roadtrips

To Oregon, with love

August 17, 2013 Uncategorized

After the island trip, where I sat half-clothed in a hot pool with several naked strangers, I had a few days at home before my next adventure-in-trade assignment required another u-turn of sorts: south to the Willamette National Forest. On a sweaty slog down the Interstate 5, I paused in Portland to hand deliver my application and calm my jittery nerves with an afternoon coffee. It took me a white-knuckled hour to navigate through the snarl, but finally the roadRead More

U-Turn

July 18, 2013 Uncategorized

There is no field guide for the decisions we have to make in life when we come across forks in the road that we weren’t expecting. The maps we follow might show the outline of a path, but the conditions on the ground are entirely a product of time, season, and maybe fate. When we hit log jams or intersections, we must choose: up and over? left or right? forwards or backwards? As civilized beings of the so-called Modern World,Read More

Together and alive

April 1, 2013 Uncategorized

I have no dramatic, weird or suspenseful tales to tell about the weekend, in which we traded our city, finally glittering with what is always a deceptively bright and warm early Spring, for the basalt columns of the Frenchman Coulee and its bone-dry, shadeless basins. No mishaps, no injuries, no wrong trails. It was pretty boringly idyllic, and that was okay with us.