Some thoughts from the road

These dry lands of eastern Oregon and Washington have to go by at a human speed now, no getting around it. It is difficult, or impossible, to capture in pictures. I feel the car window is a snapshot; passing at a high speed the image flashes in one’s slideshow, and is soon replaced. At the rate we’re going, the landscape must penetrate the senses, often in an uncomfortable way; it will not be ignored. Here are some impressions:

Scents – Dry sage, carrion, rail tie tar, green river water, hot stone.

Sights at the roadside – records curled by the sun, bed sheets in the scrub, dead hawks, dead snakes, dead raccoons, dead deer, dead possums, dead skunks, dead mice, dead grouse, mirages, freight trains, herons hovering up from marshes, ospreys perched on phone poles feeding on fish, bands of bronze grassland and green farms warbled by heat.

Sounds – hush of tires on pavement, the grumbling wasp sound of high tension lines, mourning doves in low trees at dawn, passing trains in the night.

Sensations – morning breeze cooling my arms and drying my throat at once, salt crusting on my skin and clothes, a deep oven heat in the air, sticky plum juice filling my mouth.

In these long stretches of the Columbia Gorge, where few people choose to live, where there is little but the broad grey river and the crumbling lava bluffs and yellow grass, there is nowhere to go but ahead to the next oasis. In a car I think I would say how beautiful these bluffs are
and speed on. On a bike, this heat, these bluffs are awesome and terrible too. Both things.

I find, upon climbing out of that desert river gorge, the rolling green farmlands to be brilliant. The pipes and sprinklers, their mist lit white by the sun, the colorful American flag whipping like a horse tail about its pole. They are peaceful and comforting to me, having left a beautiful wasteland. And beside that lies a sense of what has been lost in the natural world, all across America as well as here. This exquisite and wounded land.

Neale