Silver Falls State Park, Oregon

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My wife and I drove to Oregon late last month. Chauncy and Rudy were kind enough to join us. We have friends in Eugene we wanted to visit, but our prime motive was to see what Oregon was like, with the possibility being that we might move there and start a business. My wife and I wonder about taking chances, trying something different, and Oregon beckoned (shh! be vewy, vewy kwiet: don’t tell them we’re from Los Angeles), as if it had been sitting on a shelf above California in the Life Market, looming large and green and wet, calling to us as a soggy siren of the Pacific Northwest. What follows here are images from our trip.

Warning: lots of images after the fold, so for those of you who are still using a pump or hand crank for your Internets be advised. Always be advised…

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Mt. Shasta, California—the snow vanishes…

We (Mr. & Mrs. Jivester) never, ever leave anywhere near the time we give ourselves to leave. Case in point: We wanted to set off on our journey at 5:00 a.m. so of course we left Los Angeles at 9:30 (at least it was a.m.). It took hours just for the writing/printing/taping up of the copious instructions left for our neighbor who took care of our pets (our version of The Left Behind), watered the plants and now knows where to shut off our gas when the Big One strikes.

We live right near the Golden State Freeway—Interstate 5—which coincidentally is the only road one needs to take when driving from L.A. to Oregon (there are other routes, of course, but the 5 suited our purposes perfectly). From our house it takes about ninety minutes to get to the Grapevine and then down into the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. From there it is miles and miles of brown grasses, cows, various fruit and nut trees for ever and ever. Things get crowded for awhile through Stockton and Sacramento, then opened up as we headed into Redding (bought some new sandals) and then the 5 continues over Shasta Lake—we arrived at Mt. Shasta around 7:30 p.m. and drove straight past our campground (we thought there was another one higher up the mountain) until we could drive no further.

We overshot our campground but could not overshoot the summit

Chauncy and Rudy tromped briefly in the late June snow, and a fellow traveler took our picture.

Don’t look at us, look at Mt. Shasta!

We subsequently drove back down the mountain a ways to our campground, paid the modest camping fee, and attempted to set up our inflatable bed inside our tent. Well, the tent was kind of on the small side, and the bed was kind of on the large side…

Diet and exercise, my friends, diet and exercise!

The noisy pump we used to inflate the bed ran off the cigarette lighter in our rented SUV—and now that it was dark, in an effort to respect our fellow campers, we were determined to simply let some air out of the bed (so as not to involve the noisy pump), squeeze it out of the tent, and then sleep outside. I don’t know if it was because of something I smoked in combination with the hugely delicious wine we imbibed, but the inflatable bed did not come out easily. The tent fought us tooth and nail and would not relenquish the bed, until finally it reared up on its stumpy bottom and, like some mutant Japanese nuclear camping monster, tried to attack us upon the mountainside…

Our trip to Oregon was not yet one day old…and already mythic creatures rose against us in the dark of night

We fought and struggled and laughed and fell down and fought some more and shssd! each other and fought the tent with renewed vigor and shssd! each other with new severity and laughed and fell down some more until finally, like a virgin Coleman birth throuh mesh hymen, we mid-wifed the bed out into the world, and the tent collapsed in a heap of sticks and nylon. Exhausted, we fell asleep, much to the relief of our camping neighbors…

Doggies, camping and the sweet balm of sleep…

Alas, I must confess that I have a phobia concerning bears. When I was young I went camping a number of times with my family. We often stayed south of Yosemite in lesser known campgrounds, away from the crowds. Beautiful and wild and just a little bit scary. When I was eleven years of age I had a nightmare wherein a giant bear was attacking my family, and our German Shepherd was barking and fighting back, and I was hiding, terribly frightened, in my tent. This nightmare stemmed partly from a day hike experience I had: a girl (who lived in a nearby mountain town—Fish Camp to be precise) and I set off up a hillside (and were hiking lord knows where) when a large shape in the tall grasses lumbered towards us, and we heard a bellowing, and the girl turned to me and said “You’re not supposed to run if a bear comes at you” and then she turned and ran back towards camp like a fawn on steroids. I followed, running like I had never run before. To this day I always have a vague sense of dread when I sleep outdoors. I also carry the impression that girls from Fish Camp are to be approached with great circumspection.

My wife finds my ursaphobia amusing…

The next morning we stopped in the town of Mt. Shasta for coffee and a danish. It was there that I read in the Sacramento Bee that an eleven year-old boy was dragged from his family’s tent (the incident occurred arount 11:00 p.m.) in Utah and killed. His body was found some four hundred yards from where they camped. The bear was subsequently shot and killed. The post-mortem on the bear revealed that he was in fact the killer of the boy. Life is very funny, and then it’s not funny in the least.

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We left Mt. Shasta and headed north. Since this story is a little long, and there are more images to come, I will post part two tomorrow (or thereabouts).

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