Port-a-let (Part 3)

The next morning, Jones woke up at 4:30 a.m. and walked along the river until the light came. He couldn’t remember feeling this excited to see anyone in his life.

He met Michael at the school parking lot. It was foggy near the ground and three shades of stacked gray in the sky when she showed up in a black t-shirt, baggy tan cords, and a 70s-styled tan trench coat. She wore a red baseball cap adorned with a yellow rooster and a black leather backpack cinched up tight. The sight of her instantly brought to mind someone Harrison had written about but Jones had never met: “A master spy for an uncreated government.” Michael also clutched a small cooler with her left hand and a dented red thermos that looked 50 years old.

Jones spread out a map on the hood of his Subaru wagon and outlined his plan. Overhead, gulls cackled in the gray. Their first stop would be Fort Clatsop and then Fort Stevens, where in the early days of WW II, a Japanese submarine’s puny deck guns lobbed a few shells in what constituted the only attack on the American mainland during the war. Michael said that was all fine and suggested after visiting those “pale face” places they climb Mount Neahkahnie, known as Fire Mountain to the Native Americans. From what she had heard, the panorama from the summit might provide tremendous vistas for her students to draw and photograph. Jones was all for it.

From the high school they took old Highway 101 out of Astoria. It occurred to Jones that he’d never visited Fort Clatsop before, or for that matter Timberline Lodge, Bend, Burns, Bandon, Newport, the Pendleton Round-Up, the Snake River, Rogue River, Crater Lake, Bonneville Dam, the Oregon Caves National Monument, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, or the Wallowa Mountains.

Jones had driven past Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge about a dozen times in his life but never bothered to stop at the state’s number one tourist destination. He wasn’t even sure the state flower, the Oregon grape, wasn’t some sort of exotic fruit used to make an illicit wine. To think he hailed from Oregon City, once lived overlooking the Willamette River, one of the great salmon rivers in the world, and knew nothing of the life cycle of the salmon, was truly indicative of how disconnected he was from his place, his home.

He was a tourist in Oregon who taught history and never traveled anywhere. Did he really know where he lived? Years ago, he’d read a line in an essay by either Wendell Berry or Gary Snyder that went, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” He hadn’t been anywhere in Oregon and all he’d done as an adult was drink, read, and teach, a dubious fusion of accomplishments that was as corporeal as a photograph stored in a phone.

Do people need to know where they live? Does this knowledge imbue a person to perform more meaningful work?

Jones caught a quick glance of Saddle Mountain looming to the south. He’d never climbed it and thought maybe it was part of a state park. Would he explore the peak now that he could see it out his classroom window? Was he going to educate himself? He felt he should since his internal contradiction of teaching but not learning had to end. It begs the ultimate questions for adults: 1) When do you stop learning? ; 2) Why did you stop learning? ; 3) How do you start learning again?

Perhaps this field trip with Michael was the beginning of his education or maybe he just wanted to sleep with her. He didn’t know at this point. He didn’t know anything about her and was intuiting nothing.

They curved around some forlorn apartments and approached the old Youngs Bay Bridge.

“Slow down,” Michael said. “What are those?” She pointed to the two green and gray obelisks that flanked the north entrance of the bridge. Atop each obelisk was a smallish green and white metal lantern.

“I don’t know,” said Jones, “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“When we get across, pull over and let’s walk back over the bridge. I want to check these things out.”

“Okay.”

Jones had never walked across a bridge in his life. He’d also never collaborated in an artistic venture with anyone. In fact, Jones had never collaborated with anyone in his life.

Two more obelisks marked the south entrance to the bridge and Michael rolled down the window and stuck her head outside for a better look.

“These are so wonderfully weird,” she said. “Who does anything like this anymore?”

Jones eased the Subaru into the shoulder and turned off the engine. Michael retrieved a Polaroid camera from her backpack and led the way to the bridge. She saw no traffic coming from either direction, ran into the middle of the road, shot a couple of photographs of the obelisks, and then jogged over to the shoulder to inspect them. Jones joined her.

The gray was concrete and beveled; the green was treated wood bolted to the deck of the bridge. In combination they formed perhaps the most bizarre example of Art Deco architecture in the world. The camera swung from Michael’s neck like a pendulum as she placed her hands on the concrete and traced the bevels. Next, she felt the wood and then jumped up on one of the obelisk’s edges and stared at the lanterns.

Jones thought she was going to climb to the top.

“This is totally insane,” said Michael. “There is an aesthetic at work with the landscape here that I’ve never seen or read about it. Who designed this thing? How old is it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, you’re the history teacher so you better find out.”

“I will.”

“I’m not sure why, but this bridge is flat out sexy. The kids are definitely going to sketch it.”

“Let’s walk,” said Jones.

Michael hopped down to the sidewalk and headed across the bridge, where she stopped every 20 feet and shot a photograph until she ran out of film.

Thirty minutes later, Jones turned into the parking lot of Fort Clatsop and found it completely jammed with tour buses and RVs. Hundreds of tourists milled about.

“Let’s blow this off,” Michael said, “and come back in the winter when no one is here.”

“I was going to suggest the same thing.”

As they left the Fort’s parking lot, Michael said, “You know, it probably would have been better for everyone if Lewis and Clark had died on their journey and no one heard from them again. They’re so overrated anyway. Didn’t Lewis commit suicide in some awful way?”

“He was drunk and shot himself multiple times, including the head. Then he repeatedly stabbed himself,” said Jones. “After he was dead and buried, hogs dug up the body and stripped him to the bone.”

“Jesus! Like I said, better for everyone. He should have gone out when he peaked, like when he saw the Pacific and knew he’d made it.”

“Why do you think that was his peak?” said Jones.

“What else was there to do? He had to return to civilization and he probably Jonesd the primitive life.”

Jones thought about Meriwether Lewis and his journals, the misspelled and illustrated journals that the Lewis and Clark priesthood naively thought contained the whole story, not understanding the obvious tenet that no one keeping a journal ever tells the whole story, or even bothers telling the truth all the time. Jones knew this better than anyone.

“You know, he pretty much stopped writing after he reached the Oregon Coast,” said Jones. “It might be the most famous case of writer’s block in American history.”

Michael didn’t seem to hear him.

After Fort Clatsop, Jones headed toward Fort Stevens and got stuck behind an endless motorcade of mammoth recreational vehicles towing six-cylinder pickup trucks. Michael loathed the RVs but loved calling out the various absurd names for the vehicles, such as X-TREME Adventurer and Vortex Wanderer.

At some point she pulled a fraying journal bound in twine and dashed off little sketches of each vehicle’s garish logo and typography. They conversed about the ocean, birds, teaching, always teaching amongst teachers, and clearcuts, all the endless elevated massacres in the Coast Range that marred and scarred the landscape from practically every scenic vantage point and gave off the appearance of an invading army’s scorched earth policy. Clearcuts particularly incensed Michael, she couldn’t believe they were actually legal. She couldn’t believe that’s all she could see from her classroom window, but she sketched them, too, and as her hand moved back and forth across the pages, Jones caught glimpses of her work, but didn’t remark. Once at stoplight, Michael shot him a little smile and he thought about a line from a short story he’d come across recently, written by James Cain: “A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back.”