While Michele slept in – in a comfy bed in a motel – I went out to get the car washed. The motel was a family operation in Prineville and, when I asked for the location of a car wash, the only carwash they knew of was a Do-It-Yourself carwash. Prineville is a town of about 10,000 people and, after driving around Eastern Oregon, that looked big enough – to me – for a carwash so I decided to go looking. Prineville is home to a new Apple data Center, a Facebook Data Center, and a Google facility; but it is not home to a carwash. There are five carwashes near where we live, but this is one of the richest areas on the planet and Prineville, like all rural towns today, even those with new Data Centers, is poor. Too poor to have a carwash.

But I didn’t know that when I started on my carwash quest. To get to the motel, we had driven all the way through town, so I now drove back towards the center. At the main intersection, I turned right to check out the side road, at the Fairgrounds – figuring that was the far edge – I did a U-turn and tried the other side of town where somebody suggested I go back to the main drag, turn right and try the Standard Station. The Standard Station was on the other side of the road so I drove past it and then did another U-turn. If you are keeping track, you would know that I am now going back into town from almost the same place I had started, but I thought I was going the other way. I tried the Standard Station with no luck and abandoned my quest, deciding to go back to the Motel. I continued back through town past the familiar landmarks I thought I had passed this morning but had really passed last night – the picturesque Courthouse with a fountain, past the Les Schwab Tire Center, and past the Essence Yoga Studio and Wellness Center – on my way back to the motel. The motel wasn’t there!

I thought I was going in the right direction because I recognized the Courthouse , Les Schwab, et al, so I went back into town and tried again. I was on the wrong end of town as you have probably figured out and I kept going back into town, turn around, and then, I would drive away from the motel. I did this three or four times, each time getting more dazed and confused because I was so convinced that I was on the right side of town. In my befuddlement, I could only come up with two theories, Aliens had abducted the Motel, or I was completely in the wrong place; they seemed equally unlikely. How could anybody get lost in a town of 10,000? Especially somebody with an excellent sense of direction, like me.

In Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, Robert Pirsig writes about bringing a boat into a strange marina, in a strange river town, in the dark. He has the wrong marina or the wrong town, I don’t remember which, but the harbor lights didn’t match the charts and he kept moving the real lights around in his mind to make them fit his imagined reality. He was in the wrong place, but it seemed like the right place because he was mentally moving the data around. In other words,  Believing is seeing, not the other way around. My repeated passes through the wrong end of town, looking for a Motel that wasn’t there, is a classic case. After about four wrong passes, I was getting panicky. How could I get lost in a town of less than 10,000 people? All I could think of was an episode on The Amazing Race, in which an old, retired, couple, lost, not because they couldn’t handle the Race physically, but because they kept getting confused. Luckily, Prineville was a big enough burg to have cell phone coverage and I finally broke down and called Michele who calmed me down and got me back to the Motel, still rattled.

Finally, we started out for Portland, crossing the last of the high desert in the rainshadow of Oregon’s famous volcanoes. The first town we got to was Madras and we decided to stop for a Chinese lunch at the Ding Ho Family Restaurant (which specializes in Chinese and American food).

I have no idea when it started or who started it, but Michele and I have a tradition of having Chinese food on every trip we take and we thought this might be our last – and first – chance. Our strategy is to order Kung Pao Chicken to set a baseline and then a local or house specialty, in this case, Barbecued Pork Chow Don. The Kung Pao was not very interesting, but the Chow Don was very good. As an aside, a couple of years ago, I read an article on How to order food in a restaurant that has served me well. The basic theory is to not order the roast chicken or other standard dishes because they are only on the menu by demand. Other people’s demands, so they will cook it in a desultory fashion. Always order what looks like the place’s speciality because that will be a work of love and it will be cooked with real care. You’re welcome. End aside.

Then it was on to Portland for real. The road between Madras and Portland is straightish, first going across high desert, then over the shoulder of Mt. Hood, and – finally – down into Portland. Mt Hood is part of an arc of volcanos that run from Southern British Columbia through Washington and Oregon into Northern California and – from the east – it dominates the horizon. Once we entered the trees, however, we would only see it peeking through the trees in short flashes.

At some point, it became wall to wall trees, cutting off all the view lines. I remarked to Michele How can anybody think this is beautiful? About ten seconds later, I was able to pull over at a little turn out. As we had been driving through the walls of trees, would could see bright, sunlit trees hiding behind the darker trees nearer the road, and I want to see if I could get a picture across the road.

Looking the other way, through a clearing on our side of the road, we saw this lovely pond with ferns, some sort of big leaf plant – adapted to growing in the shade – and wild roses. Michele just looked at me and laughed.

As a child, Michele used to go to Timberline Lodge with her Gramma and, since we were driving right by, she wanted to check it out. The lodge was built during the Depression by the WPA – Works Progress Administration – out of local materials. Looking at it, I was reminded of a time when we thought we could tame this continent and, even, Nature herself. Of course we couldn’t but many of the attempts were stunning, especially those in National Parks.

At this point, we had about 65 miles to go to meet the Block Family in Portland. We had about two hours to do it, so it seemed like a slam dunk. The only thing we had to do was change but neither of us figured that would be a problem, but – of course – it was. First we were on Freeways with no place to hide, then a seemingly endless suburban road lined with strip malls and fast food restaurants. Finally we found a Business Park with a parking lot where we could park and we hunkered down behind the car to change.

Then, we were ready to go. Gabe had suggested Bistro Petit Oiseau as a place to meet for dinner and it was perfect (one of the many nice things about having Gabe as a son-in-law). We were back in civilization.

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 Steens 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 color 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 feet high. Except that it is not really a wedge, it is a huge block of the earth’s crust 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, Steens 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 rained on 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 Oil, 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 way to 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).