Deschutes Deliverance, Part I

My sorority sister and I stared at the muddy trickle dribbling out of the culvert in which we planned to spend the night. Did the risk of a flash flood outweigh the danger of being eaten by coyotes?  We’re going to die alone in the desert, I thought, and rush isn’t even over.

It was my second week of freshman year at a bucolic little liberal arts college in the New England tradition, located somewhat incongruously in the wheatfields of eastern Washington.  The ivy on the old brick dorms had not yet turned fiery red, and my biggest problem was that it was still too hot for me to wear as many layers of different colored Izod shirts as fashion dictated. There was a three-way tie for second-biggest problem: The crushing disappointment of having to pledge my second-choice sorority, disgust at dorm food (“kibbles and bits”), and desire to clobber the boy across the hall who put his stereo speakers in the window and left The Knack’s “My Sharona” on auto-repeat at full volume for hours on end.

So when I found a mimeographed flyer for the annual school-sponsored float trip down the Deschutes River in the Central Oregon desert a few hours away from campus I jumped at the opportunity.

Dawn on Saturday morning found me, my sorority roommate, about 20 other students packed into two Econoline vans, each towing a trailer full of deflated 8-man rafts, foot pumps and paddles. As we barreled down the interstate toward the turnoff for the river, comparing notes on our suburban upbringings (someone had once suggested the school’s mascot be changed to “The Wasps”) re-enacting our favorite Monty Python sketches and munching cereal and muffins packed for us by the dorm kitchens, the sun rising behind us turned the scrublands gold and distant Mount Hood pink and purple.

We wound down a long decline into the river canyon, trailing cometary clouds of dust.  We passed through the rough cow town of Maupin, feeling out of place as we drove by the battered pickup trucks and decaying mobile homes with dogs on long chains in the parched front yards.

We eventually reached the pull-out point, a wide spot in the road where the river flattened out a bit before plunging over the unraftable Shears Falls.  At the other end of the parking area was a dusty encampment of sport fishemen living in grimy campers that appeared not to have known the kiss of Lysol since the Nixon Administration.  As we prepared to leave one van behind so we could retrieve the other from the put-in point a dozen miles upstream, I could hear an early-season football game on a transistor radio.  One fisherman sat outside his truck in an ancient aluminum folding chair whose plastic webbing was worn through to dangling shreds.  Eyeing the gaggle of laughing, carefree college kids, he pulled a Marlborough from the half-empty pack, lit it in a cupped hand and turned his back on us to resume baiting his hook from a jar of bright yellow salmon eggs.

Momentarily taken aback from the show of disdain, I had a chilly realization that I was an awfully long way away from world in which I had woken up that morning.  But the sharp, flinty smell of sage quickly overwhelmed the cigarette smoke, and we sped up the road in a hail of gravel to launch the rafts.

The trip down the river was a washing machine of cold water, hot canyon air and bright blue sky.  The Deschutes is rough, but we were hardly descending the upper reaches of the Ganges or the Urubamba.  The worst peril we faced was losing a hat or a bottle of sunscreen.  On slow stretches we jumped into the icy water and swam alongside the rafts, clambering back in over the slippery hot rubber when new rapids approached.

One one stretch of whitewater a girl, much taller and blonder than I, who had pledged a higher-end sorority, slipped partly out of a raft and banged her knee hard on a rock.  The raft captain, a grizzled veteran of 19 on his second trip, declared that she should be taken to a hospital in the small town of The Dalles near the mouth of the river when the trip was over.

The afternoon sun was sliding toward the canyon walls by the time we returned the pull-out point.  Clouds of nighthawks had already  emerged from their roosts in the cottonwood trees and were diving and swooping on their sharp-pointed wings after the last insects of the season. The fishermen were nowhere to be seen. 

While the boys deflated the rafts on the beach, my roommate and I repaired to the bank of blue-walled portable toilet to change into dry clothes.  When we stepped out, both vans were gone.

To be continued…

Knowing Our Place

Nature, like our cats, abhors a vacuum. A large percentage of our time here at the Drainfield of Dreams is devoted to efforts to put nature where we think it should be, and nature basically ignoring us.

Our neighbors have called me at work to report deer standing on our front porch looking in through the glass door, no doubt preparing to ring the doorbell with their little hooves to ask what we might have available in the vegetable crisper. Other “peeping toms” include hummingbirds who suspend themselves in midair to stare reproachfully through the kitchen window when their feeder is empty. By contrast, the raccoons rarely spare us a glance when they lumber by the patio, being far more interested in looking for snails in the pond than in watching “So You Think You Can Dance” with us.

In an effort to keep the nocturnal masked bandits at bay, S.O. just bought the Rac Zapper 3000. Tired of waking up every morning to the sight of expensive waterlillies dessicating on the deck, S.O. is hoping instead to be lulled to sleep by “zzzzzt” sounds of the electric fence, followed by the pitter-patter of little feet scurrying back under the gap in the deck from whence they came.

The invasion of our space is not confined to mammals. Colonies of wasps live in every nook and cranny of the garden. The worker in the photo is fanning the entrance to a nest built inside a solar light, to keep the inside cool. They are deeply uninterested in us and seem to enjoy eating aphids, so we’ve left them alone for the most part. But I try not to think about how many there are when I’m out on the patio watching the paper wasps with long dangling legs hovering around the eaves. There’s also real drama on the balcony outside our bedroom, as the hollow-tube railing has been filled over the years by innumerable small spiders who hide inside during the day and emerge in the evening to check their webs. Occasionally one will venture too far and be seized by one of the iridescent blue mud-dauber wasps that patrol constantly. I once saw a mud-dauber grab a hapless spider, accidently drop it, and zoom down to catch it before it hit the ground, like a comic-book superhero (though no doubt not heroic from the poor spider’s point of view).

Some creatures actually do make it inside the house. We used to let the cats out through a kitty door until we discovered that the territory they were willing to defend was approximately the living room. Taking the Neville Chamberlain approach to diplomatic relations with the neighbor’s cats, ours achieved peace in their time by cowering under the coffee table while others made short work of their dish of cat crunchies.

Five-inch dull blue dragonflies whizz in through open windows, their huge wings making a distinctive dry, papery rattle. Hand-sized crane flies find their way in on summer evenings and cling to the drywall, far too big for the web-spinning spiders who came in on the flowers I cut from our backyard. Every fall when the heat kicks on, enormous mouse-sized (to my eyes, anyway) hunting spiders move in and spend their evenings scurrying toward wherever I happen to be sitting. All these invaders are duly evicted, but it’s a never-ending task.

Keeping nature where we want reminds me of a simplified version of the three laws of thermodynamics I once heard:

• You can’t win.
• You can’t break even
• You can’t stop playing the game.

Bambi is Godzilla

 

The deer are starting to eye the ripening apples on the ancient lichen-covered trees in our backyard.  Sublimely indifferent to the construction of our house and so-called garden on what they have rightly regarded as their property since the retreat of the last ice sheet, they spend the summer sitting a few feet away from me top of the septic system mound, chewing their cuds with an orbital jaw motion similar to that of a major-league baseball player setting up to hawk a fat glob out into right field.  Their smug expressions seem to say, “I wouldn’t plant that dahlia there if I were you.” I’ve begun my annual exercise of  putting up coils of unsightly black netting around our trees to keep the bucks from shredding the bark with their antlers to mark their territories.  Nothing detracts from a dewy late-summer morning quite like seeing a choice and expensive sapling that one had jauntily sped home with and laboriously planted by spending an entire afternoon with a pickaxe excavating a hole in the “soil”(a concrete-like matrix of clay and potato-sized rocks resembling a fossilized 1950s jello dessert) lying in a pile of splinters on the lawn.  This misery is compounded by the lack of modern recourse, as the deer remain impervious to litigation, Facebook slander campaigns and angry letters to the editor.   So netting it is.  The only redeeming aspect of this chore is that when I emerge from crawling through the rosemary hedge I smell like a roast chicken, which in my mind is superior to Chanel No. 5.

Notes on Camping, Maritime Division

Seafair weekend was chosen by our region’s founders because it is statistically the date most likely to bring an onslaught of migratory potters, glass-bead jewlery makers, hydroplane drivers and out-of-state relatives.  Actually it’s supposed to be the driest weekend of the year, and to many of us natives that means one thing:  Camping!

But we all know that statistics can lie like a cheap rug.  Never was this fact brought to bear more forcefully than on a long-ago Seafair Weekend when my Significant Other and I decided to take our twenty-four foot sailboat “Caution to the Winds” out for two days of glorious early-August fun.  We spent Friday night at Thriftway stocking up on all the essentials needed for the perilous expedition to Blake Island:  Sunscreen, bug spray, Tim’s potato chips, a Tillamook Cheddar Baby Loaf and select adult beverages.

Saturday dawned dismayingly cloudy, but S.O. and I were undeterred.  “It’ll burn off,” he said.  “Of course,” I replied. “It’s SeaFair Weekend. It never rains.” We pulled on our fleece jackets and tromped down the Shilshole dock, lugging a cooler filled with enough food and drink to have sustained the Lewis and Clark expedition for an entire winter, even if they had really liked Life cereal and Johnsonville Brats.

Since there was no wind, S.O. fired up the Iron Spinnaker. Twenty-five pulls on the starter cord later, the outboard erupted into a mighty roar reminiscent of the sound of a fork caught in a garbage disposal, and we powered out of the marina in a cloud of blue smoke at a breathtaking four knots. For those of you unfamiliar with arcane sailors’ terminology, that speed is, in miles per hour, “really slow.”  “It’s OK,” I shouted to S.O , anxiously eyeing the lowering gloom.  “It’s Seafair Weekend. It never rains.”  Moments later the heavens opened up and unleashed a frigid deluge, reducing the visibility to approximately zero just as we reached the shipping lanes.

At this point, however we were past the point of no return in the voyage if not in our relationship, so we pressed on toward where we hoped Blake Island was.  I endeavored not to remember how I used to tell my small-boat sailing students that it takes a freighter approximately a mile to stop, that is if we were even spotted, as our boat had been designed for racing and has a low profile and was coated with what appeared to me to be radar-absorbing paint.

Eventually the island hove into view and we dropped anchor on the far side.  The rain intensified. S.O. tied a blue cover over the boom to shelter the cockpit, this giving lie to the notion that “blue-tarp camping” is limited to landlubbers. 

We were now effectively confined in the recreational equivalent of a prison hulk.  We could not launch the dinghy to go ashore as long as the boom tent was up, and we could not stand up in the cabin or under the tent.  “It’s fine,” said .SO.  “It’ll clear up, it’s SeaFair Weekend.”

Since our planned barbecue on the island was now out of the question, I was faced with the daunting culinary challenge of creating a gourmet feast on the two-burner alcohol stove in the cabin, using only the materials nature (Thriftway) had provided:  Top Ramen, salmon dip, Cheetos and beer.  I dutifully cranked up both burners in an effort to heat both the ramen and the cabin.  While I waited for the water to boil I wrung out our soaked socks and fleeces, raising the ambient humidity in the cabin to approximately 250 %.  Just as I was wondering whether you could contract tuberculosis from the miasma of sweat, old campfire smoke and bug spray that results fishing last week’s camping clothes out of the laundry hamper,S.O. announced that the porta-potty had sprung a leak.  Thankfully, only of chemicals and not of “the other stuff,” but the resulting stench would have driven Osama bin Laden out of hiding in deepest Tora Bora.

Eventually we settled down to eat my culinary creation, reclining in the berth on one arm like ancient Romans because there was no room to sit upright.  S.O. managed not to make too much of a face, but I noticed he was careful to breathe only through his mouth while eating and followed every bite with a swig of beer. 

The evening’s entertainment consisted of reading the backs of cereal boxes as we had not brought any books or magazines.  “Why is there guar gum in both the peanut butter and the jelly?” I asked S.O., but he had already fallen asleep.

In fact it did clear up.  At approximately 2:00 AM I woke up and crawled out through the hatch onto the bow of the boat.  The vault of the heavens above me was filled with uncountable stars, shimmering a hard bluish white in the still, clear air.  The bay around us was a mirror reflecting the stars back so perfectly that we seemed suspended in a child’s snow globe.  The only disturbance to this perfect symmetry was a faint trail in the water made by the current passing our anchor chain and disturbing the bioluminescent algae floating past it.

The next morning we piled on every piece of damp clothing we posessed and motored back to Shilshole.  The following year we got married.  But not on SeaFair Weekend.