Monday, February 6th, 2012
Ah. My day is done, and it looks like there will be no internet tonight. This is a good thing. Keeps me offline more than needs be, and lets me focus on what I want to get done. In particular, writing this. There is always banjo to be played, some exercises to do, and breath to observe. Being online certainly detracts from all of those things. While a valuable tool, it can be abused and be made into a master instead of a servant. That said, on to today's adventure.
Getting out on the road from Boise went well enough. Traffic was light and the weather fair. The only crimp in the day was having a mirror out of whack. Somebody bumped it last night with their mirror pulling into a parking place. This isn't the first time this happened, but at least the guy didn't go back and forth ripping the mirror off it's anchors. The odd thing about this event (despite how it was easily remedied by a properly set pair of vice grips) was how strange it made me feel. I felt a sense of foreboding for the better part of the morning, like something was wrong. I certainly needed to adjust the mirror a few times, some of them whilst driving down the road (love those motorized mirrors). Maybe on some deeper level it was a symbol of changing how I look at myself, or how my perspective (literally) was askew.
Then I stopped for a shower and the feeling passed. Showers are wonderful inventions. The Flying J I stopped at was in LaGrande, which I have no idea why it is called such. Not much grand about it (or grande for that matter). It seems like a quiet little town in eastern Oregon, with not too much going for it. The people were friendly and polite. I'd go back.
Continuing westward, we come to a place called Deadman's Pass. I wish I was making this up, but I guess even clichés need to be true some of the time, right? To my delight there were no dead men (or women) present in the area. The area itself reminded me of Flagstaff. Fairly high altitude coniferous forest, the only snow covered ground I'd seen in a while now. It just felt like you were on the roof of the world. Certainly nothing like the Himalayas, but still very cool.
Looking south of the interstate, one would catch glimpses of fantastic, distant views. Towards the end of the pass, the land opens up a little, and you can see canyons in the distance. Even better, the canyons today were filled with fog, probably because of some temperature inversion or something. It looked as if you could drive off the edge of the cliff and into the clouds. Speaking of which, further west one has to drive down Cabbage Hill.
I don't know why it is called that. There's no town named cabbage nearby. My guess is that they grow lots of cabbage on the plains below. Coming to the high point, where the road bends north and down, one normally has a spectacular view of the plains below. No such luck today. it was much cooler in fact. The clouds were at such a perfect and uniform height, it looked as if you were driving to the shore of a placid lake. The only comparable experience is when you're flying (in a plane, not in your dreams) and you just break above the cloud layer. Fluffy undulations obscured by mist blowing silently up the hillside. Driving through the mist was an amazing and surprisingly uplifting experience.
It has been said that border lands, like sea-shores, and foggy regions like this, are the gateways to the ethereal plane. Maybe it is. It certainly seemed other worldly out there today. Freezing fog decorated standing plants in the valley below, white outlines in an otherwise drab tan landscape. How lucky am I to get to live all of this? Darn lucky, I'd say. Now to combine this with being home at night and we're set.
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