In the morning my daughters boyfriend came over and he and I completed the outfitting of our spacecraft. We then went and got my younger daughter and then my older daughter who was at a friends house. After stopping at Starbucks we were off to Elk Lake.
The journey from my home to the lake is about 200 miles along mostly open road. My main worry on such a trip is music, or rather the control of music or lack thereof. Do we plug the MP3 player in and listen to the soundtrack to High School Musical? Or do we plug the iPod in and listen to Metric. The kids trade off from time to time and no Jihad happens, not that there is much room for terrorist activity in such a cramped car.
We drive past ancient forests, alpine Mt Hood, and across the vast casino lands of the Warm Sprins tribe. We cross deep gorges in mere seconds that would have stymied Peter Skene Ogden for weeks, and go past luxury home sites surrounded by deep green lawns fed by the plundered central Oregon aquifer, until finally we are in Bend.
Bend has changed a lot since I was a kid visiting my grand parents in La Pine. Currently there are 75,000 citizens in the town, or rather the city. None of us our dressed in a way that the locals would approve of. We are not wearing Tevas, Patagonia, or Northface. Everyone seems like they are waiting for the photographers to get back from brake to finish the LLBean or Eddie Bauer catalog photoshoot. There are no fat people in Bend. This may be a local ordinance I am not sure. Neither are there many people of color, unless you count the leathery skinned white folks waiting for the results of their latest skin biopsy.
My kids haven’t been here for years so to them it is brand new. We slice our way through the confusing nest of streets and find our way to Century Drive and finally brake free of the last vestige of urban life, the Wigi Creek golf course and accompanying luxury subdivision. In ten minutes we are high in the pines with splendid peaks before us. I get nervous traveling to places I have not been in a while. Are they the same as last I saw them? Have they been corrupted by the bourgeoisie? As I drive on I see the titanic nature of the landscape develop. This is not land easily corrupted by roads or golf courses. Not up here astride the ring of fire. My kids note that the landscape in places seems like Mordor, from the Lord of the Rings. It is a land of stark contrasts.
On onside of the road are jagged black monoliths of fractured obsidian as large as office building, toppling like some satanic dark glacier spat up from Cocytus. Beyond them rise up a series of strato volcanoes each capable of destroying vast sections of Oregon should the crust shift just a bit. On the other sided of the road is an idyllic paradise of lush wetlands, tall firs, still lakes, and full of wildlife. We will be staying on the “paradise” side of the road not the “inferno” side.
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