, the wonders of the Phish is a topic for another day.

Today, I want to talk about Mother Roads.

Mother Roads is not exactly a cruel mistress, but she can be an icy one. Metaphorically, in the sense that traveling the highway for a protracted amount of time can be a lonely and not-obviously-rewarded endeavor, and also literally, in the sense that sometimes the road gets icy and it's dangerous to drive on. But, since this road trip took place in July and August, I'm talking more metaphorically and less literally.

I spent a lot of time driving back and forth between Ohio and Washington when I was a young lad (a few long years back, in my mid- to late-twenties) mostly because I was hella broke and with my super-fuel-efficient car it was way cheaper than flying. But I also did it because there was something comforting and rewarding about the obviously-masochistic-on-its-face exercise of driving thousands of miles at a time, by yourself, across a country that is so damn physically big and culturally varied that people on one end often cannot understand what people on the other end are saying even though they are nominally speaking the same language.

Now, the last time I did a drive of this magnitude on my own was almost five years ago. I've gone on a few long drives since then, but they've all been with groups of friends and/or with Lindsey. I had an opportunity to drive from Pullman to San Francisco and back last summer (about twelve or so hours each way, over the course of a few days) and ultimately ended up passing it up and staying home, partially because the idea of driving that far alone just seemed hard and not worth it unless it was for some absolutely necessary reason (like, say, getting back to Pullman in time for work starting in the fall so I could keep my job).

In this case, I was driving much further, even, than I would have last summer. To see the concerts I wanted to see, I had to drive from Klamath Falls to Lake Tahoe (6 hours), then from there to San Francisco (4 hours), then from San Francisco to Los Angeles (6 hours), and finally back to Klamath Falls (10 hours). I did this over the course of a week, so there was never any extremely concentrated doses of driving, but there was a lot of sleeping on the ground in cheap, crappy campgrounds (much more nerve-wracking and uncomfortable than sleeping in the wilderness), a lot of eating cheap, crappy food, and a lot of time spent alone, even if only about half of it was spent in a car.

As I wrote before, way back in my original road-tripping days, I find this kind of trip really satisfying in a sort of masochistic way. It's difficult to sit in a car for hours at a time for days on end, alone, with nothing but landscape for company, and yet, once you've been at it for awhile, you're forced into a sort of meditative state. When there's nothing to do but think, even the things you normally don't want to think about or worry about become fair game. And that's good. Having time to myself like this from time to time not only makes me think about things I would normally suppress, it also makes me appreciate what I normally have once I get back home. Basically, it's always ultimately a great experience, but it's hard to get out the door. It reminds me a bit of running: I've never been on a run I wasn't glad I'd done by the time I finished, but I've also never started a run while thinking "Fuck yeah, running! This is gonna be awesome!" Generally, I can count on having had a positive experience by the end, so it's easier to break through the initial hesitation.

In this particular case, the initial hesitation lasted well into my stay at Lake Tahoe. The drive from K-Falls to Tahoe reprised the first half of a drive Lindsey and I took in 2011, from Tahoe up to Pullman, and it's not one of my favorite drives. It's almost six straight hours of flat, dry, near-featureless desert, punctuated occasionally by dried-up salt beds that used to be lakes and dead towns with nobody living in them anymore. I can find pretty much any landscape beautiful, including Hell's Canyon and the channeled scablands of eastern Washington, but this drive just kills me. I was only an hour or so in when I already started doubting my resolve to spend a week driving through (mostly) empty country just so I could see a bunch of friggin' concerts. After listening to a live Phish recording and making my way nearly to Nevada, though, I started to cheer up a bit. I really like Tahoe in general, and the campground we stayed there in 2011 was excellent, so I had high hopes for this stay.

I needn't have worried: the campground I'd reserved a spot in this time was even better than last time's. Despite being a CA State Park campground, there was a lot of space between each site and that space was filled with huge coniferous trees, so even though the entire campground was fully booked, it didn't seem crowded at all, and I spent a good amount of time over the two days I was there comfortably sitting in the shade of a tree, reading from my Kindle and/or taking a nap without feeling at all like I was in the middle of a campground full of people.

I think Tahoe was a good place to start the trip, because it was the only destination that I'd ever been to before. A lot of what sucks the fun out of trips like this for me are things like trying to find the campground, trying to figure out where to park near the concert venue, etc. and I'd already done that once in Tahoe, so I knew (in general, at least) how things worked.

Things went downhill a bit after Tahoe in terms of my ability to walk the path of Mother Roads alone, but that's a story for a follow-up blog post...

* Also, my ancient godddamn car's ability to continue to not just fall apart like all other cars would have done 40,000 miles ago is commendable and certainly helped me bear my burden.

Palouse Falls Hike

On Dale's recommendation, Lindsey and I took a trip to Palouse Falls Recreation Area two weekends ago. As is often the case in the Pacific Northwest, the near-total lack of information about the site online made it a real surprise compared to what I at least was expecting, but in a good way.

The drive to the falls took us out to Washtucna, which evoked a lot of old memories of making the drive to the Tri-Cities and back that way twice a week for a year when I was teaching at the WSU campus there. A few miles past Washtucna, though, you take a left at a huge, very obvious sign, and then we were on "new road," for us at least. The road into the park was one of those many gorgeous, winding, slow-down-and-enjoy-the-view-or-you'll-crash-in-a-fiery-wreck roads that the Palouse does so well, and that far south we were actually somewhere between the channeled scablands and the loess hills that encircle Pullman, so the landscape was extra-beautiful.

I was vaguely aware of the fact that we were paralleling the Palouse river throughout our drive (you actually follow it for a bit just before and then out of Washtucna on our normal Tri-Cities route) and that it would eventually have to turn from a glorified stream into a falls, which would necessitate a drop in elevation, but I still didn't expect the pleasingly monotonous desert-scrub landscape we were driving through to so suddenly transform into a goddamn canyon. But it did, and then we were in the parking lot, just like that, about eighty or so minutes after leaving Pullman.

There'd been some terror on my part on the way there that I'd left my Discovery Pass ($30/yr for access to lots of pretty outdoor things!) at home like a moron, when in reality it was just hidden in that secret corner of space-time in the glove compartment where all important pieces of documentation go the moment before you really need them. Upon arriving at the Palouse Falls "trailhead," though, we found out that it was National Outdoors Day (or somesuch) and so was one of the three or four days out of the entire year when parking was free. Then I found my Discover Pass.

Anyway, the parking area and its environs were a (literal) oasis in a (literal) desert. There was a small camping area and a nice, tree-shaded lawn whereupon people were grilling and picnicking and such. Of course, we weren't there to freaking eat, we were there to tax our bodies physically and almost fall off of a fucking waterfall.

These experiences were a little harder to come by than we expected, thanks to the site's horrible signage-to-useful-information ratio, which was high even by Washington State Park Services standards. Signs goddamn everywhere, but none of them telling us how to actually hike to the falls. See, there's a phenomenal cliffside observation area right at the parking lot, but we'd heard tales of hiking down to the top of the waterfall itself, and so obviously that's what had to be done.

Unfortunately, there was no clear way down. Using common sense, we started off down one of the many, many crisscrossing footpaths that seemed to have the most tough-looking people walking on it. In this case, our logical deduction paid off in a series of higher and higher viewpoints which made it easier to understand how the site's trail system worked and even hinted at the possibility of being able to get to the base of the waterfall. Challenge accepted.

We followed the trail to the left of the original observation point as it crossed over a few high bluffs and then dropped down a bit onto some (active!) railroad tracks. Fortunately, in true Washingtonian fashion, these tracks were populated with hikers just chilling out and parents skipping rocks with their tiny, train-vincible children.

We walked down the tracks aways and then descended the really obvious path down the railroad grade to the river proper. Along the river were the biggest sage bushes (sage trees?) I've ever seen. Lots of people lined the sides of the river around the lower, more gentle "Upper Falls," and this little river-powered desert oasis would have been a great place to eat a lunch (or camp for a night, if it wasn't illegal). We pushed on after a few minutes, though, following the obvious trail along the base of the cliff on the right side of the river (as it flows downstream).

En route to the top of the falls, we ran across a hugely chubby marmot, and some more great views of the canyon walls, and then there was a disturbingly placid pool that suddenly dropped over 200 feet. Water, fall.

Lindsey jumped around a bit on the rocks just above the cataract while I sat on the ground and tried not to look at her (I'm afraid of heights and of other people falling from them, especially), and then we weighed the pros and cons of continued along a rather slippery-looking trail that circled back the way we'd come from but under the observation deck.

It seemed like this trail dead-ended in a 150-foot gravel-and-scree wash that could only possibly be descended with ropes, but if my mountaineering experience has taught me anything, it's that you've really got to be face-to-face with a descent before you can really see how steep it is. So we followed the almost-goat-trail along the opposite side of the cliff wall until we reached the wash.

At some point in here, we realized that there were actually totally normal-looking people fishing at the foot of the waterfall, so it started to seem like it must be possible to get down there without any special equipment. Turned out that there was a steep but walkable dirt-and-scrabble path that ran down the hill in the opposite direction of the wash. We followed it down, half-walking and half-sliding for the entire 200-foot descent, and then enjoyed a lunch at the foot of the huge waterfall, which was, as I said above, a lot awesomer than we'd been led to believe by our pre-hike research.

Going back up the dusty path to the top of the waterfall required a bit of exertion, especially under the desert sun as we were, but it wasn't nearly as hard as descending had been. From the top of the waterfall, it was a pleasant cool-down hike back to the car. All in all, we probably spent about three hours in the park (at most), and then we took the "long way" home: south out of the park and east through Starbuck, then back up north to Dusty before heading the rest of the way home the usual way. This drive was especially (and unexpectedly beautiful), and included some amazing train bridges and great views of the Snake River.

Schedule For a Perfect Day

515am - Wake up at Lindsey's house in Post Falls.

545am - Have massive breakfast of frozen waffles at said house with friends and Lindsey's family.

630am - Leave the house and drive to Coeur D'Alene through spring morning mist.

700am - Get changed, line up at the starting line, get lost and not have time to hand off car keys and heavy jacket.

730am - Start Coeur D'Alene half-marathon, running side-by-side with Lindsey.

732am - Find Lindsey's brother's wife while running with a jacket with car keys in the zip pocket. Hand off my jacket and keys.

~740am - Meet up with and run briefly with Jadd, Lindsey's brother, then get left behind as he speeds up to run on his own.

~750am - Meet up with my friend Jill's mom, Shelley, who's flown in from Iowa to run the race, and start running with her.

~800am - On approximately mile three of the race, swallow a Shot Block whole and almost die of asphyxiation. Force self to hack it up, regain ability to breathe, keep running.

~815am - Lose feeling in right foot, stop to retie it.

~830am - Regain full feeling in foot.

~915am - Part ways with Shelley to run faster.

~955am - Meet up with Daniel and Jadd, who finished the race ahead of us, and run the last quarter-mile or so with both of them.

~1000am - Finish the race with a last long sprint to the finish line and clock in with pretty much the same time we finished with last year at the Leavenworth half-marathon.

1030am - Meet up with Dale alongside the track and run in with him as he finished his fourth full marathon.

1100am - Drive back to Post Falls to play with puppies and recuperate.

100pm - Eat a huge lunch in the backyard of Lindsey's parents' house, consisting of various summery-grilled foods and potato salad and cole slaw.

130pm - Take a nap on the ground.

200pm - Socialize with lots of great people that I don't get to see often enough.

300pm - Leave to drive back home to Pullman in gorgeous (but cool) weather with Lindsey and Daniel.

500pm - Get back home, unpack.

600pm - Drive to theater with Lindsey, buy tickets to Iron Man 3 and an enormous Coke Icee.

630pm - Watch Tony Stark blow the shit out of bad guys for a few hours.

900pm - Drive to Emerald Garden with Lindsey and order huge amounts of cheap Chinese food. Bring home leftovers.

1030pm - Go to bed and commence sleeping forever.

The end.

i'm a wheel

or at least i feel a bit like one.

i'm settled back into the writing nest at the moment, and have been for about 24 hours now, but this weekend turned out to be a pretty significant adventure (beyond even what i had expected).

way back when, in the days when i could imagine having free time, lindsey and i decided it would be fun to go see wilco a few times during their most recent west coast touring jaunt. two februaries ago, we took a weekend to catch them in both seattle and portland, and both shows were great, though at the time i lamented the fact that all wilco shows are more or less the same. of course, "the same" should be read "awesome", but i doubted the necessity of seeing back-to-back shows ever again. this time, though, one show was within a short driving distance of our friend john's apartment in portland and the other was a short distance from my own apartment, in spokane, and was taking place almost on my and lindsey's 3 year anniversary, at the spot where we'd met for the first time. it seemed imperative to go to both.

lindsey at the hult center.

we left town late friday morning, and did the usual pullman-to-portland commute, shooting down 395/82 and then through the columbia river gorge. we made a quick stop-off just outside of the city proper to pick up john (who was visiting a friend in eugene, where the show was taking place), and then it was on to the hult center. as always, wilco was stellar. the setlist was a bit obvious, and i was likely a bit crotchety from not having eaten since we'd stopped at burgerville in the dalles early that afternoon, but that was offset somewhat by the fact that we'd stumbled on to second-row tickets.


after the show, i'd assumed that after having been awake for a million hours and driven almost 9 of them, we'd just head back to portland and sleep. instead, (fortunately, as it turned out ) we got to meet up with john and his friend, and went in search of food and drink in post-midnight eugene. this led us to an excellent pizza/beer joint called (i think) cosmic pizza and reheated vegetarian slices paired with an excellent vanilla stout. from there, things became a bit of a haze featuring organic american spirits and a rather enthusiastic eugenean (?) who kept insisting that "the spirit of the 1890s is ALIVE!" and solicited smooches from all four of us (lindsey included) before disappearing into her apartment building. 

a pizza place with sriracha!

fortunately, john opted to drive back to portland, and so all i had to do for the next two hours was struggle to stay awake as the roadlights flashed by. i think we might have also listened to daft punk's discovery and kid a. upon arriving at john's apartment, i'm pretty sure i was asleep in less than five minutes. which was good, because there would be only a little rest for the wicked.

we woke up the next morning shortly after sunrise, but i was feeling pretty good. actual, legitimate sunrise in portland is such a rare thing that it's rather inspiring to experience. as such, i shook off my lethargy, forced lindsey to make me breakfast (women are for cooking!) and then settled in to work a bit on job applications and watch the city wake up.

it wasn't long before john woke up and gifted us with a second breakfast, and then we were off to bridal veil falls for a little (read: lot) of hiking.

lindsey being dwarfed by bridal veil falls.

our original plan for the day had involved a 2200 foot ascent to a place called devil's rest, over the course of a 3-or-so-mile hike, which we were then planning on retracing back to the parking lot. this hike would take us past some pretty amazing northwest coast basalt cliffs and accompanying waterfalls.

as might be expected, though, the lure of a entire day in which there was no school-related work to be done tempted us into a bit of laziness and we'd gotten on the road a lot later than we'd originally planned. as a result, we were only about two-thirds of the way to devil's rest before the sun began to go down in earnest. it became obvious we weren't going to make it up and back before dark, and hiking long distances over a dramatic elevation change in the dark sort of takes a trip out of "fun day hike" territory and straight into "possible survival scenario" territory. so we decided to turn around. and then we decided to run.

lindsey and becca in front of another waterfall.

 not for any necessary reason, mind you. we're just idiots. some of these idiots (read: me) were even wearing non-hiking shoes which were not happy about supporting my ankles in the least bit. as i type this, my toes are asking me "what were you thinking?!" over and over in the language of PAIN. nonetheless, breathlessly shambling down 1500 feet or so of altitude over 2 miles at a good jogging clip while jumping stones and exposed roots in near-darkness is a good way to make the best of a shortened hiking day.

upon our re-arrival in portland, we settled in for a typical john-style repast, featuring much more home-cooked food than could have been eaten by eight people, and store-bought vegan chicken wings from a portland restaurant called fire on the mountain that were quite possibly the best thing i have ever eaten in my entire life. for serious.

i don't remember much of the rest of that night, because the lack of sleep from the previous few days caught up with me in a huge way after dinner. i vaguely remember passing out (quite literally) from sleepiness shortly after the huge meal, and waking up briefly later that evening to say goodnight to everyone before dropping off again.

lindsey, john, and becca at a lookout point above bridal veil falls.

we woke up in the morning just before sunrise (due to an early bedtime) and got on the road by 10am, which opened up the whole day for an awesome, meandering drive along the north side of the columbia gorge on WA-14. this was amazing until about the time we reached the dalles bridge, when the road suddenly became covered by fog and stayed that way until we got to richland. eaten lunch at a great mexican restaurant in richland before finishing the drive back to pullman, though, put the perfect exclamation point on our first leg of the wilco-trip.

after an interlude of about 16 hours of frenetic work and worry and such, we left just before dinnertime on monday to get to spokane in time to eat and catch the second show. our dinner-location of choice was the fascinating (if you're an urban-spaces geek like me) steam plant grill in spokane, which had severely jacked up its prices since our last visit but still offered great food and an excellent vanilla bourbon stout. for the show proper, we were once again in the second row, which i know have found makes the show much easier to see, but less easy to hear. we had john stiratt's bass in our faces the entire night (not necessarily a bad thing), and the setlist was a lot more varied, and there was a seven-song encore.

by the end of the trip, i'd spent a little more time, money, and energy than i'd really planned for, but it was all worth it. after this, i'll likely be chaining myself to my writing desk for good until this dissertation is finished, so it was a nice send-off to freedom, and if wilco keeps up their habit of visiting the pacific northwest only once every two years, the memories will definitely make the wait for the next go-round more bearable.