With Tristan moving to Oregon, we decided to accompany him into the core of Cascadia for the long weekend. Even when a friend is leaving to do awesome things around the world, it's weird to suddenly not have him around. The "Just to finish..." and "I know, right?" rumblings will be missed!
After slipping and sliding on the garlicky oily pizzas at Cheeseboard, we hit the road to the tune of the piano band. There is much preaching to the choir from within the choral pit about gender and race. At eleven at night, Erik has the excellent idea of pulling off the road towards Lake Shasta. We're giddy from being in the car for hours, and the prospect of plunging into greenery for days is in our faces. Everything is awash in moonlight, we share a Guinness or two, run around with the fluffy skunks. We even take boyband pictures in silhouette against the lake.
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| This was taken in the middle of the night. I need to learn to use my camera for more kuul shots. |
I can't seem to get Zombie by The Cranberries out of my head. Zombieeee, zombieee.
I love the culinary magic that happens when you go camping. Suddenly you're okay with eating slabs of bread with slathers of jam, eggs with kimchi, cookies with beer, all off of the muddy hood of a car. Paleo dieting aside, everyone licks the same knife and we suddenly all have herpes. This was somehow the least prepared we were for any trip. What cooking? What lights?
Needless to say, Crater Lake was gorgeous, even with most of the paths closed off for snow. The gay park ranger latched onto us and gave us great advice on what to do in the park, while I admired the lesbian ranger dolls. We slew each other over and over with snowballs, headshots being especially satisfying. No opportunity to jump into the lake, though I don't know that any of us were disappointed, it being icy cold even clothed and dry. Snowshoes to do the cliff-side hike would have been sweet though.
With no competitors within a hundred mile radius, it was surprising that the Diamond Lake Resort actually put an effort into their grub. A solid three star joint that cranked out quantity over quality, we ended up eating here twice, the latter because I somehow dropped my phone at the Toketee campgrounds, something I wouldn't discover until returning to SF. As we meandered our way through salads, calamari, and burgers, children played in the wet sunlight, surrounded by clouds of midge flies that tried to enter every facial orifice. I kept imagining Jason Vorhees lumbering out of the lake, and that would be our signal to ask for the bill, hop in our car, and avoid being in the bloody splash zone of the children.
Baked goods entered the picture here and it all dims, flickers.
I don't know how we would have gotten pictures of the Umpqua hot springs, but that stands out to me as one of the minor peaks of this trip. While the explorer of the Astral Plane dealt with what it meant to have a corporeal form, the rest of us stumbled into the darkness, no light in hand. We crash into bushes, rocks, until eventual rescue by two beardos on the way to the springs as well. Five pools, each cooler than the rest as you go down to the river, some lit by candles, others by moonlight. The one with the roof was colonized by stoner kids with bushels o' raversticks. It's such a disorienting feeling when the other people in the pool share how they have five children. We each do the quick arithmetic since everyone is about the same age, and all you can hear is the hot water rushing from pool to pool.
The next morning, we impulsively decide to head to the Oregon coastal dunes for our final night, and along the way, we stop for whatever scenic action arises. Watson Falls turned out to be an excellent choice, and we hike up the mile to where the falls crash into the bottom, sending sheets of horizontal rain out to saturate us. I attempt a shot or two, but even I can tell that the camera is about to self-destruct.
Of course, we had to stop the car for the elk. Even though none o' the elk stuck to the unofficial viewing station, we found our own ways of making fuzzy contact.
I can't tell who the lead singer or the bassist would be, but there's probably some drumming involved. I'd probably buy their first album before they sold out the big record companies.
"I was listening to Cascadia Freedom Movement before they became really popular," would be what I'd say.
*waves lighter app*
Tea time to close up the night. We wandered back to the dunes, bathed in cheddar-cheese lights and tracing the misty highway to the sea. Only the lines that I walked on were lit, and brightly so. I ran into the cloying foam, wet to the knee, drying in the grainy dark with the rain starting to come down. On my back to the slope between the snowy plovers, the drops hitting and I'm hearing echoes.
On our way back, the sky pulsed a pink and green as it became a carnivorous all-consuming world-succulent, ready to digest things with its mind. The trees on both sides of the highway, minions all, waved spines and pine needles, just waiting for the ululations to stop. Mirrors taking on their own fear-element, but we had Chris guiding and anchoring. The rain continued to come down as we sat by the blue and green witchfire, everything misting.
I'd never gone to bed so comfortable, and lucid dreaming came easily. I woke up in a pile of sand, snuggled again.
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