(written October 2nd and 7th)
I was happy to see, when I woke up this morning, Mount Hood still towering above the valley between us, unobstructed by clouds.
Yay!!! 😊
We ate breakfast, and Mom walked up and down the road to make progress on her daily step goal, while I stretched in an attempt to ease my spinal symptoms.
I’m still in really bad shape after my efforts exacerbate my symptoms prior to my MRI.
I really hope that I can get those symptoms to ease up.
If you are curious, breakfast is usually just cold cereal. We have a little bin full of unboxed bags of various kinds of cold cereal That during the night provides some mattress support for me, but is food storage at the same time.
Then we’ve got our massive cooler full of food, including oat milk for Mom, and soy milk for me.
After getting ourselves packed up, we headed down the mountain, passing places we had been yesterday on our way out of the park.
As we were approaching the Columbia River, there was a sign for a viewpoint, so we decided to pull out and make our way. It took a little while to finally figure out where to go because the signs disappeared, but Google was able to identify the location, so I could just follow the streets to get there.
It was a nice little viewpoint, giving a pretty decent panorama of the Mount Hood area and the hills and orchards and what not in our immediate surroundings.
From there, we decided to go on the North side of the Columbia River, something that I personally had never done before. In the past I’ve gone west on the south side of the river, but never the north.
We love waterfalls and beautiful scenery, so I looked for waterfalls that might be on our way. The South side has gazillions and gazillions of waterfalls, and the north side has only a handful in comparison, but neither of Us were really wanting to drive through Portland, and taking the Northside route allowed us both a new experience and to avoid driving through Portland.
I feel uncomfortable in cities. 😅 Driving through generally isn’t a problem, but if I have a beautiful alternative, I will just about always choose that alternative.
So we paid the toll and crossed the river and started our way west. I realized that most of the waterfalls that I could find were further away or required significant hikes to get to, so there were only maybe three that were reasonably accessible for our time frame.
The first one we stopped off at turned out to be a little bit of a bust. I didn’t realize that the hike to the waterfall was a hike down, down, down a steep trail something like 700 ft of elevation drop that would then have to be gone back up.
We went down probably the first 100 ft of elevation drop maybe before I realized it was more than I wanted to do and more than I wanted mom to try and do, for sure.
So we went back, scrambling up a fairly steep, near rock slide.
Fortunately, the waterfall that I thought was most beautiful and most wanted to share with Mom, Panther Creek Falls, was one that was easily accessible once having driven there.
So we left the main road and wound our way up into the hills, past a little town, and onto a dirt road that we followed for a good little ways. Google took us past the sign for the falls and up around the next bend into a grove of very very large evergreen trees–not the right place, but beautiful in its own right.
We hadn’t eaten yet, so even though it turned out to not be the right place, we went ahead and took our lunch break.
I spent some time stretching again, trying to relieve my spine issues, specifically trying to find a place to hang from for a little bit. Brief duration hanging seems to help, even if just a little bit. Longer duration hanging actually exacerbates the symptoms I think because It keeps my spine too straight for too long.
After grabbing food, we headed down to the the pullout near where the sign for the waterfall was. There was one other little family there walking back as we were headed down, leaving us with the place to ourselves.
There were two different trails that provided two different viewpoints–one from up top that was the shorter trail, and then a longer went down below.
We decided to take both.
The view from the Upper Falls was beautiful, and also sobering, as there was a little memorial for a college-aged woman who had died, apparently having slipped on the rocks and fallen to her death I’m guessing.
Though it’s sad that someone died there, I appreciate the additional reverence and solemnity that I feel in those experiences. The sense of awe and wonder and excitement over the beauty of the scene. The sense of adventure and the desire to explore. The recognition that exploration… doesn’t always turn out so well. The empathy for the pain and sorrow experienced by those left mourning.
As we arrived at the lower viewpoint after the little hike that wound us down a safer place to arrive at the bottom, I also had on my mind the difference between what I feel to be a consumer and an experiencer of a place.
With the fences up keeping us corralled to a particular viewpoint of the Falls, I feel like a consumer, just simply taking in a prescribed, albeit beautiful, scene.
Arriving at Falls where I can explore, walk all around it, get wet, climb in the Falls climb behind the Falls, etc, I feel part of it. I feel like I experience it.
I don’t know If my perspective is successfully communicated.
My favorite places, even if they are not quite as awe-inspiring in objective Beauty, perhaps, are those places that are free of evidence of human interaction.
I certainly marvel at the beauty of the former places, but I feel like a passenger on a tour.
I want to experience where I am.
I think that’s one of the reasons why when I like to travel to other countries, though I love to see the beautiful scenery and the historical places, I love even more to get to know the local people, to see who they are and what life is like for them.
So I loved panther Creek Falls for its beauty, and I respected the signs that said not to leave the path or the viewing area, but I didn’t feel like I truly got to experience the falls.
I wonder if that might be why I struggle in art museums? Maybe it would be more meaningful for me if I could talk to the artist or read what the artwork meant to them, why they did it, why they did it the way that they did, etc.
Only once have I attempted to create a piece of art outside of school work, at least that I can recall, and it was a labor of love. The quality was pretty terrible, but it represented a massive amount of effort over a very long time.
Anyway, After winding back down the hills, past the town, and back to the Columbia River, we again headed west. We stopped off a couple of times for the bathroom for me. For whatever reason, my body has decided to be completely off of its normal schedule. That usually happens on road trips. I think it’s the effect of sitting on a seat for so long. I think the bowels just sort of compact what’s in there.
So there have been many attempts on the trip so far to use a bathroom without any success, hoping that I could make my body go because I don’t want to have to stop later, but those efforts have been largely unsuccessful.
Anyway, we stopped off at the grocery outlet that was relatively nearby my sister’s place, but again, Business approach had changed drastically. There were a few things that were cheaper than Walmart, our normal go-to grocery shopping location, but the vast majority were more expensive.
Last year, unless I’m misremembering, the grocery outlets that we went to were basically warehouses where just about everything was much much cheaper, at times stupid cheap.
This time, the stores are significantly refreshed or brand new, and, to me, they feel basically like higher end grocery stores, like maybe Harmons in Utah.
We did find the One kind of cold cereal that I really liked from the first Grocery outlet that we went to. It was still on sale for stupid cheap, $2, versus Walmart’s $9 for the same box.
I don’t think we bought anything else, though, because the prices were so high for what we were used to.
So we headed over to the nearby Walmart… by way of Portland.
😒
My fault all the way, as I didn’t realize that when I plugged the Walmart search into Google maps, it hadn’t crossed my mind to pay attention to make sure that the one that it pulled up was the one that was closest. I didn’t realize we were going the wrong way I think until I saw a sign for Portland, where maybe we were crossing the Columbia… something.
Needless to say, I… wasn’t happy (large understatement).
Physically, emotionally, mentally, I was spent.
So little resilience in the tank. 😞
Gratefully, I was able to get off at the first exit and get right back on the freeway heading back North. And gratefully, though it felt like there might be super bad traffic, there wasn’t. After waiting our turn to get back on the freeway, the lanes opened up, and we were able to head over to the Walmart.
We did the bulk of our shopping at the Walmart there, including trying to find a decent root beer for my brother Richard who is also coming up for a get together at my sister’s place, and who loves the more designer root beers.
But there weren’t any designer brands where they normally are in the store, and I checked the store inventory, and they didn’t have any at all, so we were stymied at Walmart.
Personally, I was on my last ounce of energy, And Mom graciously offered to be the one to run everything through the checkout, so I could go back to the van and try and recuperate at least a little bit.
Zero root beer also meant heading over to the next most reasonable place, QFC, so we headed back again South, just north of the river, where Mom went in and found some root beer, not Richard’s favorite, but at least better than nothing. At that point, we were just grateful to find some root beer.
It was dark by that time, and I was just shot and needed a bit of a boost, so we decided to do dinner at Wendy’s back in Camas.
Their drink machine is perhaps my single most favorite option of any fast food place or restaurant anywhere. 🙃
I love to experiment with the flavors, and it’s a nice pick-me-up to be able to have an all-you-can drink experimentation session. 🙃
From that little pick me up, And now that we had purchased everything that we needed, we headed on over to tish’s, with me getting lost on the way somehow. I think it was because I was distracted a little bit by the work I was doing online 😅, and took a wrong turn, and then from there, I think Google routed me in some crazy way that didn’t make any sense, but I didn’t realize until we were what I felt was way out in the middle of nowhere.
But apparently, we weren’t anywhere near where I thought we were–I thinking that we were way far east of where my sister lived when we were actually south. But eventually, we got there. 🙃
The night after arriving is a bit of a blur. We spent a good, long time chatting, catching up. So many things have happened over the last year, and I’ve been terrible at being a present brother/uncle/brother in law…. I think just so focused on my own pains and struggles, and so focused on trying to help on Haven Hill when I’m able to emerge from my own darkness that I don’t do much thinking outside my own little local world.
Anyway, it was good to be there, catching up, reconnecting. I wish I were better about staying in touch, so it wasn’t an annual reconnection “catch me up” experience.
I used to be so much better at staying connected. 😕
I wish my blood family weren’t spread out so far around the country–seven kids, 5 states…
Anyway, good way to end the day after some pretty rough patches. Good to be there. Good to catch up, good to hear the fun things going on for them and the challenges as well, including multiple “big news” items.
Despite having felt spent, I stayed up talking until pretty late before heading out to Rover for the night.
Lift the World.
~ stephen
Lift the World 