Into The Blue Mountains of Oregon
This is to be a welcome vacation…
…but first I got some help getting clarity on what I needed a vacation from. Call it corruption.
Awoke this morning pretty cold, as expected, in tiny Ukiah, Oregon. The tinny box called Heater Buddy quickly earned the fond feelings its name evokes. A mist covered the ground but now is burned off, and the sky is blue. This little bowl of green grass and tall pines is nice, and extremely quiet. It is a Sunday morning and not a single car has passed since yesterday at around five o’clock.
Yesterday it took at least four hours on crowded interstate freeways to get into the northeastern corner of the state to begin the exploring that always gives me satisfaction, if not always joy. And right away I found out something. I was pulled over by a beefy Marion County Sheriff’s deputy in his 40s with a golden tan, a shaved head, and glinting blue eyes. It’s been long before Janet since I’d been pulled over. He gave me a ticket for talking on my cell phone, and told me that, well, even though I’d not had any traffic issues for twenty years, “…sometimes people who never get tickets should get one once in a while, instead of the same people who get hammered all the time.” It is worth $265 dollars to personally hear such an ideologically interesting statement from law enforcement.
Looking forward to a somewhat less tortured mentality, I headed Janet off at her usual 62 mph, into the incessant wind of the Columbia River Gorge. At Hwy. 74 we turned off to look at the little wheat growing towns which a tourist bureau website (you know how we love tourist bureaus) said had remaining examples of ‘frontier architecture.’
They looked like dumps to me, with standard 19th century buildings done with the least possible imagination and adornment, and maintained with cheap materials from the latter days. The treeless hills strung with rows of the most massive windmills, looking down on alfalfa and wheat growing farms strung along Willow Creek were kind of depressing. Coming into Hepper was pleasant enough, nestled in said treeless hills and so a bit less windy. The Morrow County courthouse in our featured photo caught my eye, perched authoritatively above downtown.
After Heppner I turned off on a road that went up into a ridge of the Blue Mountains. It being June the higher hills were still green, the alfalfa was lying in bright green rows in the lighter green fields, and the pines were starting to show in clusters and strips. Quite lovely.
As we got up near the top of the divide, we suddenly came upon a large meadow ringed with forest and covered in swaths of purple-blue. Camas! I hadn’t known that camas grew over here, and at this altitude. They are smaller than the camas that grows over in the Willamette Valley.
We started to descend into what the tourist bureau says was an ancient lake, and is now the pleasant and quiet valley where I’m sitting typing. They said Ukiah was called Camas Valley, because they grew here too, though they don’t now. At least the Indians had that to eat, because with it almost freezing last night in mid-June, I don’t think anything else edible grows here at all. The apple tree across the road doesn’t have any tiny green apples on it for some reason. The pioneer ranchers must have been scurvy folk, but perhaps independent.
