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One virtue of the traditional road trip is that you can relax by staying out of touch with the world. Just drive through the day, and collapse in a motel room at night, snoring before the news even comes on TV. Don't bother with modern stuff like Wi-Fi connections along the way. Eschew the noble tradition or picking up a newspaper to go with the morning coffee and two-over-easy-with-hash-browns.
It's refreshing at first, but after a couple of days of examining various Western deserts (Colorado truly is colorful, Utah's is most barren, Idaho's is hottest) you start to worry that something important might have happened.
But when I finally got to a daughter's house in Oregon and had chance to catch up on the news, they were still talking about whether the police had acted stupidly or properly in the case of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, whose conduct was also being questioned.
(My take on it is that no matter what color you are, it
is not wise to mouth off to cops. They are intensively
trained to control the situation.
Anything that
threatens their control, including your attitude inside
your home, is deemed a threat.)
The health-care debate was continuing in Washington, Colorado's government was still low on money, Michael Jackson was still dead but newsworthy, nothing seemed to have changed, except perhaps the news was actually running backward, because the birthers are getting attention again.
I thought that issue was resolved about a year ago when Barack Obama posted a copy of his Hawaiian birth certificate on-line and the state of Hawaii confirmed it.
But the certificate isn't enough for the birthers. Even if there were a video, they'd probably claim it was faked there are, after all, people who still think the Apollo 11 moon landing was staged in a studio.
Anyway, I could feel relieved that American public discourse was not progressing into some new and unfamiliar topics.
Here in Oregon, the main topic is heat. Portland set a
record high of 106 last week, amid a stretch of
triple-digit days, and Eugene also hit 106. From what I
read, most houses don't have air-conditioning, and some
cities have set up special cooling centers,
air-conditioned halls where people can hang around..
We're in Bend, a recent boom-town (the population jumped from 52,000 in 2000 to 80,000 today) gone bust (17 percent unemployment, plenty of foreclosures).
Bend's weather is hot, highs in the mid-90s. This is high desert, though, so as soon as the sun sets, the temperature drops quickly to something reasonable. The hot days make for torpor, just lying around reading in front of fans, but there are a lot of worse ways to take a break from routine.
Even so, we escaped the heat with a trip to Crater Lake, which was cool, magnificent, serene and interesting. The deepest lake in America, it's the collapsed caldera of an old volcano, Mt. Mazama. From my rough calculations, Mazama moved more rock in one day about 7,700 years ago than the entire Colorado mining industry has in 150 years.
From devastation comes beauty, if you wait long enough. But not too long -- when I picked up the local paper the morning after our lake trip, the front page had a story about an entrepreneur's plan to offer 45-minute helicopter flights over and around the lake next year. That might be the American way, but some days, you just wish you were on the road ignoring such news.
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