Notes from the Road - Day 16

2/14/04 9:10pm Grant’s Pass, OR

Last night, I slept soundly except for one instance of the cat outside my window caterwauling. I don’t know if it was the same cat I heard yesterday or not, but its cries sounded like that of a human baby, or a choking woman, very disturbing and loud. When I first checked in at the hostel, I saw a cat with a huge, flesh colored tumor hanging to the side of its left eye, but it walked on by. The cat sitting on the fence separating the hostel from the house next door when I woke up was black, and wasn’t making any noise.

It was raining, just as I figured, so I just showered and checked out, giving up on the 4-wheeler idea. As I left Seaside, the rain began to break and I got a precious few hours of dry weather. An historical marker informed me that the governor of Oregon in 1912 declared the entire 400 miles of Oregon’s coast from high tide to low tide would never be sold as private property, but instead be preserved for conservation. Another one identified 3 possible reasons for the name of the harbor called Ghost Hole. On the radio, one station’s identification included the heartwarming notice “No rap or hip hop!” I’d never before encountered a radio station that promoted itself so definitively by a genre of music it doesn’t play.

Eventually, highway 101 left the coast and began digging into the dense forests. Just before entering the most interesting of these, I looked at the Tillamook Air Museum. It’s housed in what’s billed as the largest wooden freestanding structure in the world, a giant hangar visible from the road. If it was really all made of wood, you couldn’t tell it from the roof, which appeared to be rusting to a dull red. (Author’s note: It occurs to me now that it was probably built with redwood lumber, and the paint is simply coming off.) When I first approached the entrance, I almost believed it’d been deserted. The one open end of the building was a gaping, black maw, and no planes were visible except one sitting outside, impossibly proportioned to look like an oblong aspirin with wings. I found it hard to believe it could ever have flown, thinking that maybe it was a display model. The signs that had pointed the way down the potholed roads to the museum disappeared a little before the actual entrance, as if the proprietors had thought, “They can see where it is, let them find their own way in.” As a result, I drove around back of the thing and had to turn around to make my way into the parking lot. The buildings on that side of the hangar looked like vastly expanded versions of the farmhouses I’d seen from the interstate in Montana, windows knocked out, doors standing open, completely abandoned, for the season or forever, I wasn’t sure. One of them looked like it’d been a government building, another manufactured children’s water slides and the like.

I ended up skipping the museum since it didn’t look worth the $9.50 admission, and a friend had told me I had to see Oregon’s rainforest. When I saw the sign for Munson Falls, I took that road into the deep paths. Going in, I passed a small corner that had been logged, bare of standing trees but littered with their remains. It looked like a scar. The road traveled up and twisted, turning to gravel. Finally, written on a tree trunk in orange paint was the word “falls” and an arrow. Inching down this even narrower gravel road, I encountered another car coming the other way. There was no shoulder to pull off onto, so I just drove my right tires off onto the ground to make way and he barely made it. At the end of this road was a circle with an SUV parked on the far side of it. I pulled behind the SUV and got out of the car. It did indeed feel like stepping into a rainforest, albeit one that was only 50 degrees. A sign pointing toward one path into the woods along the stream bubbling nearby said “Munson Creek Falls ¼ mile”.

I walked down the path into the undergrowth and heard voices and the rising sound of water. Near the end of the trail were two sets of steps, where a man was setting up a camera and two women were talking about the surroundings. The boughs parted in front of me and there was the waterfall, more than 100 feet high and postcard perfect. It looked just like any waterfall in any jungle movie you’ve ever seen. I had one of the women take my photo in a picturesque spot and started heading back up the trail, but slowly this time, really taking in all the surroundings. The abundance of life surrounding me was very humbling. Several trees lined parts of the pathway, or perhaps had fallen there and were cut to facilitate the path. Looking at the rings, I could see they were probably more than 200 years old when they died. Now they were covered in moss and fungus, slowly decomposing inside and out to fuel the process of rejuvenation. It might take another thousand years for them to be dissolved completely into the earth, but I doubt it. In fact, every tree, living and dead, was ¾ covered in a thick, green, moss blanket, some long and shaggy, some hanging gently, others gripping and layering to make a limb look three times its actual width. I stopped and stared at one cut tree lying on its side, where the rings would have been visible were it not for a thick green coat. Standing straight out like little flags were the reproductive organs of the moss, one of those words you learn in school but have no use for outside of tests and field trips; filament, pistil or stamen. Many of these delicate protrusions held a single drop of water on the end, and looking closer I found some of them had been tied together in a small but intricate spider’s web, almost invisible from the side but still stronger than steel fiber of the same width.

I moved on to a thickly carpeted shaggy moss coating a limb that stood horizontally over the path. Looking up, I saw small flying insects, like tiny moths making their rounds, and further up, the forest canopy that couldn’t conceal the gray sky. I realized my mouth was open and closed it when the thought occurred that a drop of water hanging above might have fallen in. When I stopped to consider this, I thought about how far we have removed ourselves from the communion we once had with the land, in our modern society with our bottled, flavored water and perpetual warning signs going off in our minds, for ourselves and our children. A hundred years ago, or a thousand, or ten thousand, a man standing in my very position would have welcomed a drop of sweet rain water falling into his mouth from a forest leaf above. Indeed, leaves were sometimes used to gather and funnel water, a purpose they are well-suited for. But when I, raised on television, movies, news reports, and biology class, thought about a drop of water falling in my mouth, I saw images of bacteria, virii, and fungi that could have been growing on the leaf that held it, and wanted no part of it. Instead, I’ll blindly accept whatever’s in the tap water, natural or manmade, or occasionally pay for a plastic bottle full of water that has been proven to be no cleaner or safer than the average tap water in the United States. Hooray for progress. Just to spite myself, I put my hand in the stream to test the water. It wasn’t nearly as cold as I had expected. I wouldn’t have wanted to swim in it, but it wasn’t snowmelt, certainly. The bank where I was standing was partially covered in metal fence to hold it together and stop erosion.

As I approached the area where I’d parked my car, I stopped at another felled tree trunk lying flat on the forest floor, but this one was completely hollow. I bent down and stared into the darkness and could easily imagine any number of animals making a home deep inside there. It was fully a hundred feet long, and there was nothing near the opening on my end, so I moved on. However, it did remind me of the hickory nut tree we used to have in our backyard. It was hollow inside too, and home to various animals, but it had been hollowed out by a lightning strike and continued to grow for many years, even producing nuts every two to three years.

Back on 101 South, I came to another turnoff that led to a sand dune area. There were many signs posted alongside the road saying no motorized vehicles beyond this point and one sign explained why, but what did I see as I was going by but 4-wheelers lined up to race on one end, and what looked like an instructor holding a flag. About 50 feet from the road, the entire area became lined with hundreds of tire tracks. I can’t imagine the signs referred to just a small strip of land along the roadside, but these riders were clearly organized. I wondered if they had permits.

When 101 ran into highway 18, all traffic came to a stop. I could see there was little or no traffic on 18 East so I made a U-turn and took it back towards I-5. For the next ten miles or more of highway 18 there was solid traffic, and it was only 2:30pm on a Saturday. Whatever was holding things up, I hoped it wasn’t a terrible accident or those people would be waiting a long time on that 2-lane road. It was raining steadily by the time I got to Salem, but I went through the city anyway to find the capitol building and snap a quick photo. It was a bear getting on I-5 through the city, and would’ve been absurdly difficult even if I hadn’t gotten off the highway like I did.

I drove I-5 until I stopped for tonight in Grant’s Pass. The rain was coming down so hard most of the way that I couldn’t make out the surrounding terrain, but when it got dark I felt the familiar ups and downs, and ear-popping, of mountain country. Tomorrow, I’ll be seeing giant redwoods in California for the first time. I hope it’s not raining.