1200 miles -- rainforest, Canada and back

So there we were. We had been holed up in our cozy NoPo hideaway for six days. The neighbourhood was quiet. The cats (probably an appurtenance in proper lease language, since we have no responsibilities to them aside from keeping them from becoming totally feral) had showed a disturbing tendency to assert their territorial rights, and had been exiled from the bedroom. We had a great collection of books, and an account set up at the local video store (though no Internet). So what do we do? 

We hit the road. 

The itinerary: very bare bones, probably overambitious -- we'll take in a little Oregon coast, a national park in the US, a small corner of Canada, and two major coastal cities.

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Our trip starts with a straight-shot drive to the point on the Oregon coast closest to Portland -- Tillamook. Whatever the marine equivalent of breadbasket is, it's Tillamook. 

Besides fertile estuaries and Pacific pastures, there are a few sandy beaches, especially around Cape Meares. The first one we visit, Oceanside, is a mile of sand ending abruptly in cliffs -- looks like classic Central California. Morgan makes his first acquaintance with salal berries. With its shiny leaves and the appearance of the berries they look inedible in the manner of pokeberries but are actually very subtle tasting, fragrant of calendula and cardamom. Turns out if you squeeze a salal berry from the stem end, you see it burst kaleidoscopically. 

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Tillamook is home to a cheese factory that is a regional household name and while not organic -- though I think it is phasing out growth hormones -- it has a vague cachet of Jersey-cow wholesomeness. The factory, which is free of charge to visit, has a serious "open-kitchen"policy and is a PR tour de force. It is probably just a small cross-section of the operation, but you can watch three or four varieties of cheese go from block form to retail-ready individual packages. Unlike many other interactive museums that are content just with a touchscreen for supplying information that is actually pretty static, the cheese factory shows, and doesn't just tell everything. Those inclined can press their nose to the glass for hours and figure out themselves who is doing what. With enough time, maybe even office politics and rivalries between the employees in their white toques and robes would start to become apparent.

Apart from the locale and the clean air, Tillamook is reassuring in the sense that it seems that we as humans have many years before machines finally phase us out. A good 20% of the assembly line human resources appear to be spent on correcting mistakes made by the flow belt. 

What is not so great about Tillamook is that all the fast-paced correction jobs -- just barely keeping up with the conveyor --€“ appear to be performed by women. The more arcane and leisurely-paced jobs visible through the glass on the other side of the gallery -- guy enters in technician's coat, washes out hopper or doses the rennet -- are performed exclusively by men.

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On Day 2 we realized there is no solitude to be had on the Oregon coast, even on a rainy Tuesday morning -- not in August. I travelled from Los Angeles along the coast to the Oregon border in June 2003 and don't remember any major crowding. My wife ventured that perhaps perceptions have a lot of do with it -- indeed I expected CA to be worse, or maybe I was dazzled by the cliffs and views. In any case, Oregon is softer, more contoured, lower key.

Now Oregon famously declares that 100% of its coast is public access. Apart from impassable headlands, you can walk along all of it from California to Washington. But I don't quite see how it plays out in practice if you are not yet on the beach, or how it is in practice superior to Washington's sections of coast.

We could have probably gotten away with wild beach camping at only one spot in Oregon. It was not posted but looked dicey because of possible tidal exposure. We camped the first night at a county park on the Kilchis River pretty far inland. Probably neat during a salmon run, but pretty plain Jane in August. 

We continued north up the coast, visiting a tiny town library at Garibaldi, where the librarian said the rain was unusual for this time of year, no matter what we had been told about wet Oregon.

We called at Cannon Beach with its famous Haystack Rock and its Cape Cod milieu. We donned our new matching Columbia Sportswear waterproof-breathable (though not Gore-Tex) shells (seconds; $25 each) and the rain beaded nicely as it is supposed to. 

We skipped Seaside and Astoria, the first because it is gross, the second because it was slightly off route. Cape Disappointment on the Washington side of the Columbia, where Lewis and Clark spent a winter of discontent, was just that, with an overpriced state park campground. 

Instead it was on to Long Beach, a family oriented barrier island beach where we made camp on undeveloped drivable strand north of the town...

 It rained off and on, sand stuck to everything, but it was great. For me, an Easterner, dunes you can walk on legally are a luxury, to say nothing of barrier islands that are not yet washing away.

The next morning we went to the carny in the centre of Long Beach and Morgan rode the carousel. I thought it had a 19th century feel right down to the Chinese woman in the murky depths of the ticket booth (who probably was named Madam Wu or something), which comment my wife found to be pretentious, seeing as I was not around in the 19th century, but I tried to explain to her how the past had echoes and certainly circi and amusement parks, either abandoned or slightly superannuated, have a certain flavour -- call it American Gothic or Victorian -- something akin to the fortune telling machine in the movie Big on the misty New Jersey coast. 

Day 3 - we continued up the coast from Long Beach, which is not just a generic name like Seaside but the longest stretch of beach on the US Pacific Coast. We passed still active oyster towns. Then we went through Aberdeen  (which might conjure up images of castles and cattle in Scotland, but which anyone who knows even a little about a certain 1990s grunge band probably associates primarily with recession, angst, idle logging equipment and muddy banks). It didn'€™t redeem itself. The 365-day farmer's market, whose handpainted sign advertised honey and local delicacies, was actually a flea market with a couple summer sausages mouldering in a case. Grunge and goth may have come but not the ecobiscuit movement. Sorry, Aberdeen.

Farther up the Olympic peninsula, towns became more perfunctory, not meeting William Least-Heat Moon's criteria of having a water tower and gas station. And the land became more extravagantly lush.

We turned off US 101 at  Quinault, a quaint rustic lakeside village that is one of the five or six portals to Olympic National Park, a huge fastness of roadless wilderness that to me is probably the most perfect and satisfying such tract in the US, apart from the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, which has a similar square-with-rounded-corners shape. 

By the village is the largest spruce tree in the world -- there are actually a few of these, all of them co-champions. But this one is in good health and 1000 years old...

We went 16 miles down a gravel road to a campground by the Quinault River. I will probably base a hiking trip there later this summer.

Day 4 - We realize that we can only make one or two stops per day. The main limiting factor is that our child has to sleep half of his life, at this stage in his life. We make a stop at the Olympic National Park's stretch of wild Pacific beach and walk two miles down it and back...

We drive up to another of the Park's portals, Sol Duc, a developed hot springs resort where many people start long backpacking trips and Mount Olympus climbs.

Day 5 - We arrive in Port Angeles, where we park for the ferry to Victoria, B.C. and I do the laundry while Tiia-Triin stays with Morgan on the waterfront to look at cars in the lineup. Tiia Triin says P.A. seems not to be so American as other cities, or that maybe it is just the fact that it is a bustling port.

Unfortunately there is no way for us to experience the charms of Victoria or its gardens by day. Crossing the next morning would leave too little time for the rest of the island. We need to be back in Portland on Day 8.

We arrive in Victoria an hour before dark. The nice man at the tourist office in Port Angeles had recommended a campsite at Jordan River and we strike out for it. Our impression of the capital ends up being largely related to drunken driving themes -- we see a very freshly overturned SUV on highway 1 in the centre of the city, and at dusk, we encounter a Counterattack sobriety check near Sooke (where two teens would happen to die the same night). 

Apparently the way it works is that the matronly arresting officer in her fifties prescreens drivers by talking about the programme and I assume, should the driver's response indicate that a sobriety check is in order, listing the possible risks to which the Breathalyzer may expose the driver. I chat with her about possible campsites up the road and probably make an ass out of myself (or just sound wackily Biblical or British) by correcting her, a local, and referring to Jordan River as "River Jordan", as it is mislabelled on my map.

There is plenty of room at River Jordan, on a spit of land extending out into the Juan de Fuca Strait. Though I balk at paying anything for camping -- in the great North, dammit! -- it is pretty beautiful. I feel like I have arrived after a long trip. People are playing guitars and somewhere I assume orcas are at play and George Dyson is sitting in his tree observing benevolently...

Vancouver Island is known as a place where civilization has married well with ruggedness -- true in many places in the NW but especially here. I am surprised later to read that there is still unexplored wilderness here and to see pictures of craggy glaciated peaks in the interior. 

There is not that much civilization in the southwest. Soon after Sooke, the string of private wooded properties/B&Bs on the coast, which for 40 miles resembles Southern Mendocino County or Big Sur, ends. There is an image in my mind, probably from some children's treasury of stories, of a desert island so far south in the South Pacfic that it is cold there. That is what the treeline on the strand looks like. The rainforest is impressive, a gritty, choked kind of impressive. 

Port Renfrew is basically the end of the line for civilization, unless you have a boat, up until a roadhead in Skagway, Alaska. Port Renfrew is mainly populated by inscrutable First Nationals -- they are helpful with directions, but there is an oddness about everything. My purchase of a single scone at the bake sale in the visitor centre, 75 cents is all the money I had, leaves an odd taste. There was no problem with me being perceived as a cheapskate, there's just some kind of disconnect. But I've had the same feeling before, on a reservation in Wyoming.

We take a washboard gravel road 40 miles to Lake Cowichan in the middle of the island (this is actually the official scenic route recommended by the provincial tourist authority). One tyre is down to 18 psi by the time we hit pavement again at Honeymoon Bay. 

Destruction Island, a name on tide tables for the area, would be more apt. The day is bleak, the willow scrub is bleak, everything is bleak. We have a fight about campsites and parenting. 

About the landscape, I feel the way I felt after arriving in Rovaniemi, Finland -- nonplussed. The lake is OK-looking, but not that incredible. We drive around the lake, but it is more endless gravel road, with most logging roads gated (they are on strike). The Ministry of Forests campsite is a slum in the woods. 

I remember how my dad described a trip around Lake Superior through Nipigon -- by all accounts a scenic drive, certainly marked as such, but always recounted in family history as tedious and eminently Not Worth It. Was there something to Canada that doesn't gibe with us, or am I a cretinized American, or is it just that it is a different country and not home? 

Part of the problem is that I have high and unrealistic expectations for Canada, as I view it as the great white hope for the continent, kind of a bastion of unspoiltness, like Michael Moore and his unlocked doors in Bowling for Columbine. As a kid of maybe 11, I saw Niagara on the Lake as a kind of utopian settlement, and would beg to be driven to St. Catharines on the Canadian side of the Niagara to see the well-tended small homes and gardens. No joke. My mother would say, driving past the same middle class homes, that Canada was America's poor relative.

We suspect it is just us and the day. We drive back to paved road, through the string of holiday communities and leave the lake, ending up in Cowichan River Provincial Park. The campground is average, and like other public ones has pages of ludicrous small print of what constitutes a "camping party". Luckily no one cares in practice, and the issue of having a different last name from my wife doesn't come up. 

But the Cowichan River and environs are amazing. A deep blue green cut into the basaltic bedrock. In some places you can't see how deep it is, but it is probably at least 15 feet deep and only 20 across...

 The current swirls languidly in these places, making it look dangerous, but I'll bet there are underwater caves and shelves that could be explored. Since it flows from the lake, the water is 18 or 19 and I take a dip at more safe-looking swimming hole. It's a great place to wind up Day 6.

Day 7 - Our trip is coming to a close but still we take our time, heading east and north. This is one of the finest days I have spent in the NW. 

Duncan -- the City of Totems -- is a gem of a traditional downtown. There are 80 poles in the town, many poised by the walls of buildings or in alleyways rather than being centrepieces in parks. This unusual one is from 1957...

...but most of them seem to have been carved in a spate in the late 1980s, begging the question of what the city was like before that. Do the old totems not survive, or was it a cynical tourist marketing ploy? Were carvers recruited, as artists were all over the world, to produce the murals in the next town, Chemainus? 

Then, Chemainus bowls us over with its prettiness, putting even Portland, Ore.'s bounty of roses and berries to shame. We pass up Ladysmith, which is supposedly even prettier. Too much. 

At Nanaimo we see a little overdevelopment and a faster pace to life. The ferry lineup extends all the way into residential neighborhoods. It is only 2pm and instead of giving up our afternoon, we opt to go farther north still visit the warm-water beaches of the Strait of Georgia.

Day 8 we rise at 7am and drive. All day. We end up taking the northern Nanaimo to northern Vancouver ferry and once we have disembarked north of the city I realize how little connected Canada and the US can be -- not much thru traffic from Whistler to Seattle, or at least no signs to help out such thru traffic. 

The day is truly gorgeous. 9/11 weather I call it, not because of any sinister undertone but because even before the planes crashed, people were remarking on how nice it was. 

All down I-5 temperatures are perfect and it seemed that my skin is faintly aglow. After a week of mixed rain and shine with 7000-foot peaks forming a forbidding and shrouded skyline, the twice-as-tall Mount Rainier rises impossibly large behind Seattle, its white dome so far away that it could be a huge full moon.

As with Vancouver, we have no temptation to stop in big city Seattle, either, after so much beach and rainforest time.

Diem mirabilis, indeed -€“ even Seattle traffic cooperates with us. Even though there is a 19-day project that is expected to produce nightmarish conditions in a city that is already second only to LA in gridlock. I wait with bated breath as it gets near 3 pm. Yet nothing happens! It's like a Sunday. NPR reports: "it looks like people have listened to the authorities and taken alternate routes or alternate forms of transportation." 

This is one busy corridor, BTW --€“ there's probably a 60-mile stretch from Everett through Seattle to Tacoma where there would not be a single opening for a pedestrian or stranded motorist to run across the highway. 

Things quiet down a little south of Olympia, where you abruptly sense you are in the middle of nowhere --€“ no mountains, no special wilderness areas or rivers. But a lucky find -- there happens to be a splendid park and lake created by the CCC, with the slightly silly name of Millersylvania. Miller's Woods, then. Certainly better than the rest area on the interstate, with a clear swimmable lake up there with the best of Estonian bodies of water, with picnic tables under spruce. It is no doubt a lucky find, but once again gives the impression that even in the sticks, this region offers gratuitous, awesome beauty. Anywhere else the water would have been slightly off or muddy.

We while away two hours. I swim half a mile, trying to stay in the upper 4 inches of water, which are warm. Finally there is no surface layer left near the shore and I get out. 

Then it's back to Portland, which is baking at a toasty 85 degrees (29), and the golden aftternoon comes to a close.