Saturday, April 19th
We are now obsessing over a horrible jigsaw puzzle. We are so “grateful” to the east coast “friends” who passed it along to us. You know who you are.
Sunday, April 20th
We celebrated Easter Sunday by taking the red car over to Newport for brunch. Very nice weather, partly sunny with temps in the 50s. Newport seemed very uncrowded. Lunch included an interesting dessert:
After lunch we went over to the site of the original Yaquina Bay lighthouse, a wooden structure built in 1871 on the north side of the entrance to Yaquina Bay. It was used for only three years before being replaced by the Yaquina Head Lighthouse, which was built on higher ground farther north. The old lighthouse is closed for restoration these days, but there’s a nice little park there and a path down to the beach across some old dunes.
From the parking lot we took a trail downward toward the dunes. It’s an old route, originally constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.
After detouring around the water, we got down to the level of the dunes, and then climbed up to the top of one. There we found some purple flowers that E’s phone identified as the blossoms of a leguminous plant called Sea Pea, Lathyrous japonicas.
Tuesday, April 22nd
Today E got back to work helping with reading at the bilingual elementary school. She missed last Tuesday due to cataract surgery. Today, while she was working with a fourth grader, a program staffer came around and gave the boy a little sticker. When the staffer had gone, E asked the boy what the sticker was for. He said it was a reward for doing his reading. E said that she was also doing her reading and asked why she didn’t also get a sticker. The boy thought for a minute and then said, “I think it’s because you’re old. You’re still beautiful though.” Eve says that the boy is in fact not greatly interested in reading, but she predicts a bright future for him anyway.
While E was being responsible, M took off on a joyride, making his way up to Portland and then heading east up I-84 through the Columbia Gorge, where he spent the night at the Cousins Hotel in The Dalles.
Wednesday, April 23rd
In the morning M had to go another forty miles up the freeway before finally turning south at Blalock. Whew. Finally the real driving could really begin.
Blalock Canyon Road is a narrow, worn looking squiggle of pavement with no shoulders, lots of curves, good visibility, and no traffic whatever–a nice warmup for a day of driving. The road ends at a T-junction and M turned left onto Cedar Springs Lane, where he had a chance to slow down and do a little 21st Century sightseeing.
Did he see any cedar trees or springs? Uh…no. Those must be located on some other part of Cedar Springs Lane. What he did see, on his left, was the southern edge of a very large facility called Chemical Waste Management of the Northwest. Now, back In the good old days, if you had some chemical waste that you wanted to get rid of, you could just truck it to the nearest river and dump it in, preferably on a moonless night. But there’s less of that now. Instead, “customers in the states of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Hawaii, Alaska and provinces of Western Canada” can call CWMNW to make their toxic waste go away. Here are a few pages from the brochure. It makes for interesting reading.
We might all wish that when CWMNW collects or accepts chemical waste, the material would then go to some state-of-the-art processing plant where it would be detoxified and rendered harmless. Ho-ho-ho. Unfortunately, it appears that no one really knows how to do that. But if toxic materials are not going away, then they will have to be permanently stored, stored in such a way, hopefully, as to minimize the hazard. And that, of course, is the purpose of the CWMNW site near Arlington, Oregon. The facility is just a large, specially constructed landfill complex. Most of it is around behind a hill, so you can’t see much, but there is a diagram on their web site. Even better, you can use the navigation app on your phone to bring up satellite photos of the place. From the road he was on, M only saw the main entrance, a railroad siding, and a quarter-mile long field filled with a hundred or so containers. Most of these were the standard metal shipping containers, but there were also some other things that looked like giant dark green bins with high mounded covers held down by green cables. Weird.
After that excitement, as he neared the junction of Cedar Springs Lane and Oregon Hwy 19, M came to another kind of place that didn’t exist in the good old days: a large wind power construction and maintenance facility. You know, the kind of place where you see very large, blindingly white support columns lying on their sides waiting for some giant to pick them up and plant them somewhere.
There’s a lot of wind in the Columbia Gorge and large numbers of turbines have been built to take advantage.
Moving along down OR 19, M rapidly left the both the clean energy and the dirty chemicals behind. Once you get farther away from the gorge, there are miles and miles of mostly treeless country, with lots of ranch land and wheat fields, not so many houses, and not so many towns. The roads are mostly paved now, but might not have been when they were originally laid down 75 or 125 years ago. They tend to follow the contours of the land more than our modern roads do. And the land has a lot of contour to it: up hill and down dale, with sudden little folds into which to drop and plenty of little ridges over which to climb. Very little traffic. Jaguar country.
After a bit M turned off OR 19 and drove east on OR 206, then went south again on OR 207. He passed through the towns of Hardman and Spray, and soon entered a somewhat more mountainous area. The road took him around the southern edge of Hoogie Doogie Mountain*, and eventually to a bare bones state park called Mule Shoe Recreation Area, which lies upon the banks of the John Day River. There he found some shade and ate his lunch.
After lunch came another 75 scenic and moderately entertaining miles along US 26 to the town of Prineville. Prineville used to be a nice little place, famous only for being the birthplace of the Les Schwab tire empire. Nowadays, it’s a cloud server town. Facebook (Meta) has nine data centers there, each about twice the size of a Walmart. Apple has six big data centers. We do not have exact information about how much data can be stored in these centers, but total capacity is likely to be many petabytes. (A petabyte is roughly one billion megabytes, or 1,024 gigabytes.) The data centers provide around 1,000 jobs, some of which must pay pretty well, given the number of big new houses littering the mountainsides.
Thursday, April 24th
Tertulia with R and J this morning at Coffee Culture. R talked a little about the impact on OSU caused by the recent reduction in federal funding for scientific research. He noted that in past years federal research proposals would be rejected if they did not include a section about how the project would contribute to the societal goals of diversity, equity and inclusion. These days, of course, proposals will be rejected if they do include any mention of DEI.
Back in our living room on Oak Avenue, we have finally finished that jigsaw puzzle. It seemed awfully hard, but finally yielded to a “loaf by loaf” strategy.
Friday, April 25th
Lunch today with our old friend J.
Saturday, April 26th
Errands and garden work today.
Sunday, April 27th
Pretty busy day. For breakfast we suffered through plain croissants–no chocolate. While we were out for a walk we noticed that our neighbors were having a plant sale. We went over to check it out and ended up buying a half dozen Ajuga starts. We also got the chance to tour their backyard, a wonderful place of beauty and repose.
After that M got to work in our own backyard while E took off on a joyride to yoga class at her friend L’s studio out in the country.
Later on we went to a dinner put on by the Corvallis Sister Cities program. Corvallis has two sister cities, one of which is Gondar, the one-time capital of the Ethiopian Empire. Since 2005 the CSC-Gondar group has worked with a number of NGO partners to support the city in the areas of education, at-risk children, nutrition, safe drinking water, reforestation, and watershed management. The dinner consisted of Ethiopian food, which as some of you may know, does not involve the use of knives, forks or spoons. So there we were, 175 Corvallians, all trying to figure out the best way to pick up our food by squeezing it between the layers of a folded piece of injera bread. Fortunately, generous supplies of napkins were provided. Injera is a soft, spongy flatbread. It is made from Teff flour and is thus gluten free. We also saw a display about how Ethiopian coffee is made and served. It seems that Ethiopians drink a lot of coffee.
At a traditional Ethiopian coffee drinking ceremony, guests can expect to drink three small cups of coffee. The first cup is called abol, the second is called tona and the third baraka. Baraka means blessing, and signifies the host’s wish to bless the guests. To refuse the third cup would be considered extremely rude. Let’s all of us remember that, just in case.
*If anyone recognizes the language of the Hoogie Doogie Mountain web site, please let us know in the comments.