Blue Highways: Somewhere on Muir and Salt Creeks, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

This post is a fun one, mostly about banana slugs!  Slimy, ugly and utterly fascinating, these creatures are.  I grew up with them.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) comes face to face with one, and then lets it get away from him.  Somewhere in his van crawls a banana slug, making sleep difficult.  Who wants to wake up with a slug on their face?  I don't!

I made some guesses for this post, picking spots on Muir Creek and on Salt Creek to represent where LHM might have stopped.  To see these two places, navigate to the map!

Book Quote(s)

"Oregon 230 followed a broad mountain stream called Muir Creek. When the morning warmed, I stopped along the banks to fill a basin and wash....

"Big yellow-hooded blossoms of the Western skunk cabbage spread over the margins....Looking nothing like cabbage, the leaves were used by Indians to wrap food for cooking; they pulverized the hot peppery roots into a flour that helped save them (and the Lewis and Clark expedition) from starvation in the early spring before other edible plants sprouted."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 2

"I crossed the Cascades on Oregon 58....

"At noon, the journey began a kind of sea change that started when I drove up an old logging road into the recesses of Salt Creek....

"After a sandwich, I poked about the woods and turned up a piece of crawling yellow jelly nearly the length of my hand. It was a banana slug, so named because the mollusk looks like a wet, squirming banana. I wanted to photograph it, but a drizzle came on, so I bedded it down in damp leaf litter in a pail. I could drive out of the rain to take its picture."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 2

Salt Creek, below the Falls. Image by "miatasailor" at Flickr. Click on image to go to host page.

Somewhere on Muir and Salt Creeks, Oregon

Why so many quotes today?  These passages of LHM's make me a little homesick.  I've written in many posts that I am from the north coast of California, and the climate, animal and plant life of that area is very similar to what you find in Oregon.  The forests are made up of tall trees - in my home area the trees are predominantly redwood and fir, and in this part of Oregon you have pretty much the same type of coniferous forest, minus the redwoods.  At all times of year, especially in valley's and gulches near streams, the land is wet and lush.  Coniferous forests often create their own weather by holding and trapping the moisture that they need to survive underneath the forest canopy.  In winter, regardless of whether it is raining or not, one can often walk beneath the boughs of the trees and get bombarded by water condensing and rolling off the needly leaves in heavy drops.

I love those types of forests.  In the winter, the lushness and dampness brings to one's nose a heavy smell of vegetation.  The forest loam, made up of fallen needles that have accumulated over years, provides a soft, spongy ground to walk upon.  Rivers, swollen by the rains, run high and rapid, looking very different than the dark green, brownish streams that are their summer guises.  Sometimes, large fish negotiate the rapids, occasionally leaping out of the water - these are salmon returning to their birthplaces to spawn at the end of one of the most fascinating circular journeys of our world.  Born upstream, if they survive various dangers after they hatch they swim downriver to the ocean.  There they become saltwater fish for the majority of their lives, anywhere from one to five years.  At some point, they heed the call to reproduce and find their way back to the stream that they left so long before.  They swim against the stream, negotiating all kinds of obstacles and dangers both natural and man-made.  If they make it to their spawning ground, then depending on their gender they lay eggs or release sperm to fertilize the eggs.  And then, after a glorious moment of reproduction, they die.

This type of environment is like where I grew up, and I still get a thrill walking through the chill of a dripping coniferous forest, the smell of the rotting vegetation, the smell of newly fallen or cut wood from these areas, and the smell of the clean, and I mean really clean, air.  My pants might get wet from walking through living and large vegetation such as the skunk cabbage LHM mentions.  A walk in such areas is usually followed by warming my backside against the heat of a warm indoor fire.  There's nothing like it.

A face to face view with a banana slug. Photo at The Murky Fringe blog. Click on photo to go to host page.In this world lives one of the most fascinating creatures.  I used to run across them as a boy.  LHM is entranced enough by one to revert to a boy himself and put it in a pail to take with him.  I'm writing about the banana slug.  On wet days, it was not uncommon to find one, slowly sliming its way across the leaves, leaving a trail of sticky goo behind it.  These creatures are related to snails, and have the same type of movements, sans shell.  Their antennae slowly move back and forth, with what appear to be little eyes on them.  They look like a banana.  If I touched one or picked it up, it was always slimy.

A pair of bananas. Image at the Magickcanoe blog. Click on photo to go to host page.

If a banana slug fears, it should fear little boys.  Little boys are the bane of pretty much every slow-moving and slow-witted creature.  For banana slugs in particular, every type of torture could be devised.  Slice them, dice them.  Put firecrackers under them or around them.  Throw them at other kids.  Put salt on them and watch them horribly shrivel up and die.  I partook in some of these activities, usually because of peer pressure.  Secretly, I was delighted by banana slugs.  They were just so, harmless.  They seemed like manatees or cows of the mollusk world.  They did their own thing, not really caring about anything else, paying attention only to their own world.

The UC Santa Cruz mascot, Sammy the Banana Slug! Image at World's Best Information. Click on photo to go to host page.

I was very happy when I learned some years ago that the University of California at Santa Cruz had taken the banana slug as its unofficial mascot.  The students chose the name as a statement against the hyper-competitiveness of college athletics, since UC-Santa Cruz didn't have organized athletics at the time, but when the university decided to join the NCAA Division III in five sports, the chancellor wanted to give the teams a more dignified name.  However, the Sea Lions didn't catch on, and in 1986 the university bowed to student pressure and officially changed its name to the banana slugs.  The lowly banana slug went from a regional nobody that little boys tortured to the rarified heights of university mascot, symbolized by Sammy the Slug!

Back to LHM, who put the slug in a pail and put it in Ghost Dancing in order to drive out the rain and photograph it.  What happened?  He forgot about it, then later found the pail empty.  Somewhere in his truck, a banana slug was marauding around and haunting his dreams that night.  Maybe he was right to fear...after all, a banana slug has no known predators (except little boys)!

Musical Interlude

You don't know how hard it is, sometimes, to come up with a decent tune for the musical interlude, especially when you are writing about banana slugs or skunk cabbage.  However, I found a band from Northern California called the Banana Slug String Band, whose musicians write and play educational songs for kids about the environment.  A few that were really cool weren't available, but here's one about redwood trees called Big Red.  Since I came from the redwood region, I enjoy looking at the trees.

If you want to know more about Muir and Salt Creeks

Muir Creek Falls
Muir Creek Trail
Wikipedia: Salt Creek Falls
World of Waterfalls: Salt Creek Falls

Next up: Corvallis, Oregon

Blue Highways: Crater Lake, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

I'm going back to a theme of volcanoes in this post.  When you read it, you'll understand how it fits in with William Leat Heat-Moon's journey of redemption, rebirth and self-discovery.  Now that we've traveled alongside him past three volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, I'll have to visit them.  View the map to locate the almost perfectly circular Crater Lake.

Book Quote

"Mount Mazama may be the greatest nonexistent fourteen-thousand foot volcano in the country.  Actually it isn't entirely nonexistent: only the top half is.  From the upper end of the Klamath basin, you can still see a massive, symmetrically sloping uplift of the mountain base.  Some six thousand years ago, geologists conjecture, the top of Mazama blew off in a series of ruinous eruptions and the sides collapsed into the interior.

"...I got out and looked around.  A brilliant night.  Trusting more than seeing, I walked through a tunnel in a snowdrift to the craterous rim of Mazama.  There, far below in the moonlight and edged with ice, lay a two-thousand-foot-deep lake.  Klamath braves used to test their courage by climbing down the treacherous scree inside the caldera; if they survived, they bathed in the cold water of the volcano and renewed themselves.  Also to this nearly perfect circle of water came medicine men looking for secrets of the Grandfathers.  Once a holy place, now Crater Lake is only a famous Oregon tourist attraction."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 2

Was this what William Least Heat-Moon saw from the rim of Crater Lake? Photo at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.

Crater Lake, Oregon

This post is back to volcanoes, but specifically, about the legends and symbolism that surround volcanoes.  You'll notice in the quote above that LHM writes about Crater Lake as a perfect circle of water, and that it drew both young Klamath men eager to test and renew themselves, and medicine men looking for secrets.  The symbolism of Crater Lake fits well into LHM's own journey, which he previously has described as circles within circles.  He is on a journey of his own renewal, so standing on the rim of the crater is very much in touch with two of the main themes of Blue Highways.

There is also the symbolism of Crater Lake's geological history.  Crater Lake is the collapsed caldera of what used to be Mount Mazama.  About seven thousand years ago, the volcano collapsed in a violent eruption that was fifty times more powerful than the explosion that obliterated the top of Mount Saint Helens in the 1980s.  Some of the accounts I've read have claimed that the ash material from such an explosion could have buried Rhode Island under 61 feet of ash, and if spread over the entire state of Oregon, would have covered it with nine inches of ash.  Volcanoes are always reshaping themselves.  The volcanoes of Hawaii do it in a slow ejection of lava which flows down the side of the volcano and builds it up during frequent eruptions and in slow motion.  However, the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest such as Lassen, Shasta, and the now extinct Mount Mazama, do it explosively, building up pressure as a magma dome pushes toward the surface and finally explodes outward.  Sometimes, these volcanoes are the seeds of their own destruction.  In New Mexico, where I live, the sides of a volcano in the Jemez Mountains collapsed in on itself numerous times over a million years ago, creating the 12 mile wide Valles Caldera.  2 million, 1 million and 640,000 years ago, the Yellowstone Caldera formed during three supereruptions, and is 34 miles by 45 miles wide.   Similarly, the explosion of Mount Mazama created a caldera 6 miles wide when the sides of the volcano collapsed inward and upon itself.  The caldera eventually filled with water and became Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States at almost 2,000 feet deep.

Why is this symbolic?  I believe that everyone goes through cycles of build-up and destruction, which leads to renewal.  You might have found that themes I'm focusing on, in tandem with LHM, are those like growth and renewal.  Every cycle of growth, it seems, is preceded by some degree of destruction.  Old patterns or outdated views and thoughts need to be discarded or dismantled as the growth process works.  After all, one cannot move toward a future by desperately clinging to the past.  Volcanoes are the ultimate in this type of renewal.  No matter what, they reshape themselves by either covering over their past selves with new material, or by obliterating it.

The first humans in the area of Mount Mazama, not understanding the violent geological forces at work around and beneath them, put their own symbolic explanation upon the catastrophic events that created Crater Lake.  In their explanation, handed down through their legends, the destruction of Mount Mazama was due to a cataclysmic battle between Llao, the Lord of the Below-World and Skell, the Lord of the Above-World. Llao, on one of his frequent forays to the Above-World, saw the daughter of a Klamath chieftain and fell in love with her.  However, being from the Below-World, he was not very attractive and, well, the Below-World was not where the chieftain's daughter had planned to make her home, so she rejected him.  Angry, Llao tried to her people by fire.  They called to Skell for help.

The legend seems to indicate that at this time, both Shasta and Mazama were in eruption, because it describes a titanic battle between Llao, at the summit of Mazama and Skell, at the summit of Shasta.  Huge boulders, red-hot, were thrown by each at the other.  The earth was full of tumult - landslides, eruptions, and other phenomena raged as all the spirits of sky, water and earth joined on one side or the other.  The Klamath people, afraid of what this battle would mean for the world, sent two medicine men to the Mazama volcano and they jumped into the roiling crater hoping that their sacrifice would calm the gods.  This urged Skell on.  In a final push, he overthrew Llao and threw him into the pit of Mazama and back into the Below-World.  He then filled in the hole and covered it with water to seal Llao in for eternity.

I really love how actual geologic events transform into these types of stories by ancestral peoples who are struggling to make sense of cataclysm and catastrophe.  Besides just two gods duking it out over a woman, one can read into this myth the overcoming of dark forces by light, the redemption of a people, or a war between halves of the human whole.  And all of this runs along a chain of common human themes right up into the present day, and therefore fits with LHM's journey and his attempts to renew himself after a time of personal catastrophe.

Off in California and Oregon, two mountains still stand.  One stands high, tall, and silent and perhaps will erupt to life again in a time of upheaval and chaos.  The other stands broken, a shadow of itself, an almost perfect circle of water and a popular tourist attraction as the myths of its origins fade.  They tell a story of a dynamic and sometimes violently evolving world, but they could easily be the stories of ourselves.

Musical Interlude

In keeping with the volcano theme, this song, Cities in Dust by the 1980s band Siouxsie and the Banshees, is about the destruction of the Italian city of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79.  Volcanoes are fascinating both in their striking appearances and in their striking destructiveness.

If you want to know more about Crater Lake

Crater Lake Facts
Crater Lake National Park
Cultural History of Crater Lake
The Disappearance of Mount Mazama (from 1901)
US Geological Survey: Mount Mazama and Crater Lake
Volcano Legends
Wikipedia: Crater Lake
Wikipedia: Mount Mazama

Next up: Muir Creek and Salt Creek, Oregon

Blue Highways: Fort Klamath, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

On this day of remembrance for the heroes and martyrs of September 11, 2001 I do a reflection on where the United States has gone since that tragic day and where it might go.  The opinions expressed are mine only.  William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) quote is used only as a path to my own reflections.  I do not discuss much about Fort Klamath, but offer some links below for your information.  Feel free to leave a comment whether you agree or disagree with me, but regardless, let's honor the innocent victims of a horrible act of terrorism.  Here's a map to locate Fort Klamath.

Book Quote

"I don't know whether Oregonians generally honk horns or whether they had it in for me, but surely they honked. Later, someone said it was part of the 'Keep Moving, Stranger' campaign. I turned off into the valley at the first opportunity, an opportunity numbered route 62 that ran to Fort Klamath....

"....I stopped at a wooden cafe....In front sat an Argosy landcruiser with an Airstream trailer attached; on top...was a motorboat and on the front and back matched mopeds....I stood amazed at this achievement of transport called a vacation.

"A man with a napkin tucked to his belt came out of the cafe. A plump woman...watched from the cafe.

"'What's up, chum?' the man said.

"We went inside, and I heard the woman whisper, 'His type make me nervous.'

"....I got reviled by people who could afford life at six-miles-per-gallon....After all, they read the papers, they watched TV, and they knew America was a dangerous place."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 1

Historical photo of Fort Klamath. Photo at Legends of America. Click on photo to go to site.

Fort Klamath, Oregon

The quote today is a long one, and I had to do some manipulating so that it wouldn't be too long.  The reason I chose to have such an extensive quote has something to do with the importance of this day, September 11, to many of us.

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I was getting ready to head from my home on Grand Route St. John in New Orleans to the University of New Orleans to teach my class.  I was a graduate student, and as I ate and listened to National Public Radio, I heard the announcer say that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers.  Curious, I turned on the television, thinking that I would see that a small plane, such as a Cessna, had flown into the side of the building.  The flames and smoke from the tower immediately told me that something much bigger had hit the building.  Like everyone else, I watched in rapt fascination as yet another plane hit the second tower, and when I tore myself away and went to school, I heard in the car that yet another plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.  At that point, the announcers were reporting that the United States was under attack through acts of terrorism.  At school, I fielded a call from a young woman who was terrified and did not want to come into class because she was afraid that terrorists might get her.  I excused her from class, and told her not to worry because terrorists usually attack large crowds or very well-known symbols.  Somehow, I knew that day that everything would change.

I was heartened when the world, in the aftermath of the attacks, turned out in force to support the United States.  My heart swelled when I read that so many peoples from so many other countries were expressing solidarity with the U.S. and, in the headline of the French paper Le Monde, "We Are All Americans."  Perhaps, I thought, the United States will use this opportunity to forge new bonds of friendship, cooperate with other nations, and work together with them toward a common, peaceful and prosperous future that we all seek.

But, it was not to be.  The people of the United States turned inward in fear of other terrors out there, and outwardly, the U.S. took a belligerent stance, striking out wherever it smelled the whiff of terrorism.  First it was Afghanistan.  I watched the cheers of a crowd at a prison rodeo in Louisiana when it was announced that the first cruise missiles had launched into Afghanistan.  Then, it was Iraq.  Our leaders seemed to have a lineup of countries that they planned to invade in preemptive moves to bring democracy.  Studying political science, I knew that tearing down nations and rebuilding them was hard work and could be impossible under certain conditions.  I was saddened to see the U.S. reputation suffer, and all the goodwill from most other nations dry up and blow away.

I have also watched as the U.S. has become a nation that seems to be increasingly looking without and within for enemies.  A column by Cal Thomas that I read in my local paper on September 9th, 2011 exemplifies this fear.  Thomas writes that Americans must observe 9/11 because it is a constant reminder of the countries and entities out there that "hate us," and that are "plotting to attack us again...and again." In the ten years since the terrorist attacks, American citizens are subject to new rules and regulations designed to keep them safe, but which have increased the powers and latitude of our country's law enforcement and military forces.  The U.S., in conducting its war against terror, has appeared to compromise some of the very ideals of democracy itself by profiling based on race and religion, capturing and renditioning suspects, using enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, and denying prisoners accused of terrorism basic rights under national and international law.

Why does all of this come to my mind with the above quote?  Feelings of being hated and persecuted are woven into the deepest and earliest fabric of this nation.  The original settlers arrived in North America with very recent memories of political and religious persecution in the Old World.  Even though the South was persecuting a significant portion of it population through slavery, the South always made the argument that it was the persecuted party.  Today, a white majority facing the possibility that it will not be a majority within a decade or two, now claims that it is persecuted by illegal immigrants taking jobs and racial minorities getting taking advantage of social welfare policies.  Businesses claim that they are persecuted by onerous government regulations.  What is overlooked is that often, those claiming the loudest about persecution have been persecutors themselves.

The 20th century international environment cemented in U.S. opinion that there were others out to get us.   Some of the threats were real, some were overblown.  If it wasn't the Hun in World War I, it was the Nazis and Japanese in World War II.  It was the Soviets and Chinese in the Cold War.  The enemies recently have been the Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, Cubans and especially fundamentalist, Islamic Arabs today.  Supposedly, all of these entities are spending a lot of time and brainpower trying to bring down the United States.

All of this has coincided with a concern that within society, American are not safe.  Children are at risk from pedophiles, women endangered by rapists, ordinary folk by thugs, gangs, or psychotic mass murderers.  At the expense of social programs, enforcement has been stepped up and government has turned over the building and running of prisons to corporations to meet a perceived need to house all the criminals in our midst.  The most popular solution seems to be the notion that everyone needs to arm themselves so that they can shoot back if fired upon.  It's the same idea that drove the violent society of the Old West, with a civilized veneer.  If the United States could be encapsulated in one person, it seems to me that this person would be lonely and afraid, holed up in a house, gun pointing out a slightly opened window and ready to fire at anything suspicious but not quite sure that the house he is in is really all that safe.

Yet we seem to partake in actions that do nothing to increase our safety even if it makes us feel better for a little while.  We look with suspicion on those who are different, and distrust their motives even though we know little about them.  We have marked certain groups and people, in general, as being potentially dangerous and treat them as such.  Thus, every Muslim is a potential terrorist, and anyone who questions this generality is treated by some as at best naive and at worst a traitor.

LHM's quote, above, reminds us that we cannot, as a country founded on ideals of freedoms and rights, succumb to such falsehoods.  After all, LHM was a long-haired guy in a van that invited suspicion and contempt from an older couple, yet he wrote a piece of literature that is beloved by many today.  We invite nothing but polarization in society if we suspect everyone, and as Lincoln very wisely reminded us, "a house divided against itself cannot stand."

E.J. Dionne, also on September 9th, wrote a column that stands in stark contrast to Cal Thomas.  Dionne wrote that we should remember the heroes and martyrs of 9/11 on the 10th anniversary of their sacrifices, but that then we should, as a nation, move on.  He felt that it is dangerous to build a nation's policies around an horrific event in the past at the expense of the pressing problems that it faces in the present or looking toward the future.  He writes that our nation has never been in danger of falling to entities that wish to put a pan-Islamist fundamentalist empire in place.  Instead, we are more in danger from the mistake of not remembering what made the United States great in the first place.

I agree.  9/11 should unite us.  After all, the victims of 9/11 were a cross-section of American ethnicities, religions (including Muslims), political beliefs, and classes.  The terrorists of 9/11 did not warn Muslims to get out of the World Trade Center.  They didn't care.  We were attacked as a unified, diverse and free nation.  If all we learned from 9/11 is to be suspicious of everyone and everything and to always strike before we are struck, then we keep our world dangerous place for ourselves far into the future.  Instead, we should, as good democracies do, learn from our experience and take hard and sober looks at our actions.  We should honor the heroes and martyrs of 9/11 by being wise in our collective decisions and by continuing to uphold our democratic ideals of freedom, rights and justice.  Let's not be the old couple in LHM's quote, convinced completely that the world is a dangerous place, and that others must always be suspected and feared.

Musical Interlude

I was always taken by this version of The Star Spangled Banner, performed by Bruce Hornsby and Branford Marsalis.  Just let it wash over you on this day of remembrance.

If you want to know more about Fort Klamath

Fort Klamath Museum
Oregon Trail
Wikipedia: Fort Klamath
Wikipedia: Fort Klamath (unincorporated)

Next up: Crater Lake, Oregon

Blue Highways: Klamath Falls, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

We cross out of California and into another state, our eighteenth if you're keeping track.  I revisit an old theme about state of mind, particularly the state of being alone.  Go to the map to see where we are, and enjoy some alone time reading this post!

Book Quote

"...then crossed into Oregon, where the Cascades to the west blocked a froth of storm clouds; but for the mountains, I would have been in rain again. A town of only fifteen thousand somehow spread across the entire bottom of a long valley; when I saw the reach of Klamath Falls, I kept going."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 1

Downtown Klamath Falls, Oregon. Photo at the Rowing and Sculling website. Click on photo to go to site.

Klamath Falls, Oregon

There is something very poignant when LHM sees the lights of a small city in Oregon and decides to keep going.  In the long, lonely drive across America that he has completed so far, where he has spent time mostly with himself in Ghost Dancing, I can imagine being a little shy of people.  After all, being alone is not a bad thing.  Alone time, especially for certain people (and I count myself one of them) is a way to recharge one's mental and emotional batteries.  For introverts, just being around a lot of people and activity is work.  It takes emotional energy that can be draining.  Those with the extraversion trait seem to get their energy around other people, and find being alone difficult.

I'm not sure what LHM is like in real life.  Perhaps he is an extravert, and therefore given the circumstance of losing his job and losing his romantic partner, he is in a time where he is simply more inclined to be by himself.  Or perhaps he is an introvert, and this is his way of recharging and healing.

As an introvert, I have been thinking about these types of questions.  I am married to an extravert.  My wife enjoys people and putting herself into the thick society and all its events.  For many, many years I thought that my duty as a husband was to go along, even when I didn't feel like it.  As a result, I found myself getting more unhappy and irritable.  We began to fight more at events as she mingled and I, tired and not happy about being there, seethed in the corner.  It became assumed that I would go to every event and happening, and I bought into the assumptions.

I also snatched at any time alone.  Hiking, driving long distances, even my year-long stint as a visiting professor in Lubbock where I lived alone during the week and then commuted back to my wife in Albuquerque on weekends, were like little oases of sanity to me.  I found myself happier after getting some time to be alone, to be with myself.

Being alone isn't all wonderful.  I must say that I have a very love-hate relationship with being alone.  One thing about being alone is that eventually it makes you reflect on your life, and makes you confront your own inner demons.  I have a few of them, some due to family circumstances in my youth I couldn't control, some due to my own choices and mostly from a negative self-image.  As an introvert, this was difficult because it forced me, even though I had fears of being alone, into social situations that in high doses was difficult for me to maintain. In other words, I had to go to events and activities to stay away from self-loathing thoughts, yet doing too many of those was not the answer for me.

Thankfully, I'm getting past this.  A commitment to a new form of therapy, somatic transformation therapy, has helped.  I am also making a commitment to say what I want and need, especially my need to take time for myself.  This includes allowing myself to be alone.  The demons?  They're still around but save for a couple that pop up regularly, their voices are getting more muted and I can ignore them better than before.  In fact, doing these little essays around Blue Highways has been part of that process.

I want to make a distinction between being alone and being lonely.  Being alone is a choice that one can make.  LHM chooses to remove himself from his circle in Missouri to travel alone around the country.  People can choose remove themselves for a while from the society of people.  However, loneliness is not a choice, it is a feeling.  One can be lonely even in the midst a crowd.  I've felt loneliness as well, and it's never a good feeling.  Loneliness is a lack of connection with others, and not necessarily by conscious choice.  While we all feel lonely sometimes, a persistent and chronic feeling of loneliness can lead to self-destructive thoughts and behaviors.  I'm never happy when I'm feeling lonely, whereas it is possible for me to be happy when alone.

I worry, however, about our ability to get away and be alone.  I think that one can become too engaged.  We may be social animals, but we also need time to ourselves, just like we need to sleep and dream.  Being by ourselves allows us to reflect upon our lives and what's important, and make the adjustments in our attitudes that we need to navigate a life that often throws us surprises.  In a world with a growing population, where more people are moving to cities and people are becoming more and more engaged socially via computers and communication, can we ever truly be alone again?  I walk around with my smart phone, which is always connected to the internet, and I am always within beck and call of someone.  It's becoming harder and harder to disconnect, and harder to find places where one can be truly alone for any length of time.  As more people seek ways to get away, national and state parks and campgrounds are becoming utilized by growing numbers of people.  Even going for a long drive to get away is getting more difficult, as our roads become more and more crowded.  Places that 20 to 30 years ago hardly had any cars now suffer traffic jams.

It's only going to get worse with population growth and as people crowd together in cities by choice or by necessity.  Hopefully, it won't result in a dysfunctional and dystopian society (though some may argue that we are at that point already).  I would like to think that as we become more crowded together, people might actually begin to appreciate their time in solitude.  I hope that such appreciation becomes a means of valuing society, not turning away from it.  Personally, when I flee the lights, I want my flight to be temporary, so that I can come back to society putting a greater value on myself and on others.

Musical Interlude

This song, from the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods, is ultimately about being alone, loneliness, and the companions we sometimes don't realize we have.  The song often brings a tear to my eye when I hear it, and this is an especially poignant version sung by the incomparable Bernadette Peters.

If you want to know more about Klamath Falls

City of Klamath Falls
Discover Klamath
Klamath Falls Herald and News (newspaper)
Oregon.com: Klamath Falls
Wikipedia: Klamath Falls
Zimbio.com: Klamath Falls (blog)

Next up:  Fort Klamath, Oregon

Blue Highways: Tulelake, California

Unfolding the Map

We stop for groceries in Tulelake, California with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM).  That leads me to expound on how I hate shopping. I actually write about that.  It's kind of pathetic, but I also write about tule fog and Japanese internment camps.  It's about all you can do when all LHM does is stop for groceries.  Try the map to see where this last stop in California is located.  Oh, and don't forget to turn on the Led Zeppelin while you read!

Book Quote

"I never found Lookout. In dry and dusty Tulelake, I bought groceries..."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 1

Tulelake Public Library. Photo at the website of the Siskiyou County Library. Click on photo to go to site.

Tulelake, California

I hate shopping - it really doesn't matter what kind.  There are degrees to my shopping hate, however.  Grocery shopping is probably lower on my list of shopping hates than others.  At the top - clothes shopping.  I do it rarely.  If I have to shop for clothes, I make sure I know exactly what I want.  I walk into the mall/department store, go right to a rack that looks like it has something close to what I want, and pick something out.  If I have to try it on, I just want to make sure it fits.  Then, I choose between the two or three items that I have, discard the rest, pay, and get out.  It might me a half hour at most.

I can't go into a store or mall, like many people do, and spend an entire afternoon or day there.  I can't allow myself to try on dozens of items, even stuff that I know I won't get, because it looks interesting or good.  I may go an entire year without shopping for clothes, or longer.  If my mom or wife gets me something that I can make work, I'll wear it until it has worn out.

Grocery shopping is a little different.  At least with groceries, I usually have a list, and I can check the items off the list one by one and see a physical manifestation of my internal misery or boredom counting down.  At least, with grocery shopping, I can see an endpoint to the process.  What constantly rankles me in grocery shopping is when I'm at a store where I'm unfamiliar with where the items are located, or when the store rearranges its offerings.  That adds time.  I actually take time on my first two or three trips through the store to mentally catalog where items are located so that when I come back, I can cut my time at the store down.  I also work out the best routes through the store so that I minimize having to go back to look for something.  I'd rather not grocery shop, but when I must I can live with it.

I've never understood how people can spend so much time in stores and like it!  For me, being in a store is akin to being in a dental office.  I'd just rather be somewhere else, no matter how nice the people helping me are being, no matter how much my comfort is being attended to.

Shopping aside, you may wonder what the name Tulelake actually means.  LHM provides no clue because, probably like I might feel, he simply gets his groceries and gets out of town.  Somehow he missed Lookout, California even though he drove right past it, but there has been a lot on his mind.

The name Tulelake comes from "tule" (pronounced "too-lee") which is a derivative of the Spanish "tulare," and it means a type of grass that grows in the water along the shoreline of a body of water such as a pond or a lake.  California's Tulare County was named after this particular grass, and in fact, Tulare Lake in Central California near Fresno was once the largest freshwater lake in the United States west of the Great Lakes.  I say "was" because a century of irrigation and diverting river flow dried up the lake, which occasionally comes back during periods of high rains and or a lot of runoff out of the Sierras.

I always heard of what they called "tule fog," which is considered a real road hazard down near Fresno.  This thick fog blankets the Central Valley and has been known to cause multiple car pileups on I-5.  In a way, though, I have always missed the fog that I grew up with.  The fog I am familiar with was not the tule fog but rather ocean fog that would settle in over my town often in the early evenings.  Sometimes that fog was so thick you could barely see 100 feet.  I've heard that tule fog is like that, very thick.  Fog has always given me a strange, if cold, sense of comfort.  I've felt enveloped in a protective cocoon when I'm in fog.  I don't get much fog where I live now, in Albuquerque.

One other thing about Tulelake that LHM missed.  It was the site of a POW camp during World War II for Italian and German prisoners of war, and it was the location of a controversial "relocation" camp for Japanese internees.  It was extremely notorious because it was used specifically to segregate Japanese internees who refused to swear loyalty to the United States or who had aroused the suspicions of the US government.  These internees were later sent to other permanent camps in Wyoming and Utah.  Most of the internees were threatened with deportation, but a civil rights attorney who took their cases managed to regain most internees' citizenships.  Notable people interned in the Tulelake War Relocation Center were Pat Morita of Happy Days and Karate Kid fame, and George Takei of Star Trek fame along with other notable artists, musicians, politicians, and athletes.

The forced internment of thousands of American citizens on the basis of their ethnicity and race is unfortunately not new nor isolated.  Every time we are in conflict, we face similar circumstances, whether we are referring to slavery, concentration camps at Andersonville in the Civil War, to mistreatment of prisoners in every conflict up through the so-called War on Terror.  I wish that American values had stopped slavery from happening long before it was abolished, that immigrants over the course of our history were treated better and as potential contributors, not detriments, to the United States, and that we didn't take the easy way out of profiling certain groups within our country as automatic enemies during times of conflict.  I often wish the US lived up to its own lofty ideals.  But, in previous posts, I also wrote that mistakes and flaws, and the realization of them, make people better and stronger and willing to correct them.  I want to believe that the US collectively has learned from past mistakes and used them to become a better nation.  I hope I will continue to be proved right as the US moves through its historical highs and lows.

I don't think that there is a way to tie grocery shopping, tule fog and Japanese internment together in a neat little, inspirational or deep package.  So I won't, and just leave these scattered bits of recollection and reflection as they are.

Musical Interlude

I've been looking for a good place to play this song, and since this is the last Blue Highways post about California, I'll put it here.  Whenever I hear this song, I get a wistfulness about my home state.  It has problems, big problems, and my hometown seems more dangerous with a couple of high profile murders recently.  But it's where I grew up.  When one is young, one dreams a lot...and this song captures my dreamy wisftfulness.  Besides, I like songs in minor keys.  So enjoy Led Zeppelin's live version of Going to California.

If you want to know more about Tulelake

Lava Beds National Monument
Tule-Lake.com
Tulelake Chamber of Commerce
Tule Lake Committee
Wikipedia: Tulelake

Next up:  Klamath Falls, Oregon