While there was gasoline. While there were roads. While the economy still had legs, lungs, and a beating heart. While the car had new tires. While the passports had yet to expire. While there were still places that asked for passports.
While there was still three feet of snow outside our windows. While the presidential election still had a few criminal trials to go through before it took center stage. While bird flu was still mostly restricted to birds.
While our world (we think) hadn’t slipped entirely into cyberspace.
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We’ve been on a road trip. It’s been a long time since I was a professional travel writer, so don’t expect a blow-by-blow itinerary. I didn’t take notes, for one thing, preferring—to the extent I’m capable—not to think about what I was seeing and hearing and tasting.
I will say that if you’re ever in the Georgetown section of Seattle and don’t dine at the restaurant known as Ciudad, you will have missed out on some serious end-of-empire decadence. I’m talking about the food, mostly.
Also, if long-time friends offer to cook dinner for you, and if new friends do the same, accept with joy, gratitude, and good will. You won’t be disappointed.
Joy, gratitude, and good will are your go-to emotions on a road trip. If you’re lucky, you’ll pull back into your driveway with all three intact.
We were lucky. It was a good trip. It got us out beyond the valley walls and convinced us there were places beyond them worth visiting.
Joy, gratitude, and good will are still with us. Our news feed doesn’t seem any less fragile or full of pain, but we’re still here. At the moment, that’s a good thing. We answer Prince Hamlet in the affirmative.
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A few days this winter we had trouble believing in the outside world, primarily due to blue-sky days when we climbed the hill across the road and skied down through six inches of powder on a solid base.
Afterward, I pointed to my tracks to prove that, outside world or not, I exist, and to Julie’s tracks beside them to prove I don’t exist alone. But like most drastic simplifications, this belief in one’s own being is reductive.
The instant of turning in powder reduces the world to a spot of pure sensation the size of one’s body, the universe to a network of crackling synapses stripped of narrative. You become the turn, the turn becomes you. The world turns into a mirror, and with more turns, a maze of mirrors.
Which of a thousand reflections is the real you? If you can’t tell, it’s time to get the hell out of Sawtooth Valley.
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Of course, we’ve been to Boise this winter for O-runs—CostcO, WincO, Trader JOe’s—but Boise is seeming less and less a place and more and more a vast constructed environment, a videogame made flesh, complete with winners and losers. If you want to figure out the narrative behind it, look at the blind impulse of capital toward unexploited markets.
Unexploited markets are us, at least until we find a space in a parking lot and head toward the sliding glass doors with a shopping list. Then our expenditures become units of income in somebody else’s game, and somewhere somebody else’s point total goes up.
But not by much. In the big scheme of things, our economic expenditures won’t make us losers—at least this year—or anyone else a winner. We’re not worth exploiting.
There is a certain freedom of movement in being really small. Ask any quantum particle.
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Hence the road trip. Hence our budget for motels and restaurants, museums and famous natural attractions.
There are more worrisome game-built environments out there. If Boise seems like Disney’s Tomorrowland or a civilization-building video game that ends with the successful colonization of the Oort Cloud, there are other places—the Umatilla Weapons Depot, for example, with its hundreds of ostensibly empty chemical weapons bunkers, its silent incinerators, its miles and miles of fenced-off sagebrush—that seem to come from entirely different games, postapocalyptic ones with a high percentage of dead people in them. They contain fewer opportunities to earn rewards, unless you consider still being alive at the end of the game a reward. (It is. It means you’ve won.)
That’s not the game we wanted to play on our road trip. I’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and given the way he constructs that particular scenario, it doesn’t sound like much fun.
We were headed to Vancouver Island, where we hoped to find open green spaces, rain forests, empty beaches, elaborately manicured gardens and afternoon tea at the Empress Hotel. Going to a foreign country, especially one that combines a polite civilization with wilderness, suggests there are better narratives out there, ones that might have a few extra chapters because they’re not turning everything into game points as quickly as possible.
Vancouver Island was an explosion of green, a sort of idealized celebration of new life, set, in our imaginations, to the music of Vivaldi’s Spring. We visited the Butchart Gardens, 55 exquisitely manicured acres of flowers, trees, fountains, sculptures, winding paths, and pollen. We didn’t have any allergic reactions, but the combination of sea-level oxygen and aggressively fecund plant life was a shock, especially when we had just come from a sere, snow-covered, high-altitude world where oxygen was scarce and white, black, and grey were the primary colors.
We spent two nights in Sidney, a small retirement city north of Victoria, and its peacefulness, cleanliness, and general atmosphere of cheer made us wish the Canadian government would make old-age visas more accessible to their neighbors south of the border. Or at least Trump Visas, where refugees from Idaho could wait for old age and dementia, either for themselves or for those right-wing politicians bent on eliminating the rule of law.
Whichever comes first. Make America Great Again, indeed.
We drove a narrow and rough coastal highway out to Port Renfrew on the west side of the island, and toured its nearby beaches, tidal pools, and a small, sparsely occupied fjordside pub, where I had a giant plate of raw tuna, topping off my central nervous system’s mercury quota for the year.
It was a beautiful, kaleidoscopic trip, but Canada’s narrative isn’t as simple as I had imagined. Vancouver Island is, for one thing, a vast logging/mining/fishing operation, and there isn’t much to distinguish its extractive capitalism game from our American variety. Often enough, the capitalists playing the game are the same people. The difference between the two countries is that Canada’s got a lot more resources left to extract. It also has a lot more water, at least on Vancouver Island.
Like a lot of other Americans, Julie and I have thought about moving to Canada for the water, the relative cleanliness, the warming tundra, and the nice people. But such a move becomes impossible to think about when the future holds the possibility of hordes of climate and economic and political refugees heading over the border once things start falling apart here. Canada has traditionally welcomed immigrants, and much of its vitality as a nation comes from its immigrant population. But Canada won’t welcome desperate Americans in their uncivilized millions. Politeness and even mercy have their limits.
It was such an intimidating thought that we skipped high tea at the Empress.
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We took the ferry back to Port Angeles, and took our place in the line of cars that stretched down the peninsular coast to Long Beach, where we stayed in a hotel that was hosting a car show—mostly tricked-out Camaros, and the mindset that goes with them.
From there, we drove across the delicate giant bridge that spans the mouth of the Columbia, down to Tillamook, and east to Bend. There we checked into a new, clean, minimalist hotel, whose straight lines, bare walls, and grayscale vinyl floors took us back into constructed reality with a vengeance. Days of driving through the fringes of old-growth forest left on the sides of highways had given us a tentative faith in a separate, natural world. It evaporated in an instant.
We ate in a very good restaurant in a new building constructed to look like a repurposed factory and made friends with the bartender.
The next day we drove home after having coffee with friends in Burns, and picking up Juno at Julie’s parents’ house. We got to the house at dusk. Juno walked out to the deck, barked at the bunnies and coyotes to tell them we were home, and got down to the serious business of being pissed off at us for abandoning her for ten days.
Then we found that the power had been out for a number of days. The contents of our freezers still were cold, but softening. Another day and we would have had to throw food out.
It was an effective reminder that when our world ends, it will end with a power failure and an angry dog.
We called the power company. They sent a truck and a crew, which arrived at 9:45 p.m. It took them five minutes to reset a circuit breaker on the power pole across the road from us, but our well pump didn’t come on so we still didn’t have water.
The pump had been acting up for a while, and I had ordered a new pressure switch but hadn’t put it in yet. I spent the next morning in the crawl space, getting reacquainted with old plumbing and electrical skills that hadn’t been very good in the first place. As usual in these situations, I did everything twice—the right way the second time—and emerged from the darkness under the house with no confidence that the pump would work when I threw its breaker switch.
It did work. We have water. The light switches turn on lights. The microwave heats cold coffee. No circuit breakers refused to reset. We’ve been eating thawed steak and meatloaf and once-frozen peas, bricks of last summer’s eggplant parmesan, and anything else we were dubious about refreezing.
After a couple days cleaning out the car, washing clothes, and getting used to being in snow again, we realized that the really exciting part of our trip had been in the homecoming, when the unexpected interrupted our schedule, our sense of the normal, and our comfort.
It was time for a new narrative anyway, one with more agency than being a tourist requires. For the past few days Julie’s been cooking up a storm and I’ve taken advantage of a newly thawed landscape to start digging ditch. The last few summers have been arid enough that our irrigation has suffered, and yesterday I dug ditch through 36 feet of tangled roots and gravel. It took three hours—slower travel than I was used to—but when I walked back to the house for dinner, mud-covered and hungry, I knew I had done something unequivocally solid, substantive, and somehow able to reinforce the delicate fabric of reality at its tearaway points.