The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  As everyone knows, it rains almost constantly in the Pacific Northwest, so the previous day I’d scaled Fred’s roof and caulked the leaky roof-rack bolts with silicone. I was confident my repairs wouldn’t do the trick, but it seemed the attempt should be made. Later, we restocked Ethel’s pantry with … fruits and vegetables! As the memory of seeing me feverish and nauseous faded, Leslie’s zeal to reform my diet had reestablished itself. Orchards and farms lay in green bands between the river and the bare, brown ridges near the campground. Wandering past these pesticide-free, organic Edens, we saw women garbed like eastern European peasants in long dresses, kerchiefs, and head scarves perched on ladders, picking ripe peaches. I reckoned they belonged to some sort of religious sect. Or maybe they really were eastern European peasants who favored traditional costumes. Stopping off at roadside stands, we bought peach and apricot preserves, strawberries, onions, zucchini, and various other artery-friendly foods

  * * *

  It’s a safe bet that there aren’t any romantics among the civil engineers and heavy equipment operators at the Washington Department of Transportation. The song of the open road is not their song. This is as it should be. You wouldn’t want an inspector to overlook a critical crack in a bridge because he’s writing lyrics in his head or daydreaming about stardom on American Idol. We cannot, and should not, look to them to create a name for State Route 14, an exhilarating name to give it the distinction it deserves. Sometimes a highway’s numerical designation communicates the allure of the vagabond life, lends itself to rhapsody—Highway 101 or Route 66, for example. But there is no magic whatsoever in the anemic “14”; it does not beckon, it says nothing, promises nothing of the grandeur the traveler will see driving the road in its eighty-five-mile passage through the Cascades and the Columbia River Gorge. The river was below us and on our left, of such breadth that it looked like an elongated lake, frilled with white caps in a brisk west wind. Fishing boats and sailboats drew greenish wakes across the blue water, and a few windsurfers cracked over the waves. Across the river, wooded ridges climbed toward Mount Hood, as white and sharp as a shark’s tooth.

  Two lanes defined the road; there were many bends and small towns. Towing the trailer, Fred had a top speed of forty miles an hour. Even so, we would be out of the gorge by midday. We did not want to be out of it, not yet, so a mere hour or so after leaving Maryhill State Park, we pitched into an isolated campground three miles up a side road in the heart of the Cascade Range.

  There, my skills in backing up Ethel, considerably improved, were put to a severe test. After hauling her up a gravel road not much wider than she was, I had to back her uphill into a tight little space. Leslie got out and directed me … A little left … okay … no, more left … right now … too much … You’re jackknifing! I broke out in sweats of frustration. Straight now … Straighten out! It was looking pretty grim till I was rescued by another Airstreamer, a Californian named Hal, who stood beside the driver’s side window, instructing me on each nuanced turn of the wheel. In no time at all, the trailer slipped into her slot as neatly as my laptop’s power cable into its port. Months later, my sister-in-law gave me a book for a Christmas present. It was titled How to Back Up a Trailer … And 101 Other Things Every REAL GUY Should Know. Hal was a real guy. Me? Not so much.

  Drinks with Real Guy Hal and his wife, Joey, brought on another bout of Airstream envy. Their model was bigger than Ethel and had a full-size refrigerator, a full-size shower, and a full-size bed. Leslie looked with longing at the shower. She hadn’t used Ethel’s, not once. It bothered her to bathe in a broom-closet enclosure containing a toilet, not to mention that Ethel’s small water tank compelled thirty-second shipboard showers in no-hookup campsites, and that the drain clogged often. She chose campground bathrooms, and those had their drawbacks.

  Excerpts from her blog, July 12:

  This morning I attempt to shower at the Maryhill state park campground, which actually charges for the privilege … 50 cents for 3 whole minutes … I trek to one bathhouse where there’s ONE shower whose occupant has clearly put in five dollars’ worth of quarters … Then trek to another bathhouse, where the regular shower stall has nowhere at all to put clothes … The handicapped stall has a little spot for clothes, and I take it … But wait. The coin machine is jammed. So I leave clothes and stuff, hop over to the other stall and occupy both for 3 minutes.

  * * *

  We saw Beacon Rock the next morning. Clark sighted it on October 31, 1805: “A remarkable high detached rock Stands in a bottom on the Stard. Side near the lower point of this Island on the Stard. Side about 800 feet high and 400 paces around.”1 (“Stard” was Lewis’s abbreviation for “starboard.”)

  Seagulls began to appear, heralds of land to sailors and, to overland travelers, of the sea. It was near Beacon Rock that Clark observed rises and falls in the Columbia, which he correctly ascribed to tides. It was the expedition’s first encounter with tidewater. He recorded it matter-of factly. There was more emotion eight days later, when the Corps of Discovery camped at Pillar Rock. He wrote in the notebook he kept to record courses and bearings, “Ocian in view! O! the joy,” and then in his journal, “Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Ocian which we have been so anxious to See.”

  Actually, Clark and the men had mistaken the lower Columbia estuary for the “ocian”; they had another twenty miles to go before reaching their goal. It took them a lot longer than it did us. Half an hour past Pillar Rock, we entered Astoria, a working seaport and the oldest continuously inhabited city west of the Mississippi, founded in 1811 as a trading post by John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. (Santa Fe is older [1609], but its habitation was interrupted for about twenty years, its Spanish settlers driven out by a revolt of the Pueblo Indians.)

  Astoria’s maritime atmosphere was welcome, all the more so because it was authentic, as opposed to the contrived nautical ambience of tourist towns, where there is always at least one tavern called the Ye Olde Something-or-Other and shop is spelled shoppe. We crossed a bridge and hooked southward on U.S. 101, found that a state park campground was full, and fetched up back in “K” land—a Kampground of America trailer park. Predictably, it rained, off and on, for the whole two days and nights we were there. Just as predictably, my repairs to the roof rack proved only partially effective, so whenever there was a letup, I dragged the dog bed outside in attempts to dry it off, and toweled Sage and Sky, their matted fur a reproach.

  On a wet, chilly, windy morning, we paid a visit to Lewis and Clark National Historic Park, where a replica of Fort Clatsop stood under sitkas more than two hundred feet high. An announcement came over the PA system that two spaces were open on a kayak tour that was leaving immediately. We answered the call, piled into a van with other adventurers, and drove to the launch point, a mile away on the Lewis and Clark River. A bald eagle perched in a tree. Two rangers led us in a few loosening-up exercises, then we eased ourselves into two-man kayaks and proceeded downstream, stopping frequently to listen to ranger Shawna’s lectures on the Lewis and Clark expedition and local ecology. We learned how to tell the difference between sedges, reeds, and grasses. “Sedges have edges,” she instructed. “Reeds are round, and grasses are hollow.” Also how to distinguish a fir tree from a spruce: the tips of spruce branches point upward. I tried to think of ways to put this knowledge to use in my future life. Shawna was fascinated by Lewis and Clark’s encounters with grizzly bears and told a few hair-raising tales, like the one about Lewis being charged by a bear after he shot a buffalo. With no time to reload his flintlock, Lewis ran into a stream, turned to face the charge, and braced his pike in the stream bottom, hoping the grizzly would impale itself before it swatted his head off his shoulders. Apparently impressed by this demonstration of resolve, the bear spun on its heels and fled.

  At the end of our voyage, two hours later, it began to rain in earnest, and we retreated into Fort Clatsop, which Leslie insisted on calling Fort Ketchup. There, by cand
lelight in long cabins, the two captains caught up on their journals and classified their discoveries, more than three hundred species of plants and animals previously unknown to science. The Lewis’s woodpecker, the Clark’s nutcracker.

  We put up our hoods and sloshed our way to a musket demonstration put on by a six-foot-five-inch guy wearing a ponytail and buckskins. In the twenty-first century, he was an eighth-grade teacher. He pointed out that this was a very Lewis and Clark kind of day. It rained all but twelve of the 106 days the expedition was camped at Fort Clatsop. The sun shone for only six.

  A few years ago, a friend of mine taught me how to load and fire a flintlock rifle, a complicated business requiring a good deal of practice and, if you’re being charged by a grizzly, an impervious nervous system. That the giant teacher kept his powder dry in such weather was itself a marvel. He shoved a ramrod down the barrel to make sure it was empty, poured in a dram of powder from his flask, rammed in a paper wad in place of bullet, cocked the hammer with its piece of flint, put a few more grains of powder into the pan, and pulled the trigger. The spark from the flint ignited the powder in the pan (whence “flash in the pan”), the flame shot through the touchhole in the barrel, and the gun went off with a most satisfying bang and puff of smoke.

  I then learned that my own eighth-grade teacher (Sister Joan Clare, the reader may recall) had taught me an incorrect pronunciation of Sacagawea. It wasn’t Sacka-jah-WEE-ya but Sah-KA-ga-waya. This was more knowledge I hoped to put to future use, perhaps at a cocktail party when conversation flagged.

  Next morning, we crossed the Columbia’s mouth back into Washington and stopped off at Cape Disappointment, the westernmost point reached by the Corps of Discovery. Clark marked his arrival by carving the inscription WM. CLARK. BY LAND. NOV. 19, 1805 into a pine tree. It had taken him and Lewis eighteen months and five days to get to the western ocean.

  It took us fifty-six days. After I retrieved the plastic bottle I’d filled in Key West, we hiked a mile through forests swathed in fog and mist, and at last the ocean was in view. Across a hundred yards of sand, iron-gray breakers curled and crashed, making one incessant roar. As we picked our way through jumbles of driftwood, a beachcomber pointed out a baby seal, its white fur barely visible in the rocks of a jetty. To make sure Sage and Sky did not molest it, Leslie led them well away, then released them to gambol in the surf. I waded into the sheet of a receding wave, dipped the bottle, and shook it, mingling the Pacific waters with the waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

  I’d finished reading Bernard DeVoto’s edited version of the explorers’ Journals. From Lewis’s grave on the Natchez Trace to the continent’s western shores, I’d traveled with him and Clark, sharing vicariously in their hardships, their disappointments, their triumphs, their astonishment at a West whose breadth and beauty exceeded anything they could have imagined. In the places that had changed little since their day—the Missouri headwaters, the Bitterroots—they’d seemed almost living presences. I felt that I’d come to know them. I was going to miss them.

  It was time to head north for the Canadian border.

  * * *

  SIGNS AND WONDERS

  Some signs …

  Outside Tok, Alaska: IGNORE THIS SIGN.

  A bumper sticker in Maryhill, Washington: I’M OUT OF ESTROGEN AND I HAVE A GUN.

  Another sign in Tok: WELCOME TO ALASKA. THE LAST FOREIGN COUNTRY FRIENDLY TO AMERICA.

  Seen in Cannonville, Utah, printed on the back of an Italian tourist’s T-shirt: IL MONDO È UN LIBRO, E CHE NO VIAGGIA NE LEGGE SOLO UNA PAGINA. (The world is a book. And who does not travel reads not even one page.)

  A bumper sticker in Friday Harbor, Washington: DON’T BELIEVE WHAT YOU THINK.

  Two billboards somewhere on U.S. Route 2: ADULT SUPERSTORE. DVDS. TOYS. LINGERIE. Ten yards from the entrance: JESUS IS WATCHING.

  A bumper sticker in Tuscaloosa, Alabama: CAUTION. DRIVER UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

  And a couple of wonders …

  Salem Sue, the World’s Largest Holstein Cow, stands on something even more unusual in North Dakota: a hill. Sue, made of reinforced fiberglass, was born in 1974 at a cost of forty thousand dollars. She is thirty-eight feet high, fifty feet long, and weighs six tons. The legend: In 1883, an early settler of New Salem, North Dakota, was plowing his field when two Sioux stopped by to see what he was up to. The older Sioux looked at a chunk of broken sod, dirt side on top, and turned it over so the grass side was on top. “Wrong side up,” the younger Indian explained to the bewildered farmer. After thinking about it, the farmer realized that the prairie was better for grazing than plowing, and that was the beginning of New Salem’s dairy industry.

  The World’s Largest Ball of Twine, Cawker City, Kansas. You have to make your own fun out on the central Great Plains. Back in 1953, Frank Stoeber, like many farmers, was a string saver—literally. He rolled spare pieces of sisal twine into a ball in his barn. But as time passed, instead of reusing the twine, Frank kept on rolling until, in 1961, he had wrapped 1.6 million feet into a sphere eleven feet in diameter. He turned it over to the town. Cawker City, to retain its title as holder of the World’s Largest Ball of Twine (there are rivals), has continued the tradition with an annual Twine-A-Thon, in which anyone can wrap more scrap twine onto the ball. Spools and wrapping apparatus are provided. String and yarn are prohibited. Today, the ball occupies an honored place under a brick and steel gazebo. Forty feet in circumference, with a recorded length of 7.8 million feet of sisal twine, it weighs nine tons.

  * * *

  PART FOUR

  Northern Lights

  At the Arctic Ocean.

  30.

  The Pacific Northwest is to coffee what Kentucky and Tennessee are to bourbon. Every town and hamlet has at least one espresso shack; some have two or three on a block, serving up lattes, macchiato, or straight stuff brewed from every bean grown on Earth. Why? Did people need stimulants to stay awake, or just to cheer up under the perpetual gunmetal skies?

  “Let’s ask,” Leslie said when, near Cape Disappointment, we stopped for lunch at a concession stand advertising wood-fired pizza and a brand of coffee called Stumptown.

  It was run by a fiftyish white guy, Jim, and his much younger Vietnamese wife, Chee. Jim, who’d been a financial adviser in a previous incarnation, had met Chee, slender as a wand, her straight black hair falling to her waist, in Saigon a few years earlier, when he was vacationing in Vietnam. (Though I’d made two trips to Vietnam since the end of the war, it was still hard for me to imagine an American going there for fun.) She was preparing to enter a convent when Jim convinced her that marrying him was her true vocation.

  They were proud of their pizza, made from a fine-grained imported flour, Ultimo Caputo (he asked if I was related; I wasn’t), and with fresh tomatoes, herbs, and spices. They baked their own bread, a kind of focaccia, for their sandwiches. Leslie ordered a Mediterranean, with chicken, sun-dried tomatoes, olives, and other delicacies that were way too healthful. I opted for the meatball sub and asked for a cup of the Stumptown coffee. Way better than Starbucks, Jim boasted, and I took a sip and gave him an A for truth in advertising.

  “A couple of young guys started it in Portland. Bought beans from all over, and don’t overroast them like Starbucks. It’s shipped to me overnight every day, and then we run it through a French press.”

  But why was coffee such a big deal in the Northwest?

  Jim shrugged. “Starbucks got started in Seattle, that’s all I know,” he said. “There’s been a backlash against the chains, back to small-scale coffee shops.”

  And because there are just so many things you can do with a cup of coffee, some espresso stands had resorted to gimmicks to get a leg up on the competition. “They got pretty edgy, bikini espresso, the baristas wear skimpy bikinis. A few of ’em got so edgy they were shut down.” He didn’t elaborate, leaving me to picture topless baristas, nude baristas, pole-dancing baristas in spike heels.

  *
* *

  By late afternoon we were in Tacoma and looking for a campground with a vacancy, which was proving difficult. An all-day, all-night indie rock concert was being held in a Tacoma suburb and had drawn thousands. Finally, the map revealed a state park called Dash Point. It looked promising because it was hard to get to.

  So hard that it confused the usually infallible Magic Droid. Her directions gave me whiplash. “In one hundred yards, turn right,” she said in her Sister Joan Clare voice. “In half a mile, turn left on…” And more turns; Christ, she sounded like a drill sergeant with all her left-right-lefts. Then, in the heart of the Tacoma port district, I missed one, which required me to make a U-turn. In the best of circumstances, that’s a tricky maneuver when towing a trailer, and these were not the best of circumstances, the street walled on one side with warehouses and no intersections on the other. A tiny hot-pink shack appeared in the middle of a cramped parking lot, hemmed in by buildings and in back by a tall fence. A picture of a scantily clad woman with enhanced breasts beckoned from a sign. DRIVE-THRU ESPRESSO. BIKINI BARISTAS. One of those edgy places. It was closed, which proved fortunate. I pulled in, intending to drive around the shack until I saw that the space between it and the fence was barely wide enough to accommodate a Mini Cooper. A glance in the sideview mirror showed me that Ethel had already hit a hanging plant, which Leslie unhooked and set on the ground. If I went a foot farther, Ethel’s skin would be pierced by a low-hanging eave, and then she would topple the bikini baristas’ place of employment.

  Leslie waded into traffic on the main road, put up her hands, and imitated a traffic cop. I began to sweat from terror that I’d botch it and create a traffic jam of irate motorists flipping middle fingers and threatening bodily harm. Desperation is the mother of competence; I backed the trailer into the street without a kink, Leslie replaced the hanging plant, and we headed for the missed intersection.