Since July 2nd, we have been in Salem, Oregon. It is not the Salem with the witches, but a quiet, middle-child West Coast capital founded by Methodist missionaries 150ish years ago. Though many will not stop in Salem on their way to Portland, I’m glad we did, because we have had one of the best weekends of our trip.

There was one big reason we stopped here.

LUKE

At Capernwray, Luke and I were famous friends, and many of my memories from that time include him. But Capernwray ended four years ago, and I haven’t seen him since. Luke is a grand old guy and a great host, so it has been a pleasure to stay with him for as long as we have.

On Independence Day, Luke, Hannah Dorr, Paul and I started off the day by driving to a river east of Salem. The spot, Salmon Falls Park, wasn’t as crowded as a California beach, but we barely found parking. Paul calmly verbally chewed out a pick-up truck full of large people that pulled into the spot we were first in line for. They were rude while behind the wheel, but once outside of the truck they did that Latin whiney thing that passes as pleasantness, so I couldn’t yell at them without feeling like a terrorist. We used the bus to block them in as a sign of hostility, but they didn’t seem to mind so we just left it there and climbed down the slight bank to the river.

The river bed was made up of rocks ranging from the size of an orange slice, to the size of a watermelon. All were slippery, and so I crossed it with my toes fiercely gripping the thongs of my flip-flops, Gordon fearfully at my side. We had left Muddy in the bus, knowing that there would be no aspect of the river that he would enjoy, and also that in his stubbornness not to get wet, he would probably prematurely pull his handler into the water.

We tied Gordie to a log and jumped with full intentions into the deep pool the waterfall drops into. It was cold, but not unpleasantly, in the sun. I can’t estimate distances very easily, but we climbed a very tall cliff (20 feet? 30? Paul and I disagree on this matter, but this site estimates the full height of the falls at 25 feet), and basked for a while. After watching a skinny waif of a child vacillate on the edge for 20 minutes, with a line-up of impatient teenagers behind her, I though I might go for it. Luke and Paul had already jumped. Neither died, but skillfully landed in the one spot in the water that wasn’t a large rock. I would have found it easier if it had been a straight drop, if I could just release my knees, let my body go limp, and be confident of landing with a splash. But this cliff you had to take a run at, if you were to clear the rocks of certain death. Only the example of a cocky 11 year old and a 13 year old finally forced me to save face and jump. It was good. It was brave. But not as brave as what came next.

Next, Luke led us into a cave that had been dynamited out of the cliff to connect the river on the top of the cliff to the river at the bottom of it with a more gradual incline, so that salmon traveling upriver to spawn don’t get stuck facing a 30 foot wall. We swam into a cage, two side of which were concrete, and the back wall was just a gushing strength of river current. It was pretty much as solid to the touch as the concrete, actually.

Luke had introduced this experience to us as “climbing the fish ladder.” So, I imagined something like this:

Wikipedia Fish ladder article

But, dear reader, it was NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL. We were facing a gigantic fish ladder, a fish ladder built for a mighty Oregon salmon, not some wimpy British anchovy, and we were scared.

As the river travels through the cave, it has to jump a barrier every 7 or so feet, a wall that simultaneously holds water back and lets some over in the middle. This set-up is perfect for a fish that can jump out into the air to make small gains against a river current. For a human, it means that tests of strength and will are staggered every 7 feet, just enough to be out of arms reach so you have to wade into a swirling, violent pool while gripping the sharp rock walls with all the strength in your fingertips. You don’t know until you get over each barrier whether this pool will go up to you waist, your chest or your neck. Most often it seemed to be chest height.

Luke says “I’ve done this once before, in high school.”

He says “Stick together,” and then “Stay to the sides.” He says that it may look like a dark endless cave, but once you go around the corner you can see the light of the other end. He says “I hope you can hold your breath for at least 30 minutes.” And in we go.

As the cave got darker and darker, Paul, Luke and I had to call out after each climb “Are you ok?” because we couldn’t see if one of our companions had been dragged under the water and slammed into the rock walls or the step. Hannah banged her head early on and turned back after four or five fish steps, so we were party of three. Luke went first up each step, the dutiful guide, and Paul and I were alternating going second or third, pulling and pushing each other to help beat the relentless pounding of our fluid opponent.

At first, my arms were strong enough to get me to the top of a barrier, and over into the other side. But after 10 of these monumental efforts, my body was tired and shaking from the cold. I stopped speaking at all, except to reassure the others that I was alive.

After 25 fish steps, we were at the top. Luke somehow pulled himself up an actual ladder of steel rungs build into concrete to see if there was a way out, but we were blocked in. The fish ladder ended at the top in a concrete box with a grate lid. I assume the fish can exit somehow under water, but we could not.

The journey down was more dangerous, but less strenuous than the journey up. It was on this leg, trying to jump the barriers without letting the river carry me away,  that I bruised my arm, caught my neck on one of the steps and scratched it, and swallowed a gallon of river water.

Edit: I should add, that although we ragged Luke a bit for leading us on this dangerous mission, the fish ladder pumped enough adrenaline through our body, and bonded us to each other as survivors in such a way that it easily became one of the major highlights of our whole entire trip.

After the river, we went to the town of Independence, OR, to celebrate the 4th in true American style by watching a fireworks display over the Willamette River. There must have been 20,000 people there (Paul and I also do not agree on this number, so I am posting a source: The Polk County Itemizer). We paid the $1 admittance fee, and milled with the crowds around the stalls selling elephant ears (fried dough), funnel cakes (different kind of fried dough), Mexican and oriental food, and ice cream. We sat patiently on an odorous bench waiting for 10 o’clock and the show to begin. And boy! Them were some major fireworks. We missed the grand finale because we were eventually bored and thought we’d get a head start to the car, but overall it was fun. A good, fun, long day.

Luke and I were clicking away with film cameras, so pictures from the 4th do not YET exist in digital form, but Paul took pictures on the 5th with a digital, so I have used those in this post. On that 5th, we went west toward the beach. Maybe I can hassle a guest blogger into writing that day up?

Part of the team:

Oregon coast:

The shoddy bus and stinky crew has made it successfully from the comfortably East Coast mini-city of Halifax to the confidently West Coast mega-centre of San Francisco. Yesterday and the day before we drove Highway 1, hardly believing the rocky cliffs stopping the water to our left, the sandy dunes in Monterey, the smell of salt.

We landed in this city, coincidentally, on Pride weekend. The theme this year is “To form a more perfect union,” a phrase from the preamble of the U.S. constitution. The creator of the phrase explains:

“We LGBTQQIs are no longer an outsider people asking for tolerance. We are Americans. And we are not merely denizens of this earth, but citizens of the universe in a perpetual effort to form a more perfect union with all of its members. The theme was originally inspired by my reading of the 2008 California Supreme Court decision on marriage and the preamble to the US Constitution.” (Jokie Wilson)

Anyway, tomorrow is the big parade, so we are thinking about sticking around to watch that. Today, I would like to find a good farmers market and a beach, though it occurs to me as I write this that it might be too late in the day for fresh produce (all I know is that the Halifax market gets unbearably after 10 am).

I know the Halifax market very well. Not so much the San Francisco one (or, for that matter, any other farmer’s market in any other city, anywhere). It would have been easier, of course, to stay in one city, and get to know the seasons and what to expect from the local farmers at what time. I don’t feel very connected to the land on this trip: we are in California, and I haven’t eaten anything fresh off a tree! (In Georgia, I found a grapefruit at least). We drove through the artichoke centre of the world (according to the signs), but it was a strip of factory farms. I still yearn for connection: to a community, to a place. A cross-continent tour is not a breeding zone for something like that, and I feel like my half-assed attempts to conjure it is misguided. But I’ll be seeing my friend Luke soon, and my friend Brent soon after that, and I guess that has always been the only community I’ve successfully created: scattered loves across the world.

View SF Pride Parade Route in a larger map

Photo of the 2007 parade from Shooter.net

Quick update from a cafe near the Grand Canyon:

We left Taos, made our way through Santa Fe (what a beautiful city!), and then camped near some ruins about an hour east of Flagstaff, Arizona. On the way to the ruins we drove through the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, all of which we got to see for free because Obama declared this past weekend Fee Free weekend, or something like that, which meant people could visit national parks and grasslands without paying the price of admission. Nice. We’ll upload some pictures from the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest soon.

The next day we went to an insanely beautiful state park called Slide Rock, which was comprised essentially of a slowly flowing river and a series of pools, all of which lay at the bottom of a narrow, twisting canyon of red rock. It was gorgeous. We took video of that place, and we’ll try to get some of it up online soon.

We got back to the bus after slipping and swimming around Slide Rock and found a yellow flap of paper on our windshield. Parking ticket. Drag, but not a big one.

From Slide Rock we booted it up toward the Grand Canyon, intent on taking advantage of Fee Free weekend. Success! We rolled through the gates to the Canyon about an hour before sunset, $25 richer than we would have been had we entered the park any other weekend of the year.

I have a confession to make: I figured the Grand Canyon would be a tourist trap; I assumed it was all hype. I was dead wrong. The place is jaw-dropping. I couldn’t believe it. Bethany can attest to the fact that I walked around the South Rim of the place completely speechless. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before in my life.

That night we camped out at a campsite called Ten-X, which sounded more like a military testing ground than a restful place up in the Arizona trees. We ended up spending two nights there, and today we’re heading out in the direction of Las Vegas, not to gamble, but to gawk at the gaudy spectacle of it all.

Talk to you all soon.

Grand Canyon photo by StudioTO.

For my own records, before new memories erase older ones, I want to write down a few of the delightful small things I have stumbled into or worked hard to find over the past couple of weeks:

Minden, Lousiana : “Are you lost?” the cop asks, instead of giving me a ticket for bad lane-changing. He didn’t notice the busted rear-view mirror, either. After running my license, he talks about his pit-bull for 5 minutes and encourages us to “do it” (the trip), because he always wanted to but can’t anymore if he is going to put his kids through university. He points us towards the diesel station, and wishes us good luck. Broken-down buildings (”Dixie Laundry”) line a quiet stretch of railroad tracks.

Shreveport, LA: Old black woman on a rocking chair on a wooden porch, Municipal Auditorium, choir practice across the street (better than Elvis), little girl waved, Old men frolicking on benches in front of the courthouse. Got lost looking for the highway, thank goodness.

McLellan Lake/reservoir, Texas: Sunk into rock sculptures, snake dangers, made me like Texas. Miniature oil derricks, the bird with yellow wings. Muddy’s bid for freedom, and Gordon’s attempts to herd him back. Gordon’s bathroom duties (following Paul there and back to guard against danger). Old people on bicycles. Men floating in mud water inside an inner tube… fishing? Fire resistant grasslands. Firefly on Paul’s guitar case.“Free” campsites.So much light!

Quanah, Texas: Public swimming pool on a dirt road, $3 entrance fee for anyone older than five, teenagers who hang out there all day, sexy lifeguards Sandlot-style, Indian history.

Santa Rosa, New Mexico: Best enchiladas at Joseph’s Bar and Grill. Night time drive out of town up to a State Park… scrubby desert next to another unswimmable lake. I grabbed a sun-bleached stick, cactus flower. Route 66 pride everywhere. $10 rear-view mirror, plus license plate finds in a junkyard. Police chase over a misunderstanding. Starter cable died, and resurrected. Blue Hole: 81 ft. deep, they say, but for those of us without scuba equipment, mostly valuable as a COLD plunge on a hot day. Moderated body temperature back down to manageable levels for 72 hours and counting.

Taos, NM: Quite the drive here: snow dabbed mountains. Woke up at a lake cradled by hills. No swimming. Adobe Taos, hippie-haven, artist over-population. Donald Rumsfeld has a house here? Bill O’Reilly-loving tourists from San Diego admonish me to be a “good” journalist, like those on Fox News are. Green city, Indian jewelry. Turquoise and polished red coral in silver. The big, soft hands of Tony Reyna as he showed me pieces crafted by his son and other Indian artists. He cautioned me against fake turquoise, and taught me how to tell the difference. The Taos pueblo dwellings, with their 3 ft thick adobe walls and revolutionary history. Hot tub in a mountain side. On a detour, more waxy cactus flowers in yellow and orange. Spanish, at last.

What a run it has been since our last video update. We’ve blown tires, broken windows and mirrors, seen statues of Leadbelly and Elvis in downtown Shreveport, driven across Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and a good chunk of New Mexico, and today we dipped our sweaty, weary bodies into a hot spring on the rocky, cliff-walled bank of the Rio Grande. It has been a ride and a half.

Since last we spoke on video, Bethany and I left Savannah and within an hour blew a tire, creating in the rear view mirror an explosion of rubbery, snake-like strips that filled our lane and nearly crushed our resolve. Over the course of the ensuing five hours, I made four separate two mile bike trips to a service station and back, trying to get a tow truck. One eventually arrived and proceeded to hoist us up onto a flatbed and haul us one hundred miles to Macon, Georgia.

We slept that night in some deserted post office parking lot. The next morning we bought a new tire and were back on our way. Over the next several days, through sweltering, shirtless heat we drove across four states, making overnight stops in places like Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi. In Shreveport, Louisiana we visited the hall in which Elvis played his first concert. Take a gander in the picture gallery below for proof that Elvis made his debut in a place a little more grand than somewhere like the Cavern Club.

Today we arrived in Taos, New Mexico, a small little mountain-foot town that both Julia Roberts and Donald Rumsfeld apparently call home. Next we plan to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then off to Utah, California, and then up to Oregon and Washington. We’ll see how the bus holds out. Since Savannah we’ve not only blown a tire, but also fried a starter motor cable and had an accident in which we lost both our driver’s side mirror and window. But we’re still rolling.

Here are some pictures from the last couple of weeks of our trip. Some of them are self explanatory, others aren’t. Enjoy!

Mississippi is Alabama, is Georgia, is Pennsylvania, and so on. It might be unfair to say so, but a lot America looks alike. The outskirt of every city, at least. A cacophony of auto parts stores, Waffle Houses, and supposedly cheap hotels drowns out any original tune the different spots on the map might othersiwe have. We did spend more time drawing out the personalities of Savannah, in Georgia, of Charleston, in South Carolina, and of Charllottesville, in Virginia, and were rewarded, but there was little in the industrial wastelands outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi that made me want to delve deeper into their idiosyncrasies. We drove on by.

I’ve noticed that graphic design is not a priority of advertisers in the Deep South (Alabama and Mississippi). Signs along the road are laid out in hideous block letters (not even attractive block letters, like Helvetica or Frutiger) in faded, bland colours, on garishly lighted, obtrusive backdrops. Worst of all are at the billboards for the strip malls, where many of these bad signs are squished into a drab maxi-sign to clash against each other for perpetuity. The last place I remember seeing good design was outside Charleston, South Carolina: and it was advertising a Wal-Mart.

Oh, and the air is so full of Spanish around here! So many children! It makes me happy, but frustrated, to hear them. Happy that these kids know Spanish, that it is the language they speak with their mothers, and amongst themselves. Happy that they didn’t need to lose that part of themselves to fit into this culture. Frustrated because it tugs at my heart to see them, and as much as I want to hang out with these cheerful, latino kids, this isn’t my home. They aren’t my ex-students. I don’t know a thing about them, and vice-versa. I have to remember that they don’t know me like the kids in Bastión do. They get suspicious and scared if I try to talk to them, and they run back to their parents. So mostly, I listen, and my heart aches to participate. I haven’t spoken Spanish with anyone since… Ecuador, probably. I mean, I haven’t immersed myself in speaking the language. I’ve said things here and there, but I haven’t had to start thinking in the other language. And I miss thinking in it. A lot.

Photo of Charleston, SC, by Paul.

During this trip, many questions have come up that were (and are) without clear-cut answers. In that situation, a decision taken with confidence is as valuable as a correct one. Thus, we decide with confidence that, despite the attractiveness of the prospect of staying put and etching out a sedentary life for ourselves, we are going to search even more obscure landscapes out on this trip, as originally planned, and bravely travel westward, trusting we will be able to speedily fix any future obstacle in our way.

New resolve from White Bus Black Dog on Vimeo.

Oh, technology. I just spent hours putting this together. It was like getting sucked into any task, I suppose, but keyboard buttons and mouse track pads as tools seem to make everything slower. I hope somebody finds this map of our route so far interesting: the blue place-marks include links to relevant blog entries. The yellow ones are places we got grease (those are mostly useful to us, in case we ever repeat this route). The trip line is mostly correct, though there are some mistakes and omissions, because I just didn’t feel like going into exact details of EVERY kilometre we have traveled. I figured the big picture is good enough.

View White Bus Black Dog in a larger map

Well, the bus is having troubles. We’re parked out back of a gas station along a highway in Charleston, South Carolina. We’ve been here since Saturday evening, and the service station doesn’t open up until 8:00 am on Monday morning. I spent several hours this morning roaming the town on foot in an attempt to find a mechanic who works Sundays, but the only one I found refused to look at the bus because we’d converted it to run on waste vegetable oil.

“Boss won’t let us touch ‘em,” he said.

So Muddy and I walked further along US-17, past closed Chevrolet and Ford dealerships, bustling Sunday morning post-church pancake houses and massage parlours.

It poured all last night, and it’s hot and humid today. We’ll sweat out the rest of the day on the bus, and then hopefully we’ll be able to find someone tomorrow who’ll fix us up and get us on our way.

The problem is this: the bus shuts off suddenly. Three times yesterday we were driving along the road when, out of nowhere, the bus turned off. No sputtering, no warning lights, no heaving or sighing or screeching. The engine goes quiet, the steering wheel locks up, the brakes stiffen until they’re unusable, and so we flick on the four way flashers and try to edge over to the side of the road. Once we got stuck right in the middle of two lanes of traffic, at rush hour no less.

It has been pretty trying on the old enthusiasm; it’s difficult to stay excited about the next day’s travel when the threat of mechanical problems looms so large.

So, at this point in time we’re forced to reconsider our plans. If the bus is going to continue to give us trouble, should we really try to cut a diagonal from Savannah, Georgia, up through deserts and over mountains in an attempt to make it to Vancouver by the start of July? We’re questioning whether or not this is still a wise idea.

Right now, the most attractive alternative is to just throw in the grease towel and park the bus in a warm, friendly locale for June and July, then slowly make our way back up the coast and over to Halifax for the start of September. Anyone know friends or family looking for subletters or house sitters in Georgia or South Carolina?

The crew has landed at the seashore, finally.  A ferry deposited us in a quaint little island village, we drove through saying  to each other “we are in the Bahamas.” We found a campsite in the Hatteras National Park on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, walked over a dune, and found ourselves feet away from a white sand, blue water beach.

We are quite content here for the next little while. The village is small and flat (great for bikes), and only three miles away from the campsite. A couple we met on the ferry we took to get to the island invited us for a drive on the beach tonight in their four wheeler.

Paul’s computer is having some hiccups, so we are in a café backing up his hard drive. We need to buy some MOSQUITO REPELLENT (big time). After a terrible nights sleep, I found myself at 5:30 am murdering hordes of blood-filled mosquitoes that were flying up against our windshield in the early morning light. I had taken the dogs down earlier, to try to sleep on the sand, where I thought the ocean breeze would drive the hordes away, but the breeze had died down overnight. Only after the Battle of the Windshield was I able to claim some hours of rest. Gordon´s underside is pink and welty, Muddy is tired from snapped and huffing at invisible buzzing presences all night.

This place is beautiful! We are hatching plans to never leave. Saturday was awful. Sunday we arrived here and it all felt better.