It's a long, long way to Portland. It's a long way to go.

Mari and I were invited
by Daniel and Elliza
to come to Portland to see
our newest granddaughter, Elliot.

We decided to drive,
partly for the hell of it,
partly because Mari has a slightly used Subaru,
replacing a long-term Ford Escape,
and partly because--
among other things--
it made it easier to see our daughter, Heidi,
and Jack, somewhere near Santa Cruz.

We aimed, first, at Las Vegas,

mostly out of sheer curiosity,
since we had never been there.
We will probably not go there, again.

It has been our intention
to see a show
because we had (logic in play, here)
never been to Las Vegas before.
When we got there,

we said "To hell with it: let's eat."

Cigarette smoke everywhere.

We did enjoy the drive
through desert places
we had never seen,
or could not remember.

The next day, we drove through
even more interesting places,
wriggling our way on back ways
to Lake Tahoe, not Reno,
but the south end of the lake where we had an enchanting seafood dinner
at a table next to a young couple from England, at a restaurant at the lake.
The "patio" was glass-protected from whatever wind there might have been,
providing both an indoor and outdoor experience, simultaneously.

On the morning after,
we drove around the east side of the lake,
just for the views, stopping for breakfast
at the Tunnel Creek Cafe,
proudly said to have been a prop
for the TV show, "Ponderosa".

I found myself staring up at a pine tree
wondering what kind of pine it was:
eventually logic kicked in, again.

I was more intrigued by the sign on the wrong side of the building--
the back side, the uphill side, the side facing the trees--
that advertised the availability of gluten-free food;
just what Hoss and Little Joe would have wanted, I assume!

That day,
and another,
we drove toward Portland.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

SmokeSound

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