From the Caldera Into the Fire We awake this morning in our rustic cabin on Diamond Lake. The sun rise is behind us and we enjoyed the pleasure and grandeur of the sunset over the mountain ridge last night from a pontoon boat that I cajoled our group into renting. I was asked if I knew how to pilot a boat and I said, “sure!” The truth is, I did go for two summers to…
Columbia Gorgeous The Columbia River Gorge is designated as a Federal National Scenic Area (in1986) and is the largest such tract in the United States at 80 miles long and a average of about 12 miles wide. By my math, that suggests about 800 square miles, which makes the area as big as the state of Rhode Island. Besides all the beautiful scenery and massive water flow that drains the Cascade Mountain range and the…
Into the Breach Today we are trekking Eastward from Astoria, Oregon at the mouth of the Columbia River, towards the famous Columbia River Gorge. That will take us directly past Portland, the scene of the greatest crime against American democracy the country has ever known. Just being close to Portland gets my blood boiling. We will start the day with a visit to Fort Clatsop in the midst of the Lewis and Clark National Park.…
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream When Shakespeare has Hamlet ponder this thought, it is a follow-on to the famous “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Shakespeare is as heralded a poet as he is because he does, indeed, ponder the imponderable thoughts we all have on any given day. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea…
Wooden Eye Wood is on the rise again. It seems to go in and out of favor like the bathroom porcelain color palette. There are times when wood is all about it for design purposes and other times when wood gets ripped out as grandmotherly. When I was a kid, knotty pine wood paneling was very comforting. I remember staying at some friends’ house and feeling very much at ease in the wood-paneled study with…
Rushin’ Around the Russian River A few years ago, Kim and I joined our friends Gary and Oswaldo on the perfunctory Alaska Cruise for a week. We went up to the Glaciers that make for the scattering of islands where Sitka and Ketchikan are located. One of the things all Alaska Cruise tourists see is the influence of Russia on the 50th state. The Russian Tsars pushed eastward across the North Pacific as early as…
Rosebud When I was a kid, watching all the great sitcoms of my youth, I remember watching an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show (which ran from 1961 – 1968) when Rob and Laura Petrie were trying to explain to his son, Richie, why his middle name was Rosebud. It was a November, 1962 episode written by our old friend, Carl Reiner and it wound up that Rosebud was an anagram of an origin…
Road Trip! What is it about some people that they have wanderlust? I think it must go back to the Hunter/Gatherer psyche that arrayed early man. Some people settled and were happiest when they were putting down roots that bound them to a place on the earth as though to not do so would leave them free to spin off the planet into the ozone. Other people would sooner spin out into space than be…
Get Away Day In this year of broken plays, where whatever we were all planning to do, we have had to cancel, postpone or modify, Kim and I proposed to our dear friends Frank and Lydia a celebratory road trip to the Columbia Gorge. We proposed it for the second half of summer, feeling that by that time we would have this nasty Coronavirus thing, whatever it turned out to be, well under control as…
Amazon on My Mind It is said that when Jeff Bezos was taking his now-famous cross-country trip to move to Seattle, he wrote the business plan for his new business idea. That idea was to build the world’s biggest bookstore using this new concept that was gaining traction in 1994, the Worldwide Web. The internet and its packetization of information across large and remote data networks had been building in the defense and academic worlds…