Missouri then Kansas. The red lights you see in the dark are windmills.
Music by:
Peter Biedermann “Christiana”
Dredg “Brushstrok: An Elephant in the Delta Waves”
Epic Road Trip ~ Kansas
Kansas
Leaving the city of Kansas, which is in Missouri, lands us in the state of Kansas, which is not in Missouri. The weather improves immediately, as though meteorology obeys cartography, which follows geology, or at least topology, which all actually makes sense. The sky becomes blue again, and thus begins one of the longest and strangest passages of the whole trip.
Epic Road Trip ~ St. Louis & Missouri
With access to the hotel wifi, it’s now possible to do things like post to the blog and, oh right, check the weather, which reveals a new front moving up from the South in a big arc, carrying sleet and freezing rain. The forecast puts it shy of the due west highway by morning, like a wave approaching the shore, but just. If we leave early enough we can scoot past before it arrives. However, it effectively eliminates the optional Southern Route kept open as an escape hatch if the weather out west looks bad. Westward ho it is.
It starts snowing again at 2am (3am by my Virginia body clock). I know it is snowing because I’m still awake with road jitters. The forecast is apparently wrong. It snows all night. Day 2 begins after only three hours of sleep.
Epic Road Trip ~ Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois
Welcome to Kentucky
Across the Big Sandy, Kentucky greets us with an oil refinery. It’s a Dante-esque scene, with flames blazing from pipes that pierce the skyline, steam and smoke everywhere. An orange backdrop of the setting sun compounds the effect. Storage tanks up on the hill are blithely painted with a big “Welcome to” sign, which is bracketed with corporate logos of the refinery. But the human engineered landscape dissipates quickly. Kentucky assumes a fine bucolic appearance of gently rolling hills and forests for what’s left of the rest of the day.
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Epic Road Trip ~ Virginia & West Virginia
Packed
We’re running out of room.
Right.
You can only take one small bag.
Right.
No, really.
I’ve got a small carry on. And a backpack. It can sit under my feet.
Cool. My kayak paddle will be by your head.
Yup, got it.
With the car packed (really packed) idling and pointed west, and we strapped in, the driveway suddenly feels like a runway. We pause a moment to contemplate it. Mentally go through a preflight checklist. Contemplate the leaving part.
The road starts out uphill and twisty. First, wending out of our rural hill country, up the Southwest Mountains and Poe’s Ragged Mountains. Beyond that up the Blue Ridge, across the Appalachian Trail and Skyline Drive, down the Shenandoah Valley, then up into the Alleghenies, which encompass almost the entire state of West Virginia. From there it’s a rolling downhill slide to the belly of the country, and then days of flatlands.
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Epic Road Trip ~ Homeward Bound
Postcard from the Road:
Somewhere over the Midwest at 33,000 feet
Out the window, the North American continent glides slowly by at 552 mph. Last week it took all day to cross a time zone — a long day, making good time. Today, three time zones will come and go in as many hours. Time is relative. On a boat, with a fair wind, we might cover three miles in an hour, and are happy to do it. Ironically, that slow pace is a far richer experience than this, as was the driving.
The plane passes right over Hood River, and I think I see Emily’s house. The Columbia Rover Gorge, so beautiful and majestic yesterday, from here looks flat and uninteresting. Fog fills it to the rim, adding to the effect. Skim milk spilled on a table. Mount Adams and Mount Hood yesterday rose up from the Cascade Range like mythological giants. If appearance made a sound, theirs would be booming thunder. But from 30,000 feet they’re just small, mute protuberances.
Mount Adams
Columbia Gorge filled with fog
Oregon. Idaho. Montana. Nebraska. South Dakota. Minnesota. Iowa. There’s the Mississippi, frozen and still. Wisconsin. Illinois. Before the sun touches the mountains I’ll be in Virginia.
the frozen Mississippi
A couple of times during the trip, I checked the dash cam to see it was working as intended. It’s pretty amazing to see. Many handheld photos, taken throughout, show a remarkable landscape, changing dramatically from moment to moment. It’s a big country.
It will take some time to winnow through. Clear blue skies, rain, snow, wind storms, dust storms, white outs going through high mountain passes; forests, farms, prairies, deserts, rivers and cities. It’s all there. It’s still there.
Epic Road Trip ~ Mile 3082 : Hood River, Oregon
Postcard from the Road:
Portland, 9:51pm
Left Emily in Hood River this morning. Not an easy thing,
But she has a bunch of friends already, and a job, and a place to live, and a vigorous sense of adventure. She’ll be better than fine.
Back in Portland, met up with Doryman, who was on his way to Port Townsend to deliver a boat. We spent hours talking philosophies: Eastern, Western, Personal, purely conjecture. It was good to see him. He’s thinning the Doryman fleet, paring down, preparing for a new phase of adventures of his own. So much suddenly becomes possible when you cut all the lines that keep you moored.
Leaving at 5am to catch a flight back East. In the coming days I’ll start backfilling details and photos. There’s an awful lot of story left out — so much you just can’t get your head around when you’re moving so fast, let alone get down in any coherent fashion. Epic indeed.
For now, this is tonight, my last night in Oregon, in Portland, in a group house hostel in the arts district with a bunch of twenty-something’s, in the fog:
