Forgotten Oregon II – Day 4

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Disclaimer: This post is one of those that ended up being written years after the experience was had. Sadly, there were no notes taken so whatever is shared here must be extracted from the images and what memories they may have lent us. Fortunately, there was an itinerary still in my directory of travel plans, so that will help with some details. As to why this wasn’t noted or blogged about, I was in the throes of writing/editing my book Stay In The Magic and felt that any other deep writing would derail that fragile effort.

Yurts, we are in love with yurts. They are the perfect tiny little home away from home. What’s missing, such as the toilet and kitchen, is made up for with character.

It’s always a sad moment when we are done packing the car and cleaning the debris we’ve tracked into the yurt and are about to lock the door. We’ve never stayed in a yurt where we didn’t leave with fond memories of every minute we spent in these canvas palaces by the sea. Just writing this made me run over to the Oregon State Park site, check for availability this coming Thanksgiving 2021, and snag two nights in this exact unit.

Just up the road is Cape Perpetua, but it is what lies below that place atop the mountain, the Devils Churn, that draws me in. Down below, the rushing water crashes into a tiny slice in the earth,  a space too small to contain all of its energy, and so it explodes with the water, trying to make its escape.

I never tire of watching this spectacle and could stand here for hours capturing thousands of photos if it weren’t for Caroline gently dragging me away, reassuring me that hundreds were probably enough. As I went through the directory storing photos from this date, I ended up removing more than 250 images that I deemed unworthy. However, with all the chaos in the churn, it’s not like one could just grab the best image by taking a shot or two.

Part of the trail down to the churn. Next time I’m posting something about the Oregon Coast I should remember to capture the trail as it leads away from the parking lot as it too is a nice sight.

Speaking of nice sights.

That’s the Yaquina Head Lighthouse in the distance. A priceless 1st-order Fresnel lens sits atop its tower; the same type of lens also resides in the Heceta Head Lighthouse I wrote about yesterday.

We’ve been driving north, but somewhere or other up here, we’ll need to turn around as we have another date with a yurt south of Washburne.

Stopping in Depoe Bay to just sit a while and admire the ocean.

And occasionally look over at my wife to smile at our incredible opportunities.

The seagull knows nothing of the enslavement to economic systems, unlike us, who know nothing about the freedom to soar. While the bird cannot describe its beautiful environment, humans are typically hard-pressed to describe what is beautiful in nature.

I took one hundred photos to capture the one that ended up here. I was mesmerized by the flow and patterns the water would take as it piled up against the rocks below me each time it traveled on different pathways as receding water changed the dynamic of the water coming in. With the center column being deeper, a dark emerald color pulled me into depths where that water was mysteriously traveling outside of my purview. I wanted to be a consciousness that is able to flow where the water goes. I want to be the bird that skims over the surface of the waves, just a feather above the churn that threatens to bring it out of flight and into the realm of the fish below. Like the hyphal knot emerging atop mycelium, seeing light for the first time, I want to have my first peek at the universe, but here I am, stuck within my head of preconceptions of my place among the others in my species.

Water is infinite and doesn’t know of its relationships from the Pacific to its distant frozen cousin encased for the past 35,000 years in a glacier; it cannot know of its gaseous form in a cloud hovering over Pavlikeni, Bulgaria, or its fellow molecules about to be sipped as a coffee at a breakfast table anywhere on earth.

I on the other hand, if I try hard, am able to bring myself toward the edge of infinity when writing about what I’m looking at as I explore the internal landscape of language as it’s used to describe phenomena outside of me.

To the rocks of Siletz Bay, life is an imperceptibly slow crawl into disappearance. Over many thousands of years, they’ve grown smaller as their exteriors flake away under the barrage of the elements. I’m like those rocks in that I, too, am flaking away, but I’m aware of my disappearance as it happens in the comparative blink of an eye. Not satisfied with only knowing my fixed place, I have to travel my imagination and constantly feed it with all forms of stimuli as I try to understand the peculiarity of self-awareness that the water and rocks may never know.

I’m nearly always astonished at how little awareness my fellow humans bring to the game of life. Here we are in Lincoln City at the local streetside glassworks, and as I look at this float, it is the result of our ingenuity to bring sand, lime, and soda ash together under an incredible amount of heat that has allowed us to protect ourselves from the elements, store fluids, restore our vision, look into the heavens, and examine things we cannot see otherwise.

Where’s my bag of infinite knowledge when I want to know more about the 22° halo I’m looking at? Oh yeah, with the help of community knowledge shared on the internet, I know that this is from high-altitude hexagon-shaped ice crystals that, as light passes through them, bend the light at a 22° angle.

When did these rocks fall down? When were they formed? What minerals are present? What other people lived here 500 years ago? What are we leaving for people 500 years from now that will tell of our relationship and understanding of what we were looking at?

These barnacles won’t be telling the story, nor will the average person who might have had the ability, but instead, they are locked into artificial existences that never ask them to describe their world as much as it demands they consume banalities in their lonely isolation.

Wherever you are on this planet, what if it were just you and a friend looking out at the last sunset ever? What might you tell a future generation of beings of what you saw, experienced, and desired? What if, to a future generation of intelligent beings, the dreams, knowledge, and aspirations of a former species consisting of billions of people could be understood in minutes? What will we have collectively offered up for the incredible opportunity to have been standing there looking into existence?

Humanity has the opportunity to be 7 billion lighthouses to future generations, but instead, we trade our time on earth to effectively be nothing more than 6.9 billion specimens of bacteria buried in the soil beneath the lighthouse, hidden from view and unknown to those captivated by the shining light.

Forgotten Oregon II – Day 3

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Disclaimer: This post is one of those that ended up being written years after the experience was had. Sadly, there were no notes taken so whatever is shared here must be extracted from the images and what memories they may have lent us. Fortunately, there was an itinerary still in my directory of travel plans, so that will help with some details. As to why this wasn’t noted or blogged about, I was in the throes of writing/editing my book Stay In The Magic and felt that any other deep writing would derail that fragile effort.

Yesterday, we were hoping for favorable weather this morning, and here we are at the beginning of our trail with the sun streaming in. Not that it will get far, as we are in a rainforest at Carl G. Washburne State Park south of Yachats, Oregon.

Funny how I can gaze upon a mushroom, just one more mushroom among the thousands I’ve seen in my lifetime, and still I find it enchanting. I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this, listening to the same old bologna I’ve heard countless times, and it’s rubbing me in such a way that I’m considering running away. The mushroom is never able to share its stupidity, but a human is all too willing to demonstrate that it’s dumber than a fungus planted on a forest floor. How should I write about the serenity and beauty of a place when surrounded by the chaos and ugliness of those others within my species?

Looking back at these trips I have to lament that I wasn’t willing to write of my impressions and take inspiration from the environment at the time. Mostly, I was content to have the photographic memories as I saw myself as having just enough skills to take those, but my writing was still in its nascent stages; well, it still is, isn’t it? All the same, even rudimentary notes help bring back things that are long forgotten. The lesson is, always take too many photos and at least write some things down on every vacation day you ever take.

Taken before the days, we understood that newts excrete a toxin when stressed. I tend to want to believe that Caroline’s tender touch doesn’t stress the newt, but then again, if something 6,480 times bigger than me picked me up, even if it was gingerly, I’d be excreting all over myself and the creature holding me.

My half-educated guess is that these are Stropharia caerulea, also known as Blue Roundheads, and are not edible.

I believe I’ve posted this exact view more than a few times, and why wouldn’t I? It’s just perfect in every way.

I’ve tried time and again to photograph this bridge, and after years of not looking at this particular image, I realize that using my 10-22mm lens I was able to capture the angle I was looking for. If I was a more dedicated photographer, I’d travel with the full complement of lenses I own, but the truth is that I’ve never grown beyond believing I’m taking run-of-the-mill snapshots of average quality, so my effort is what it is.

As I stare at this image, contemplating what to write, I think about the smallest mushroom I see there on the left, just under the cut of this tree. It’s obviously not as small as it could be because, at some point, just after it left the spore stage, it probably did not have a mushroom cap and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that. Then there are the spores the tree caught of the moss, growing like a vertical carpet under the mushrooms; I failed to note what direction all of this growth was facing to learn more about the lighting conditions where these plants thrive. Studying those aspects and admiring the reflections on the wet mushrooms I start to take notice of the blurred background and how appealing it is to my eye.

Sure, everybody should see this sight with their own eyes, but today, I’m happy there was nobody else on the trail who would have been a part of this scene. The sunbeams, shadows, greenery, and nearly imperceptible amount of fog are just right.

I could have just posted a single photo of our day on the central coast of Oregon and shared that we’d hiked in this particular state park, visited a lighthouse, and experienced a magnificent sunset, but instead, I’m inclined to overshare, causing these brief notes where I really don’t share anything of value at all.

Where’s Waldo? She’s there in the shadows, but who really cares about her standing back there, hardly seen as what I really wanted to share was the lush green carpet and those sunbeams that beg me to forever remember how mysterious they are and how they change the character of a forest.

Sometimes, the carpet of moss appears as a fur coat on the limbs of trees. I wonder if I really need to point out that this is far more elegant on older trees where the growth has been accumulating for years. Sadly, when we move through a forest, clear-cutting the life that we need to harvest for our own financial gain proceeds indiscriminately, giving no care at all about the wisdom in the forest that comes in the form of trees such as this.

For fungus, there is no importance of time on display as they quickly come and go with their impact experienced in mere moments but they do represent the symbiotic nature of a healthy environment where things are allowed to remain undisturbed by our sense of propriety.

Another fungus cutting its own path into my reality. I suppose I can be happy that this thing isn’t gifted with a kind of mobility that would make it the stuff of nightmares.

Today, we took the longer option regarding our hike. Typically, we’ve taken the Hobbit Trail down to the beach, but with the weather seeming favorable, we are taking a left towards the lighthouse.

Heceta Head Lighthouse at the end of the trail.

Is it enough to say wow here?

We managed to be here right in time for a tour of this 117-year-old fixture on the Oregon coast.

Who pays for the repairs and upkeep of these iconic treasures? We, the general public, do with our paid admission as we carve out time from our vacation to crawl up these towers. When we visit and buy something from the gift shop, we fund repairs and pay for the people who protect the buildings from vandalism. Nature is already a tough visitor, wearing down the structure that lives year after year under the battering ram of weather. I’d imagine that the water seeping through or down these walls would ultimately make Heceta Head unvisitable. Thanks to everyone who toils to preserve lighthouses.

I can’t remember the specifics about the couple acting as caretakers here and how and why they let us in for a quick tour, but I’m forever grateful. It turned out that the lighthouse was closed back in August 2011, just a few months before our arrival but major renovation work that would shut the facility for the next two years hadn’t begun yet, and so we were “snuck in.” Persistent enthusiasm must be good for something.

A quick look at the ocean and it was time to head up the road back to our yurt that we’d booked for two nights. As we walked along the street, oh, how we wished that someone driving past and seeing how worn down we were would have had room to pick up three strangers and take us back to Washburne. No luck; we hoofed it.

Instead of walking along the highway the entire distance we turned back in towards the China Creek Trail, where it emerges at the highway to head over to the Hobbit Beach Trail. We should have gone to the beach and walked back the rest of the way, but we were tired and hungry.

But not so tired and hungry that I couldn’t stop and take even more photos of the lovely mushrooms.

After a short rest and some food, we crossed the highway to the Washburne stretch of beach to bask under the sunset.

Sure, it’s more of the same, but I couldn’t choose between the two.

As a matter of fact, you’ll notice that this photo is similar to the one below Caroline, but notice the position of the sun in the sky here, while in the last photo, it’s about to dip below the horizon.

The only reason this cute photo of Caroline is here is to have some visual discontinuity in my two sunset photos.

Looking through these photos nearly ten years after I took them, I can’t help but dream of our next visit to the Oregon Coast, even though we just spent three weeks up there this past November. Being as enamored by this stretch of America as I am, I’ll likely never understand the fascination with California’s less-than-stellar coast south of here.

Lingering in Quebec, Canada

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Just like the previous day’s blog entry, this post is being written in early 2023 with no notes available to me. While somewhere in our stuff they might exist, I’m not feeling inclined to go on the hunt for them so I’m simply attacking these three missing days of our Canada trip in order to bring the photos out of the darkness of their electronic prison.

This is obviously not old town Quebec City anymore; we have left our luxury digs at the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac hotel and are headed north. A note about that lodging: back in 2011, Caroline was working for a company whose clients included many hotel brands, including Fairmont. This afforded us the opportunity to get a vastly discounted rate on our King Suite, where we paid the minuscule amount of only $150 a night. While that is normally (and especially back in 2011) rather pricey for us, we just looked up what that room rents for today, and it comes in at $1500 a night yikes.

The gigantic Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré is about 20 miles east of Quebec City and is an obvious first stop on our drive today. We had no idea that we’d stumble across another one of Canada’s national shrines today.

Even when it’s gray outside, the holy water in the church will be fresh and the environment magnificent, as this is something the Catholic Church gets right. A shrine or chapel to Saint Anne has been documented on the site since 1658, but today’s basilica was built in the 1920s after the previous one burnt down.

The basilica houses several relics from Saint Anne, including several inches of forearm bones. Miracles have been reported and in one area, a number of crutches and canes are on display, supposedly left by cured pilgrims.

According to the Catholic Church, the basilica receives over one million visitors annually, so there doesn’t seem to be any danger of this church being shut down.

This chunk of “Moon Dust” (ash-covered soft-ripened cheese from Duvillage 1860, later renamed La Pleine Lune) has stood out in our memories for all these years; we may forget details of the days spent in this French corner of Canada, but this cheese will never be forgotten. After our vacation, I tried to have it shipped to America, but to no avail (probably because it is made from unpasteurized milk), and now, a dozen years later, I’m looking anew, and still, nobody is shipping this cheese to the United States.

Quebec, Canada

To someone unfamiliar with moose crossings, this certainly raises the old eyebrows, but so does the translation of the sign, “In case of intrusion, call 511.”

At the village of Les Éboulements, we stopped to take a quick self-guided tour of this flour mill called Le Moulin Seigneurial, which was built back in 1790. By the way, we have no problems with French street names, city names, or the speed in kilometers; the sense of being elsewhere is a delight.

At about 110 miles northeast of our starting point in the old town center, we decide that we’d better take advantage of a ferry that will take us across the St. Lawrence River which has seriously widened after leaving Quebec City. The ferry featured a small restaurant that allowed us to sample another version of poutine.

This patterning phenomenon is known in ancient cultures as water eating the sun.

I was just kidding about what I wrote above, but in Scotland, this form of baling hay is called rolling the kilt.

Saint-André-de-Kamouraska, Quebec, Canada

You might otherwise just pass through the village of Saint-André-de-Kamouraska in Quebec, but there’s something about this old house that captured our attention…maybe it’s just that we are on the south side of the St. Lawrence River.

Caroline Wise at the post office in Saint-Denis-De La Bouteillerie, Quebec, Canada

When out on the road, Caroline has more than a few people back in Germany to whom she tries to write, so they find a surprise in their mailboxes from somewhere in North America. With a postmark from the village of Saint-Denis-De La Bouteillerie, we can hope they’ll be wondering just where our adventures took us.

Has anyone else ever wondered just how many beautiful sunsets they’ve seen during their lives?

If you thought we might take a break in the poutine dining regime, you’d be wrong, as we know that when we return to Arizona, there will be no more fries, cheese curds, and gravy, and with that in mind, we had a scrumptious dinner at Chez Ashton in Levis across from Quebec and likely drove to some point west of Montreal for our overnight stay.

Forgotten Oregon Trip – Day 4

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Disclaimer: This post is one of those that ended up being written years after the experience was had. Sadly, there were no notes taken so whatever is shared here must be extracted from the images and what memories they may have lent us. Fortunately, there was an itinerary still in my directory of travel plans, so that will help with some details. As to why this wasn’t noted or blogged about, I was in the throes of writing/editing my book Stay In The Magic and felt that any other deep writing would derail that fragile effort.

Wheeler, Oregon, caught our eye the very first time we passed through. but it was going to be another eight years before we finally got around to booking a stay here along the bay. Who am I fooling? Everywhere here in coastal Oregon has caught our imagination, and we’d gladly pull up a spot of damp earth every 500 feet along the 363-mile length of the coast if we could. Why 500 feet? If we had ten years to do nothing but dwell in the beauty of every inch of this coast, that would be the distance between our campsites to cover the 1,916,640 feet that stretch from north to south.

Lucky us that late afternoon yesterday, we had some glorious weather for our two-hour kayak adventure as here we are the next morning under some heavy skies, a good time to turn inland.

Looking at the map of our Forgotten Oregon trip here in 2011, I wonder what thinking went into the idea that we’d go from Portland to the coast back again to just south of Portland, and then we’d head up the Columbia River to Long Beach, Washington, and once more to Portland? We had about two hours on the road, passing through Cannon Beach before turning east on Highway 26 to make our way to Canby, the home of the Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival.

Died fiber waiting to become yarn. As a relatively new spinner, Caroline used this opportunity to stock up on a variety of spinning fibers, covering many sheep breeds such as Shetland, Romeldale, and CVM (California Variegated Mutant).

Spindles waiting to grab hold of fiber to make yarn. Ken and Carol Ledbetter (KCL Woods) actually hail from Southern Arizona.

Sheep waiting to be shorn to offer up their fiber so humans can make yarn that will make wool clothes.

Example of wool after it’s passed through the hands of a spinner and knitter.

There goes a sweater on the left and a warm couple of beanies on the right.

Stuff your face in this and soak up the smell of lanolin; you’ll be addicted to the magic of wool.

Fiber porn at fiber fest is just what anyone would expect, but then all of a sudden things went seriously hardcore. On this very loom (itself a naughty word!) is the exotically lust-inducing fiber art known as Chilkat weaving.

Yeah, just look at that and drool. How this can be shown out in the open is beyond my imagination. For years to come, Caroline would come back to the Chilkat style, fetishizing it with wicked intentions of someday dipping her fingers into creating such sensual designs. If you cannot begin to understand this almost erotic situation, you’ve simply not learned the way of falling into those things that are perfect hand-crafted pieces of art.

We needed some fresh air after all that frolicking in fiber, and so up to the river we went. That’s the Lewis and Clark Bridge out there over to Longview, Washington, but our sights are set on a different crossing further west.

Yep, she’s spinning on her brand new Turkish spindle instead of looking out at the scenery, and of course, I’m photographing her while I’m driving because we are those kinds of idiots.

We’re here. No, this isn’t the full breadth of the Columbia River, but it is near the spot where we will board the Wahkiakum County Ferry over to Puget Island in the main river channel. From there, we’ll pick up the highway and cross a bridge to get us into Washington proper.

We’ve just left Westport, Oregon, for our 15-minute ride across this arm of the Columbia.

That’s Puget Island in the distance.

On the right is Puget Island, and on the left is the mainland of Washington State; we are on a bridge over the middle of the Columbia River, looking east.

Only in Washington minutes, and it already looks totally different than anything to the south in Oregon.

North Head Lighthouse at Cape Disappointment, Washington

Here we are out at the North Head Lighthouse at Cape Disappointment. The lighthouse wasn’t open to visitors, we are disappointed.

But we are not disappointed with the sunset out here, not looking at it from here…

…or here.

They Call it a Haboob

JWise Photo of the Day

A dust storm, also known as a Haboob, arrives from the south to blanket Phoenix, Arizona in dust

If it’s a haboob, it must be monsoon season in Phoenix. From out of the south, sand, dust, and dirt are kicked up and dragged north to blanket the desert with sun and lung choking blanket of fine particulates that used to be known as a dust storm. Of late, these storms are being called a haboob, can you guess why? My idea is that it gives weathermen and men in general, the chance to use the word boob without referring to breasts but all the while they get to enjoy having said boob, satisfying a guys need to be thinking of boobs, talking about boobs, and imagining boobs, even if it is under the guise of a haboob.

I Believe That is Rain

JWise Photo of the Day

Storm clouds and heavy rain contrasted agains a blue sky that is quickly disappearing as I approach Prescott, Arizona

It was approaching the time to pick up Caroline from her weekend of sewing with Sandy, but as I got closer to Prescott, the weather started turning ugly. I drove right into a heavy thunderstorm with buckets of rain coming down so hard I could barely see more than 100 feet in front of me. My car windows were still sealed shut and the air conditioning blasting from the escape from desert heat down south, while the thunder roared and lightning strikes were obviously happening not more than a mile from the very road I was struggling to stay on. The monsoon storms during the summer in Arizona are beautiful when they have these clear delineations of blue skies contrasted against dark threatening clouds.