Fair Columbia

Here in Troutdale, Oregon, enjoying a cup of coffee at some random truckstop. Today I was hiking around the waterfalls of the Columbia Gorge, and the weather was nice enough to cooperate with some perfect blue skies. There's more to come, but right now I'm looking at some chicken wings that are just begging to be eaten. And seeing as how I haven't mastered the art of typing without the use of my hands, that's how it's gonna be. Anyway, here's yesterday's post:

Getting My Money’s Worth (Journal Entry, 6/23/08)

I’m in Ainsworth State Park, on the southern side of the Columbia Gorge. Tomorrow I’ll head a few miles west to hike among the waterfalls, but for the moment I’m taking it easy. For reasons that I still cannot completely comprehend, every campground I have visited will charge either the same amount or a trivial larger amount for campsites with full RV hookups. I’m a pretty basic camper – all I need is a place to park my car, a relatively flat spot for my tent, and a secnd, smaller, flat spot to put my campstove. If I feel like spoiling myself, I might even want a picnic table. Besides that, I might need a bit of water from a faucet somewhere in the campground, and a proper receptacle for that water once I’ve processed it. Or if I need to drop a deuce.*

*One of my favorite expressions of all time. To this day, I consider the phrase “drop a deuce” to be the most important single thing that I learned during my four years at Bishop Hendricken High School. This says more about my relative maturity than it does about the quality of education I received.

So that’s it: maybe 200 square feet of space, a water source, and a hole in the ground. This is why I was getting so frustrated with the “great state” of California** charging upwards of $25 a night for a little flat patch of dirt.

**California is a beautiful state. It really is. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see that beauty because it is also the most populous state, and all those people (1) get in the way and (2) drive up the cost of everything to comically high levels. As a New Englander, it causes me great pain to pay more for something than I feel is the fair price. I felt this great pain on a regular basis living in CA.

Now, with an RV hookup site, you get an electrical jack, a water faucet, and a sewer clean-out, without having to walk even a few feet. That’s infrastructure, and I know a thing or two about how much it costs to build and maintain infrastructure. It’s what they pay me to do. I’ll tell you this much: it costs more than two bucks. This means that as a primitive camper in a campground with RV’s, I’m subsidizing those road-clogging leviathans. This causes me great pain (see **).

So how do I bring balance back to creation? By helping myself. I have resolved to use the hell out of my electric jack. I’ll be charging cell phones, cameras, and GPS units all night, and I’ll be typing away drivel like the last few paragraphs long into the night. This isn’t about me, people; it’s about Justice.

On to business. Today was a museum-and-visitor-center day, which for some reason leaves me feeling more tired than after a long day of hiking. I suspect the coffee.***

***the cheap-ass motel I stayed at last night advertised “FREE COFFEE” along with their other complimentary amenities, like wireless internet that drifts in and out as the signal attempts to make its way through the cinder-block walls of the building. And like the wi-fi, the coffee left much to be desired. First off, it wasn’t a proper coffee-brown. It was more of a deep red. And it tasted like shit. No, scratch that; if you went through the trouble of taking a dump, drying it out, grinding it up, and percolating hot water through it, I can pretty much guarantee that it would taste better than the substance I attempted to drink this morning. Maybe have a nutty sort of flavor. The best explanation I can think of is that the motel manager failed to either place fresh beans in the coffee maker or to clean out the grounds from previous nights. Or from previous years, for that matter. Maybe they pissed in it too, for good measure.

I couldn’t even swallow the stuff. And as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my coffee standards are low. But I still wanted coffee. So I walked down the block to a little espresso shack, and stood waiting in the drive-thru line among the cars, and got some real coffee. They even put too much cream and sugar in it, Dunkin’-Donuts-style. I still think that that first aborted sip of “coffee” got to me, though. This was coffee so bad that it actually had the opposite effect of coffee, and left me feeling sleepy and lethargic throughout the day, no matter how many cups of real coffee I consumed.

Right. On to the road trip. Today was very much and inside day, first visiting the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center and Museum in the morning, and then Bonneville Dam and Fish Hatchery in the afternoon.

The museum was fantastic. A beautiful building with bare cedar columns on the inside and xeriscaped wildflower blooms outside. The museum covered the natural and cultural history of the gorge, with exhibits on the last great Ice Age, the Lake Missoula super-flood, the Native American history of the area, the Columbia River dams and fish migrations, and everything that I ever could have wanted to learn about Lewis and Clark (like the well-concealed (at the time) fact that the expedition went seriously over budget. Like 2000% over budget. This, of course, began the proud American tradition of government cost overruns).

After lunch, I drove by Bonneville Dam below the Bridge of the Gods and the Cascade Locks. It was a big dam. That meant that I had to go look at it. I like visiting big dams – regardless of how ill-advised, unnecessary, or devastating to river ecology some of them may be, they still stand as a testament to the incredible potential of modern engineering. Like a modern-day Archimedes, give me a slide-rule and a near-unlimited federal budget, and I can tame the mightiest river on earth.

Arriving at the visitor center, I inquired if there were any tours offered of the dam. Yes, said the receptionist, but the last tour of the day left ten minutes ago.

…

I’ve been to three damns now that are significant enough to merit offering a guided tour of the powerhouse: Glen Canyon in Arizona, Shasta in California, and now Bonnevile in Oregon. At every single one, when I arrive, “the last tour of the day left ten minutes ago.” I’m calling bullshit. There is a massive federal conspiracy to prevent me from seeing the inside of a dam. This goes up all the way to the very top, with Cheney cackling gleefully as he watches my hopes dashed through his homeland security video screen. Bastards.

Right. Time for some dinner. More to come.

-deuce-

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a dam.”
-Gone With The Wind-