Driving into Oregon from Northwestern Nevada, we were still in the Great Basin with flat playas in each little basin. After about an hour of driving and futzing around, we came to a T in the road where Highway 140 dead-ended at Highway 205. Logic would say that we only had two choices, turn right deeper into Nevada or turn left towards Oregon, but Michele pointed out that the Winnemucca Chamber of Commerce suggested a third choice. They suggested going straight – cross-country style, I guess – as a better choice. We opted for the road to Oregon (where we had a hamburger in Fields).

Driving through Oregon, both Michele and I kept remarking about how wet it was.  True, the hills weren’t wet, but most of the valleys were bright green with intensive farms – ranches? – and even if they were being watered by mining the aquifer, it was wet to us.

We were running along the bottom of Steen Mountain and, on our right, we could see that subterrarium water, running down from the canyons, was watering the trees that were starting to colonize the valley.

I understand that it doesn’t look wet to most people, but it would if you had been driving through much drier Nevada for a couple of days. The green is so bright, so intoxicating, that it is easy to understand why most Arab countries have green in their flags. In the Muslims mythology, the colour green represents nature and life. As we drive up this long straight road running alongside Steens Mountain, scratching our bug bites, we were sure they are right about the life part, bug life for sure.

Remember those brown rubber doorstops that are wedge-shaped? Now imagine that the wedge is huge, about 50 miles long from north to south – or the other way around if you are coming from the south, like us – and 9,733 high. Except that it is not really a wedge, it is a huge block that has tilted and looks like a wedge on the surface. The high part of the wedge catches the weather and is eroding, washing down hill into the valley at the low, western, part of the block. This makes the low part heavier – and the high part lighter – further tilting the block. Now imagine that the block is made up of layers and layers of volcanic rock, basalts and lava flows, from about 17 to 14 million years ago. That is Steens Mountain.

What makes the whole thing unusual, is that Steens is a block with only one mountain. As an aside, Steen Mountain is named after Army Major Enoch Steen because he liberated the mountain from the part of the Paiute Indian tribe which, heretofore, considered it their their home. End aside.

We drove up the wedge from the west and, as we got higher, it got wetter and greener. We passed the delightfully named Donner und Blitzen River and climbed into the trees where we camped.

It had been getting clouding and, the higher we climbed on the mountain, the chances of getting wet increased. We found an isolated spot in an almost deserted campground and we were set up in time to have a sunset dinner – of fresh salad, raw veggies with Sage and Mushroom Olive, and a barbecued, grass-fed, steak – over looking a dry meadow.

At about three in the morning, it started to rain lightly and we got up, ran around camp checking everything, and threw our bag into the car, just in time to have it stop. Michele and I looked at each other, shrugged, pulled the bag out, and went back to sleep. The next morning, Michele slept in, which I only mention because, when she was going through my pictures from the last couple of days, she remarked Why didn’t you take any pictures of me sleeping in, in a sort of Don’t you love me anymore voice.

Then we started up Steens Mountain, driving slowly with the windows down; enjoying the warm air scented with sage and wildflowers.

^{Photograph by Michele}

When we got high enough to look into the first canyon, it was a revelation for me.   From the valley, these canyon looked just like any other Southwest Canyon, but from on the mountain, I realized they were carved by glaciers.

As we got higher, we could see all the edge of the world and we also saw one large rain cloud. It was raining but, because it was so dry, the rain wasn’t hitting the ground.

The top of Steens Mountain was surprisingly flat; tilted but flat. Then, at the tippy top, the edge just dropped away, plunging down into the Alvord Desert, almost a mile below. It was about this time, after we had been out of cell phone range for a couple of days, that Michele’s phone told her that she had a new message, Courtney Gonzales wanted to know if we wanted to join her and Gina to see an Opera that night. Ahhh…the wonder of technology.

As we left Steens Mountain, she – he? – gave us one more gift: a snow field with a couple of guys filling their ice chests, who replenished our ice.

As we dropped off of Steens, the landscape went from green to sage to dry-grass and back to green as we got to Frenchglen.

We were not only in Eastern Oregon, but we were also in the Southern part of the state and had a wedding to go to in Northwestern Oregon, so we made a long haul northwest. The most prominent feature of the landscape, as we drove through long valleys, were the lava flows that formed a capstone over the softer, earlier, ground. The flows must have cooled slowly because they formed columnar formations that were striking.

By the time we got to Burns – population 2,806 – we felt we were back in the Big City. We weren’t, of course, and we had miles to travel and one more major stop, The John Day Fossil Beds National Monument  .

There are three separate parts to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and we only went to one, The Painted Hills section where we watched the sunset. From there it was west and a little south, in the fading light, to Prineville where the complaint of the day was that Google had used Union Labor to build their new server farm (rather than local guys).

I am going to start this in the middle because I am stalled out on writing about the beginning of our trip to nephew Jason’s wedding. We spent Sunday night at Mike Moore’s and Linda Fleming’s in the Smoke Creek with a plan of going to Eastern Oregon on Monday morning. The reason for the visit, in addition to seeing Mike and Linda, was to get some travel pointers from Mike. He has wandered around this area more than anybody we know, has the same aesthetic as we do, and generously shares the best, hidden, places.

Mike suggested that we wander around the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge in most northwestern Nevada, before we go to Oregon. And before we go to the Sheldon Refuge, he suggested stopping at Floating Island Books in Cedarville, California. Getting our usual late start, we turned off the gravel Smoke Creek Road onto an actual paved road at about 11:30 Monday morning. In this case, the paved road is Highway 447 which goes north into Cedarville and beyond. Cedarville is in Surprise Valley and the surprise is water and the agriculture – and the power lines – that comes with it.

This corner of the West – the corners of California and Nevada which sort of bleed into Oregon – is both more remote and more populated than the areas we usually visit. This is the eastern edge of the proposed State of Jefferson, composed of counties in Oregon and California that feel abandoned by somebody else’s government far away in Salem and Sacramento. And I think that they are right, they are pretty much abandoned and, in a fair world, they would be their own State. They think we – we being the City Dwellers in the Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin – are taking their water and, of course, we are. We, in the Bay Area, have been taking it so long that we think it is ours and we even get indignant that some of our water is going south to L.A.

I-5 goes through this area and tourists blast along the highway on their way to someplace else, thinking that it is homogeneous and desolate and boring. Off of I-5, almost nobody drives through on the way to someplace else (well, almost nobody, I guess, since we did). But, getting off of I-5, wandering around the two lane roads – both gravel and paved – reveals a rich, vibrant, and varied world. Wherever there is water there seemed to be large farming and ranching operations, and almost every road junction has gas available and often a small market/restaurant. One of those junctions – where 447 crosses the road from Alturas to the Sheldon Reserve – is Cedarville. While Cedarville is not officially a town – the Federal Government calls it a census-designated place – it is much too big to just call a road junction. It has several restaurants, a market, a beauty shop, and Floating Island Books, owned and run by Michael Sykes.

Michael had moved here from West Marin where he had previously owned a bookstore – still Floating Island, I think – in Point Reyes and this bookstore has a West Marin/Point Reyes vibe for lack of a better way to describe it. It is the kind of bookstore – and Michael is the kind of bookseller – where I can ask about a book by Loren Eiseley and be offered a choice of two, long out of print, books. I bought one, The Night Country: Reflections of a Bone -Hunting Man, that became my main campsite entertainment.

Here is one passage I particularly liked, I have said that the ruins of every civilization are the marks of men trying to express themselves, to leave an impression upon the earth. We in the modern world have turned more stones, listened to more buried voices, than any other culture before us. There should be a kind of pity that comes with time, when one grows truly conscience and looks behind as well as forward, for nothing is more brutally savage than the man who is not aware he is a shadow. Nothing is more real than the real, and that is why it is well for men to hurt themselves with the past – it is one road tolerance. Another road to tolerance is out here, just east of Jefferson.

When we told him, where we were going, Michael got out his pencil and traced a few suggested roads on a more detailed map (interestingly enough his suggestions pretty much matched Mike Moore’s). The next day we went to lunch in Fields – at a restaurant that had been recommended as having the best hamburgers in the area – and Fields could not have been more different than Cedarville. Fields has a population of twelve, making Cedarville look huge with its population of 514 – down from 849 in 2000 – but we only met three of the locals and they were all armed, giving Fields a bit of a Mad Max in the afterscape vibe.

Fields is really only a store and restaurant, in the same building, with a couple of gas pumps in front (and four motel rooms somewhere). When I first walked into the store/restaurant at Fields , I noticed that the guy behind the counter had an automatic pistol, in a holster, hanging off his belt. It took me back a little. When I walked down a couple of stairs into the restaurant, I was struck by three things at the same time; the cook was a very attractive, young woman, she was armed with a nasty little snub-nosed automatic, and she was cooking more bacon than I have ever seen in one place. I remarked that I didn’t have a gun and felt sort of naked, she answered, I don’t blame you, I would feel naked without a gun too, and I relaxed, figuring a sense of humor and bacon will trump the gun.

Michele and I both ordered bacon burgers with fries and they were terrific. So was the homemade ice tea served in a glass.

I’m not a gun guy, but if somebody were going to carry a weapon, this seemed like the right place to do it. If I walked into a Starbucks in San Francisco and saw a guy with an automatic strapped to his belt, I would just quietly back out and then run, but here, it all seemed almost normal and was a good opening for a conversation. The owner’s automatic was a .45 Colt – often called a 1911 from the date it was adopted by the Army and it was lovingly finished in raw metal which just emphasized it’s craftsmanship-ness. Sandy and  Tom Downs own Fields Station and, like Michael Sykes and our friends, Mike Moore and Linda Fleming, they moved her from somewhere else (OK, moved there part time in Mike and Linda’s case). They probably all moved here for different reasons, however they have all self-selected to live a different, and in many ways harder, life than living in, say, the Bay Area and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have more control of that life with their own state.

As interesting as Cedarville and Fields are, they are the developed areas and we came here to see the undeveloped areas, the areas that weren’t worth developing, the areas that are leftover.