Friday, July 20: On the Oregon Trail: Hermiston OR to
Portland OR to Vancouver, WA. 196 miles.
A tiring but inspiring day. We left Hermiston at 9:30 after
the usual motel breakfast, and got back onto I-84, which soon dropped down to
parallel the Columbia River, following the course of Lewis and Clark and the
emigrants who followed them on the Oregon Trail.
The Columbia River Gorge is a phenomenal sight. Geologists
think that it was caused by a series of massive floods perhaps as much as
15,000 years ago, created when gigantic glacial dams in what is now Montana burst, sending towering walls
of water from Lake Missoula downstream at up to 80 miles per hour, scouring out the gorge,
flooding most of eastern Oregon, and scattering huge glacial erratic boulders
over a vast area.
Dams built in the last century have changed the appearance of
the river valley since Lewis and Clark and the Pioneers that followed them saw
it, but in many places it remains much the same. It is amazing to visualize the
challenges these men and women faced.
At the attractive visitors’ rest stops the State of Oregon
has built every 90 miles or so, there are interpretive displays illustrating
the progress of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery and the emigrants, with
quotations from their journals and letters, and maps and drawings illustrating
the vicissitudes they faced.
One of the emigrants complained “we faced hed (sic) winds”
day after day, and we can attest to the fact that they are as strong as ever.
The westerly “hed” winds we drove into must have been blowing 25 knots or more,
to judge from the whitecaps on the river, and driving westbound was a
challenge. Poor Priscilla, accustomed to getting 45 to 50 miles per gallon
through most of our trip (and 99 miles per gallon for the half hour drop from
the Grand Canyon to the valley below), was barely getting 35, and laboring at
that. The only people enjoying the wind were the dozens of windsurfers we saw
from time to time on the river below, zipping around like dragonflies, at
unbelievable speeds. And hundreds of great white wind machines
that lined the crests on either side of
the gorge for mile after mile were spinning and pirouetting in a
giant ballet.
We arrived in Portland at 1:30, and scouted out my sister
Nell’s condo and her daughter Sara’s house, in the southeast section of the
city. Nell was back in Maine, but we were curious about where she lived, and it
looked very nice from the outside. Sara was at work, so we asked a man we
encountered in Nell’s condo complex where we could find a good place for lunch.
He steered us to “Bread and Ink” on Hawthorne Avenue, which is a marvelous and
hip (if not Hippie) street, with funky shops, a huge Powell’s bookstore branch,
second hand shops, restaurants and bars.
Bread and Ink had a nice menu, and we each splurged on an
irresistible dish: breaded and fried Pacific oysters, huge and delicious, with aioli sauce and
salad. Our efficient and comely waitress was a startling sight, wearing a black T-Shirt with short sleeves that showed off her
magnificent tattoos, covering both arms from waist to shoulder and beyond, and
shiny black tights that were very tight indeed. A short black waitress’s apron
provided a necessary touch of modesty, for there was no skirt or other pants to
do the job. But this was pretty standard dress for the neighborhood –at least
for the young women who could get away with it.
We shopped for some gifts and a book we had been looking for
(at Powell’s – an enormous enterprise that I suspect is dwarfed in size by its
parent store in Downtown Portland), and we each had an ice cream cone at Ben
and Jerry’s before stopping to see my niece Sara, now home from work, and her
son Nathan.
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