evolutin'

Be careful what you name a thing. Shackleton's ship, "The Endurance" needed it. Columbus' "The Mayflower" certainly did and could've probably used some pruning. Charles Darwin's "Beagle" had all the insignificant sound and fury, all the yappy anxiety, and baying conviction of a typical hounddog. With only a faint whiff of truth, he was hot on the trail and the whole neighborhood tried to shut their windows against the noisy intrusion. Evolution's out there; that's for certain, but the exact relationship between a critter and its habitat is complicated and smeared out across the past and the future. It seems like the whole house is gettin' remodeled and we're locked inside until it's done or we figure out how to fire the general contractor.
The other day I was hare-krishna'd by some well meaning hippy who asked if I wanted "to help him save the planet" by joining some eco-club. (turns out I couldn't help too much) As far as I can tell, the planet's not really in a whole lot of trouble. Humans may be the worlds sloppiest tenants but our tiny blip on on time's radar is already fading and this giant ball of teeming furious self-replicating DNA is gonna be just fine in a millennia or so. Humans will be latest layer in a dense strata of interesting artifacts. Something that often gets overlooked in all this ecological chatter is that we humans are just as damn "natural" as every spotted owl and hairy headed fruit bat. If we bark all night and pee in the pool, well that seems to be what human critters do and it may well do us in. The fact that some humans live a bit more responsibly than others just another part of the plan. Live like you were born to, it's all you can do, but don't worry so much about the Earth; after all, it's not particularly worried about you.


This rant started about evolution and got derailed by my second cup of coffee. Burning man's theme this year is evolution and we're headed out on friday to make our way through Berkeley into the black rock desert for a week of experiments in freedom and frivolity. Camp KFC is 20 people strong this year and ready to pass out 2000 fried bologna sandwiches, 40 gallons of bourbon, and a cargo-plane's worth of irreverence.

Ah, the pride of mastering a lawn chair. Maybe next week we'll put some time in working with something more complicated, like a spoon.
This is the view from the trails that start behind the trailer park. This town is just plain odd. Smaller than Winchester and it's got 7 bike shops and 4 breweries. I found a vegetable oil mechanic who raises bees and chickens and reveres Tom Robbins. There's a vegetable oil gas station where you can get prefiltered oil for half the price of diesel. You can't turn around without bumping into some blueberries or blackberries.
We've been hiking and biking so much that we go to bed early and exhausted. Stella still gets up at 6:15 without fail and I'm starting to thing she's just about old enough for her own little trailer to sleep in. I've been growing a beard so people know that I'm all woodsy-like.
These mountain grassy balds are downright enchanting when the wind rustles the grasses.
Here's Stella, fresh out of the wash, ready for the drier.

So if aliens did ever saucer over Sausalito or stop by Roswell to put up some plastic flowers and crosses, I'm bettin' they don't notice the humans at first. Most likely they'd think the world was inhabited by cars and then realize that the cars are in some type of symbiotic relationship with frail pink monkeys who scuttle from car to the nearest shelter like some kind of ousted hermit crabs. Seen from above, humans probably seem as skittish as crawdads at a creole festival.

One glaring difference we've noticed in Oregon is the relative newness of the modern worlds' influence. Fortunate to be one of the last places beaten into submission by asphalt and evangelism, Oregon has a few generations less of senseless and irresponsible occupation by the great white tribe. I like to imagine that when the settlers got to the coast and realized that they were actually gonna run out of forests to clear-cut, they rubbed their chins and said "hey, uh, we might wanna leave a few of those trees up. you know, just in case."

or again

The first time I ever saw a bear I was shin-deep in snow in the Smokey mountains in February. My two hiking companions and I had rounded a corner on the edge of a ridge bringing a snow- covered meadow and a single black bear into view. Like an over-ripe raspberry threatening to stain a fresh bleached table cloth it stood there and split the instant with a pregnant suspense that preceeded recognition or response. Then and there I heard my good friend Brian say one of the truest things I've ever heard spoken when he stammered "it..it's not a gorilla", followed by Brandon's drawling "I think you're right." The word "certainty" has "aint" as its root and often the only thing honest folks are sure of is what a thing isn't. Sometimes there's just no word for a new thing and the worst thing is throw the wrong word over it some kind of bad wall paper. Two days ago I wound up ignorantly bobbing around the ocean on a surf board (flail board or hope board would have been more appropriate names for my use of the thing) when a seal poked his head up off my starboard bow or at leat the closest thing I've ever had to one. We both made noises of mutual surprise and he was gone before my brainstem and various sphincters finally agreed on the overall non-sharkiness of the encounter and lapsed into pleasant amazement.


By and large, mother nature is a wildly creative and festive prankster with seemingly infinite new ways to amaze, but she does occasionally have an off day when it comes to breathing the vital essense of isness into a new critter. Anyone who could describe a banana slug as anything other than a turd with antennae has never snuck a look at their own offerings to the porcelain Poseidon. Ugly doesn't cut and banana-slugly is a bit contrived. Lip-curlingly hideous takes too long to say and "Ick" might just be the only appropriate thing to utter. It's not just the turdiness of the beast it's the fact that appears to be a turd that's fallen on hard times and been a bit under the weather to boot. Maybe a turd that was always sickly as a child and turned to the bottle for solace. Fortunately slow-moving and seemingly lacking any hostile intentions (other than their willingness to tar-and-feather any sense of aesthetics) banana slugs are harmless enough and rare enough that they have posed no threat to our enjoyment of the verdant splendor and opalescent flowings of the stream-cracked mountain trails east of the cascades. The swimming holes are polynesian and hedonistic in appearance but distinctly protestant and calvinistic in temperature.

The Blue Ox RV park in Albany Oregon has it's mascot cast in fiberglass in front of the office looking like some kind of demon smurf yak. This should have been a warning to us, but we were lured in by the ease of parking, the clean showers and the pool. (these features are as alluring to the RV crowd as a legless pomeranian is to a python) As a disclaimer I want to point out that the Blue Ox RV park is a clean, professional, and pleasant organization. Much like a cracker barrel, you know exactly what you're getting and you know there's gonna be some clip-on sunglasses involved. That being said, living at the Blue Ox is like living in giant parking lot with a bathroom. I'm sure that's just fine if you never leave your trailer. (which is fairly common behavior, the only time i saw anybody else was when the power went out and it was like the RV park had hatched a brood of TV-fed pork sausages in denim cut-offs) The week that we got there the temperatures rose into the 100s and TIffany, the 3 mammals and I were trapped in the air conditioned trailer. Now for me to stay in the trailer happily for a week with Tiffany, the baby, and two dogs would require a divorce lawyer, an adoption agency and an unscrupulous vietnamese restaurant. So we did what any kentucky-bred, travel-wisened wanderers would do; we hated life and plotted ways to kill each other. There was nowhere to go! We were trapped between the interstate and the airport in a parking lot with 84 square feet of air-conitioned space. as soon as we had a day off we fled for the only other place within 30 miles of here that had an open RV space, the Benton Oaks Trailer Park in Corvallis. Now, we had checked this place out on our first surveyed the area and found it lacking but after a week under the demonic possession of the icy yak-god, the trailer park appeared like a lidless trash can in front of a family of starving raccoons. We have large shady trees and friendly neighbors. The dogs can wander about. We're on a bike trail that goes 60 miles form the mountains directly to a brewery downtown. We're far enough east that the coastal breeze chills the evening air. We're home. (well, we're paid through theend of the month anyway)

photo: not the trailer park, but we can pretend

when we arrived in oregon, we headed to portland just to see what's going on there, but at the end of a hot day traveling with the bay-bay our ability to navigate the trailer through a major metropolis waned and tensions began to mount in the cabin of the vanmobile. i gave up and parked to gain us some time for map reading and slow breathing (i parallel parked for those who are impressed by handymanly things like trailer driving) and when i looked out the passenger side window i saw a sign, a divine oracle, a burning bush, a flaming flamingo; that sign read "oregon brewers festival". our course was clear. having read once that beer can make humans happy we decided to investigate further. 200 beers were featured and nearly 2000 people were in attendance. many were the foamy moustaches and wobbly wanderers. the groove was laid back and the beer was cold. we were heavy into people watching when we noticed 4 or 5 folks snapping pictures of stella playing with our empty (i promise) beer mugs on the ground. she clearly realized that the path to happiness involves the up-ending of these curious devices and was amusing the dickens out of the locals around her.

home at last?

I put the van in park and said "honey, we're home" as we pulled the airstream into slot number 85 at the Blue Ox RV park. We're across from the pool and laundry room and we have a tree. I can't say much for the aesthetics of the place but it's friendly, clean and we're awfully happy to just have a place to be for a week. We haven't spent more than 5 days in the same place since the beginning of May and we're a bit travel-weary after the 3,000 mile jaunt with a 13 month old. This week is devoted to figuring out our professional obligations and trying to get a feel for the area; I'm gonna go look around the ER tomorrow and work my first shift on Wednesday. We found the good grocery and the hip part of Corvallis. If Albany has a hip part, we haven't seen it yet. We're a bit on the frazzled side being this far from home and not really having a home but we're cracking ourselves up and maintaining our baseline level of belligerently naive optimism about the possibility of existing as full-time wanderers.