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- Paradise Camp
- Blue Highways
- Valley Livestock
- Eating Well
- Herrick Farm
- Sights Along the River
- Christmas Treasures
- A Return Trip
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McKenzie River: Blue Highways
Well, so much for telling about our adventures in August. Here's a  picture of me and some chickens at Bea's youngest son's place. The chickens are all eaten now.
After only a little self-examination, I have figured out that I have a hard time finishing these travelogues after I get home. So I guess you'll get what I get done before then and I'll try not to promise anything I'm really not going to deliver. Since this trip was to the lower McKenzie River (the last was to the upper), I'll try to work in some of the observations I never sent you from that one. But I'm not promising....
This trip (to recover from yet another Voters' Pamphlet), I drove down the backroads on the east side of I-5, which runs straight up the Willamette Valley on around longitude 124 W (and by the way crosses the 45th parallel just north of Salem) from Portland to the Eugene area to visit my friend Bea. One of the design engineers for I-5 in Oregon is said to have claimed that his proudest accomplishment was that his section of the interstate ran exactly along a specific meridian for something like 40 miles. We all believe it. I-5 is a boring drive in my opinion, even when it's a little curvy and one which I've taken a lot in my commuting life. Thus, the "blue highways." Actually these were the thin black line highways, through agribusiness and small farms, ranches and orchards. The blue on my map is waterways. It's a good travel book, even if it uses weird maps. ("Blue Highways: A Jouney Into America" by William Least Heat-Moon.)
I like to look at the livestock and fields and imagine people's lives, so different from mine. It's still Fall in the valley now and just starting to rain. They're harvesting cabbages and fall squash, most of the hay is in and Halloween decorations are up. Lots of people grow pumpkins, so there are piles of pumpkins and corn shocks and sometimes a corn maze, too. Dahlias and marigolds are still blooming and the zinnias are mostly hanging in there, but the more fragile summer flowers are pretty much gone. We haven't had a freeze yet, so there isn't much red foliage, but days are shorter, the sap is falling and the hillsides are bronze, copper, gold and orange among the many shades of green and gray-green--but muted, tapestry colors. Come to think of it, we don't really have a lot of red foliage in Oregon, mostly maple, sumac and a few bushes. Oh, but this is blueberry bush county and the blueberry fields are beautiful this time of year. With the bushes all turning red from the tips in, it looks like a cloud of red smoke hovering over the fields at about waist height.
And this is definitely George Bush country, too. I counted 51 Bush-Cheney signs to 13 Kerry-Edwards signs on the drive down. Well actually I had to count one "Vote Democratic" sign to get Kerry over a dozen. If this is a swing state, it's in the city neighborhoods. On the other hand, there are lots of DeFazio signs here too, sometimes in the same yards as Bush-Cheney. (For you out-of-staters, Peter DeFazio is the Democratic liberal/populist/labor Congressman from the area.) And the Eugene paper endorsed Kerry, as did the Portland paper. And just to top it off, there's a Kickbusch Road down the highway a ways. An interesting election for sure.
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picture of me and some chickens