Tuesday, April 25
In the morning M loaded his expedition gear into the truck. At 10:30 he departed on another trip to the wilds of northern Nevada. Three hundred miles later, he still hadn’t gotten out of Oregon. But that was all part of the plan. He spent the night in Lakeview, Oregon, where he had had the foresight to reserve a room.
E, meanwhile, had more important issues to attend to. She was having her annual birthday dinner with D, a friend and former colleague. She met D at their usual place, Dulce de Alma, where they could both order small portions of delicious things. But what to wear? The weather had turned quite warm, so E treated herself to a new spring blouse.
Wednesday, April 26
M left Lakeview at 8:30 or so, with the remains of the previous night’s Mexican take-out tucked into his backseat fridge. Unlike the Dulce de Alma in Corvallis, El Aguila Real in Lakeview specializes in huge portions of more or less edible things, so there was plenty left over. After an hour or two of driving, he was still in Oregon, but he had gotten as far as the Doherty Slide, one of his favorite places in these parts.
After another hour and a half on the road M was well into Nevada and ready to get off the pavement and find a place where he could stop and eat his lunch. On the map, there was a gravel route called Knotts Creek Road. It looked promising, although just what it promised was not clear. But down the road he went. Five or ten miles in he passed a very active cattle operation.
After that, the landscape got emptier. Eventually, he came to another ranch, this one not so active.
Just a mile or two past the abandoned ranch, the road enters an area called Pearl Canyon. There M found a place to stop and heat up his chile verde.
After lunch, instead of going back up Knotts Creek Road to the highway, he went farther into the boonies, turning first east and then north on Leonard Creek Road. This got him back to the highway, but at a point some 40 miles beyond where he’d left it.
Buoyed by this nifty maneuver, he decided to try a similar strategy to find a place to camp for the night. He drove a little farther east and decided to head down another gravel road, this one called Sod House Road. On the map, he could see that it connected to Sand Pass Road, which would take him into some likely camping areas.
As it happened, this was not a good idea. After driving for about an hour on a not very good road, M found that his Nevada atlas and his Nevada reality failed to sync up. Sod House Road did not connect to Sand Pass Road or to anything else. All he could do was to drive back the way he had come and start all over again, with not many hours of daylight left.
And what was E doing on this nice April Wednesday? She was off taking pictures of flowers, picking rhubarb from our garden, and making a pie!
We’re pretty sure that she intended to share both the photos and the pie with M…probably.
Thursday, April 27
E started the day at tertulia with J and R, after which she attended the Zoom BBB (Better Bones & Balance) class. In the afternoon she did Laughter Yoga, and for dinner went with H and T out to Gathering Together Farm. E and T had oven baked fish with broccoli rabe and garlic herb mashed potatoes, while H had fresh pasta. Was it good? It’s always good at GTF.
M started the day by cooking bacon and eggs on his hillside and listening to a couple of meadowlarks. Then it was time to go into town to get some gas and start the homeward leg of the journey. The plan was to explore the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge with an eye toward spending the night somewhere therein. If that didn’t work out, he could always just go on back to Lakeview. What he discovered was that the reserve wasn’t exactly prepared for visitors. All the little roads to all the interesting places had suffered washouts over the winter and it was going to take time to repair them. There was no announcement about this and no one around to ask, so M had to find it out for himself by driving around and discovering the washouts one by one. That in itself was entertaining up to a point, but got old. Finally, though, he found his way to an actual place. It was called Gooch Spring.
M briefly considered camping at Gooch Spring, but there wasn’t much to look at once you’d finished with sagebrush and, at an altitude of 6,090 feet, it was likely to get pretty chilly overnight. M decided to head back.
The drive to the west provided another encounter with the Doherty Slide, this time going down the traverse instead of up. There are several YouTube videos of vehicles traversing the Slide. Here’s a link to one. The word “slide” in the name does not refer to cars or animals sliding over the edge and falling down into the valley. Instead, it probably refers to the large amount of eroded material found along the base of the ridge.
Friday, April 28
M returned home with a truck covered with dust both inside and out. Cleaning took hours, and even then the interior did not pass inspection. M got a piece of rhubarb pie anyway.
Saturday, April 29
It’s been warm for several days now–shorts weather–and flowers are blooming all over town.
Monday, May 1
Oops, it’s cold again. Time to put those shorts aside.
Tuesday, May 2
In the morning we went for a walk at the Finley Wildlife Refuge south of town. The pond on the Woodpecker Loop was as full as we’ve ever seen it. We noticed that the season has reached an important milestone: the poison oak is back! And boy is it healthy looking. One small consolation is that just when the poison oak leaves pop out, the wild irises come into bloom. They both seem to like the same conditions and are often seen close one another, though not usually this close…
Back at our house, a flicker has been coming around lately. He makes a racket by tapping on our metal chimney cover. Here he is at the feeder.
Wednesday, May 3
Lots of work in the garden today. E needed to repot her rosemary, which has been the centerpiece in her flower bed out by the front sidewalk. Last week she got a big new pot for it and today we made the change. Wasn’t easy.
In the afternoon we went for guided walk through a neighborhood that contains some of the city’s older homes. Most of houses featured on the tour were built in the period from 1890 to 1910. The oldest house, however, was the Biddle-Porter house, which was built circa 1856, making it one of earliest Corvallis homes still standing. Benjamin and Maria Biddle came to Corvallis around 1852 and had previously lived in Springfield, Illinois, where Biddle had been friends with Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer who also lived there. Apparently the friendship continued, as shown by the existence of letter from Lincoln to Biddle written in 1860 during Lincoln’s first presidential campaign.
Thursday, May 4
Tertulia today with J and R. Like us, they’ve been out looking at wild flowers. R has seen fairy slipper orchids (Calypso bulbosa) blooming at the Lewisburg saddle. After tertulia M worked on his drip irrigation network and pulled weeds. E did a one-hour exercise class, planted some candytuft in her old rosemary pot and then went off to the nail salon–all this well before lunch.
Ah, the active life in Oregon, where burbling streams unexpectedly reward gravel road explorers, and there is rhubarb pie back home! The theme of culinary delights continues whilst springtime unfolds, flickers tap chimneys, wild irises bloom alongside poison oak, and rosemary gets repotted. These quiet joys spare the reader dances round the Maypole, the raucous sounds of Lucinda Williams singing “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” and even “Four Dead in Ohio.” We are content.