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Across Oregon

In Ashland, we stayed with Dave S, another Opcode coworker, and his family.  After dinner we went out to hear some music at the Wild Goose, a dive bar where Dave has played. 

On Tuesday, August 15, I worked at Connor’s house (one of my Avid coworkers), and then introduced Dave S and Connor to each other at dinner.

I went into town and paid to have people at the Ashland 76 station replace the headlight on the Outback.  Dave’s daughter Sabrina happened to walk into the gas station just then, so I drove her back to the juice bar where she works and had coconut and orange juice.  She is leaving for junior year abroad in Alicante this week.  Afterwards I rode around with Dave S in the woods on a jeep.  He had just gotten a pair of logging boots with spikes.


Wednesday we drove to Ray’s cousin Meg’s goat farm in Eugene.  Ray slept, and Meg and I walked around her neighborhood.  One of her neighbors had just harvested large amounts of wood on their property in order to raise money so that one of them could buy out another’s share of their parents’ estate.  It all smelled like sap.

Thursday was another productive work day for me.  Thursday night we ate with Ray’s other cousins. The food was better than in Ashland, but still not definitively out of the Olive Garden class.  After dinner we visited Colin and Natacia.  Natacia has a setup for playing video games with friends around the world.  She was watching her twitch friends play some game — she is looking forward to meeting them in person at a convention in Long Beach this October, for twitchers.  She assumes they think she’s a gay guy, and will be surprised at the convention.  She also said that YouTube had told its users that any monetized video had to be accessible to five year olds, and a bunch of them had moved to twitch.  (Their community guidelines don’t mention five-year-olds — I figured she was interjecting editorial interpretations.)

Friday, August 18, we drove to Bend.  We had hoped to go on highway 242 on the side of Mt. Washington, but it was closed due to a fire that was casting smoke over the whole area.  We went to the Sunriver resort, south of Bend, where Ray’s college friend Steve has a house, and where several of their friends had rented additional houses for 40 or so people who would go see the eclipse somewhere (Sunriver wasn’t quite in the path).  Our Bend friend Rick was working as a bartender in Sunriver, and he was extremely generous, probably overly so.  We were joined by one of Steve’s kids.  We stayed at Steve’s house that night, seeing another scion in the evening, and yet another in the morning.  (We saw the fourth and fifth in Seattle a few days later.)

Saturday, August 19, after getting over my mild hangover, we pressed on eastward.  We stopped near the tiny town of John Day, where we visited Rick’s friend who is in county jail for six months.  He said that one of the guys in with him he knew from K-12, another was a Swede doing four months for assault at a Rainbow Gathering (circumstances unclear) and that he knew ALL of the guards before.  The whole strip of highway 26 around John Day was awash in eclipse merchandise, though not particularly crowded.  We drove up highway 7, a very pretty stretch of road, to Baker City, so we could check out where the path crossed Interstate 84.  Interstate 84 was quite an ugly area, especially Cement Plant Road, and I hope somebody got some punk eclipse pictures from the ruins of the industrial facilities there.  There were rolling treeless hills, with no apparent way to get to the top of any of them. We crossed it off the list of possibilities, and as it was starting to get late, proceeded to Boise to join the family reunion underway.

[not so] Clear Lake

The trip began Friday, August 11, with dropping Justin off at the airport, for a cruise from Bergen to Murmansk and back.  We proceeded to the annual two-week party at Indian Beach Resort at Clear Lake, getting up there around 3pm.  There were probably a dozen or so people up there, including Juliette, who is almost four months old.  We went out on the motorboat “Brown Squall”, from which her dad Skot wavesurfed:  he got up on his surfboard, threw the rope back to the boat, and followed it closely by surfing on its wake.

I’m tired just from watching Skot wake surf.  What is it about these guys?  They don’t mind that they are wet.  They don’t mind that it hurts.  They don’t mind that it’s exertion.  They seek out all those feelings.  What in the world is that like?

The boat conked out in mid surf while Alex was trying to duplicate Skot’s feat.  Adam took some time getting it started again.  Sounded like the carburetor was flooded but that wouldn’t explain the original problem.

Saturday and Sunday were more of the same.  The lake had so much algae this year that there was no oxygen left for the fish, and several of them floated dead on the water:  Jenny directed us on a Dead Fish Cruise down near the town of Clearlake, where the largest and most bloated specimens could be appreciated.  Afterwards, we went someplace far away and swam a bit.  There were many rides on boats each day.

The drug of choice for most of the party people is Coors Lite or Bud Lite, since it’s so darned hot there, like 100 degrees during the day.  Our friend Tollef brought a bunch of beer from his brewery (Temescal, in Oakland), which had actual flavor.  And there was wine, and our friend Alex made punch, which he says is from the Bengali word for five, as in Panch Phoron.  Wikipedia backs him up on this.  And, for the very first time, I saw just a bit of cocaine served on an iPhone, which I suppose makes sense.

Sadie [Adam and Jenny’s dog] seems even older.  She had to be separated from a larger black even friendlier and fluffier dog, in the water, because she is just not up to play any more, and she doesn’t know it.

For some reason the dinner conversation got to the subject of female stand up urination, and Alex said that when he was eleven years old and coming from a family backpacking expedition on the Wyoming Montana border, he was in a bar in their unisex bathroom with a row of tall urinals and a person came in and unzipped and he realized she was a woman, and she pissed anyway, as a man does.  I said, you should testify to the Texas Legislature how this traumatized you, and he said, that’s why I got so into wearing women’s dresses.  These extended jokes, building Bulwer-Lytton-wise on each other, are responsible for a lot of creation myths among dull psychologists.

Saturday night had a game of Pictionary, featuring totally made-up words, like “Clampari” (there was a Campari umbrella nearby).  I couldn’t figure anything out.

Everyone left on Sunday, except us and Adam. 

Monday, August 14, we packed up, stopped at the Redbud Trailhead on highway 20 nearby, and walked 2.5 miles to Cache Creek and back.  It was a very pretty walk, starting out in a bunch of trees which were burned in the Rocky fire two years earlier.  From there, we had lunch with an Opcode coworker Kim in Redding, and stopped at the AAA where we got some paper maps, and asked if they could help with my drivers license which expires just before we get back in November.  They couldn’t, but they did point out that the DMV in Mt. Shasta never has a line.  We got there a minute late so it didn’t matter.  We drove on to Ashland and met our friends for creekside dining at a Japanese restaurant.

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

We are getting ready to leave the Bay Area for 14 weeks. We’ll tour the Northwest US and hope to see the eclipse, get another glimpse of Iceland, see art and film in Venice and Kassel, have dinner at Hisa Franko, attend a wedding in Berlin, see a church near Prague. Then I will get somewhat serious and work for six weeks, at offices in Szczecin and Kiev, in Berlin, and in Paris and Rome. Finally we’ll hop down to Ethiopia and check out its geography.

We’ll try to keep you up to date with our adventures as they continue.