The Think Tank

Last weekend Mom, myself, Joel and Maure set out for what we intended to be a biking weekend in Eastern Oregon.  Our original plan had been to visit Crater Lake, but due the abnormally cool and wet spring, a large portion of the Rim Drive was inaccessible under a late snowfall.  In fact, the forecast the weekend was for lows in the 20’s and snow Saturday night, which did not sound like good biking weather to us.

We made up a new plan pretty much on the spot Friday morning, deciding on the John Day Fossil Beds because they were supposed to be beautiful, there was ample camping available, and the weather was supposed to be warm with only a slim chance of rain on Saturday night.  Maybe even an isolated thunder storm, which is always cool and might make for some neat photos.

In the event, we definitely got the thunderstorms but that was about all that went according to plan.

It started raining around Biggs as we passed through a vast windmill farm, and it poured pretty much the rest of the way.  The sky was black and ominous, and the “isolated thunder storms” covered about a hundred miles of land, and kept us entertained for several hours while we were driving and setting up camp.

Fortunately we arrived at camp between rain showers, so we got everything setup before it started raining in earnest.  Fearing that the rains would intensify overnight, and knowing that our big tent does not fair well in heavy rains, we rigged a cover using a Tarp of Prehistoric Dimensions and an impressive array of bungie cords, tent stakes, ratcheting straps and string to produce a covering befitting only the Nobelist of ghetto dwellings.

Satisfied that this would keep things dry and safe, we commenced dinner preparations: which is to say we commenced drinking, and bullshitting, and drinking, and arguing about politics.  And drinking.

Did I mention drinking?

Before we knew it, it was 4AM and somehow or other a 5th of Crown Royal, a half rack of beer and some quantity of a vile substance called Apple Jack had vanished from our campsite.  Nevertheless we didn’t feel we were done drinking yet, and since the Apple Jack was not fit for human consumption, I set out in search of some more hooch.   I scrounged around in the back of the van and found an errant bottle of wine which had gone on sabbatical  under the back bench during our camping excursion the previous week.

I proudly brought my prize to the table and handed it off to Maure so she could open it with her Swiss army knife.  Maure carefully twisted the corkscrew into the top of the bottle and pulled it free again, leaving only a small hole in the top of the bottle.  “Something is wrong with this cork,” she announced sadly.

“Let me see it,” Joel said, and took both the bottle and the knife/corkscrew from her.  He then carefully twisted the corkscrew back into the same hole and mightily jerked it free again, leaving the bare corkscrew glinting in the flickering candlelight.

“It’s stripped”, he announced in surprise.

Accepting that this was a likely scenario but certain that I could prize out the stubborn cork, I demanded my own try.  “You fools,” I said to them.  “You didn’t cut the foil off!”  Because everyone knows that a thin foil or plastic covering will best a determined corker every time.

I bravely opened up the blade and ran it around the bottle slightly below the lip, a bit surprised at the stiffness of the foil, but undeterred nonetheless.  After completing the arc, I proudly gripped the top of the metal wrapper and pulled it off… only to find that it had not come off at all.  The foil was still firmly attached to the top of the bottle.

“That’s odd,” I mumbled.

Maure and Joel had lost interest and gone back to talking amongst themselves, but I was determined to get into that damned bottle.  I found the lower edge of the metal wrapping and wiggled the blade under and tried to tear it, but it was stubborn and refused to let loose.  Finally I managed to cut a small flap and tried to tug it free, but it would not go.  Clearly what this situation needed was just a little more muscle, so I set at it again, slowly and carefully cutting and prying the stubborn foil away until I had peeled it loose about half way around the bottle.  Now I had some serious leverage.  Using the neck of the bottle as a pivot, I jammed the tip of the knife under the flap of metal and gave a mighty downward push on the handle.  The wonder of physics and levers did their dance, and the damn thing finally popped off… and apparently ripped the cork out along with it!  I was thrilled at my apparent genius and reveled in it for a short time.  I couldn’t believe I had wasted all that time through out the years fiddling about with corkscrews when all you needed to do was carve up the foil wrapper and drag it out in one smooth motion.

I looked up at Joel and found him staring perplexedly at the bottle, clearly working through a similar thought process as I had been, and that is when I began to realize that it was unlikely that the cork had flown free of the bottle when I removed the wrapper.  There had to be another explanation.

And then it dawned on me.

The bottle never had a cork.

“This is a twist cap bottle,” I said, and we all immediately broke out into hysterics that made our stomach muscles ache with exertion.  I’m not even sure how long we laughed, but it was long and loud and I’m certain that our fellow campers heard it.

Several minutes later we retrieved the mutilated cap and the guffawing started all over again.

Sore from laughing, we were finally convinced that we had probably better call it a night.  Maure retired to bed while Joel and I finished up the last of the drinks we had already poured, which only took about ten minutes, then it was off to bed for us too.

Sadly, when I arrived in the tent, I found that the whole back quarter was collapsed: the pole that should have been convex, forming one wall of the dome in our “dome tent”, was in fact concave, curving inward from the corner and arching up to the peak.  Fortunately it was being supported by Maure, who was sleeping on top of her bag and in her clothes.

I vaguely remembered Sue and Maure mentioning something about the tent seeming “smaller than usual” and suggesting that something might have been wrong, but that description had not inspired me to come and investigate earlier.  I was also dimly aware that in order for Maure to go to sleep as she had and take up her role as foundation for the sagging tent pole, she would have had to crawl under it without bothering to attempt fixing it, or trying to further rouse my interest in fixing it.  I was further aware, dimly of course, that Sue had been in the tent for several hours and had apparently been undisturbed by the peculiar new floor plan as well.

I, on the other hand, was very concerned.  It seemed to me that if 1/4 of your support structure was hanging upside down, there was a high likelihood that the tent was going to fall down before morning.  I voiced my opinion aloud, which convinced Mom to get out of bed and help, and roused Joel’s curiosity from within the safety and warmth of his own tent.  Maure was completely unimpressed by our predicament and continued to sleep, wedged under the collapsed tent pole.

Joel asked if I needed help, and I said that I wasn’t really sure what was wrong yet, but he started snoring before I had even finished my answer, so I figured the offer had been mostly ceremonial.

I started investigating what had happened, showing an impressive amount of mental and physical prowess given my condition, and I quickly discovered that the tent pole had slipped out of the metal coupler at the apex of the arch.  I tried to put it back in from inside the tent, which for some reason did not work, so then I decided to try swearing at it instead.  I reeled off a couple of whoppers and then tossed in another one through clenched teeth, just to make sure it understood my level of frustration.

The tent was unmoved by this show of machismo and responded by sagging further – though to be fair it probably had more to do with its foundation suddenly realizing that things were amiss and leaping to her feet demanding to know, bleary-eyed, just what the hell was going on here.

I quickly explained that the tent was falling down and decided that I was going to have to fix this situation from outside, a conclusion that upon hindsight probably should have been made sooner.  Seeing that I had been working over my head and that Mom was still supporting the tent, Maure decided to pitch in and raised her arms as well… but a peculiar thing happened.  The higher she raised her arms, the more her knees buckled.  Very slowly, wearing an increasingly worried expression, she continued to raise her arms and succeeded only in sinking lower to the ground until eventually she was on her knees.

“I… I don’t seem to be able to stand up,” she said, sounding awestricken and confused.

“Try lowering your arms,” Mom suggested.

But her advice only seemed to confound Maure further.  Realizing that impaired as I was, I was our only hope of salvation, I ventured out into the night to see what I could see about this tent pole business, leaving Mom to hold things up and Maure to ponder the complexities of coordinating her extremities.  I feared my task was going to be complicated by the affore mentioned Tarp of Prehistoric Dimensions, but surprisingly this was not the case.  I was quickly able to see that the pole had not slipped out of its coupler, as I had originally thought, but the fiberglass pole had snapped off at the base of coupler instead.  Thinking that I could push the broken piece out of the coupler and and slip the rest of the pole back into the coupler, and realizing that my own motorskills were not operating at peak efficiency, I dispatched Mom to find a tool for the job.

Mom, who had  not been drinking as the rest of had, clearly was feeling left out of the Physically Impaired Club so instead wasting the time it takes to pick up her feet as she exited the tent she tried to saunter out the door in such a way as to the convice to the tent that her feet were nothing more than simple air particles which could flit gleefully straight through the lip of fabric underneath its open door with nary a rustle of fabric.

The tent was in no mood for such foolishness, however, and maintained its own molecular integrity with grim determination, leaving Mom no alternative but to stumble out of the tent and break her big toe.

Maure was still in the tent on her knees and Mom was now sitting on the 5 gallon bucket/toilet that we always pack around with us on camping trips, trying to convince her big toe that it wasn’t really broken and could give up on all this pain business, Joel was busy setting a marching tune with a particularly heartrfelt round of snoring, which left me holding the tent up.  Since the sagging tent was still above Maure’s head and I assumed she was still suffering her odd affliction, I asked if she could go get me some kind of tool which I could use to remove the broken piece of tent pole from the coupler.  She agreed amiably but instead of standing she set out on all fours, which I took to be a bad sign so I called her off and just let the tent deal with itself.

It took me two tries to hit my target, which was the 10 foot by 20 foot area where we had erected easy-ups over two picnic tables to form our kitchen/dry eating area, and once I had successfully located that elusive bit of land I had to grope about in the dark until I eventually hit paydirt in the form of a three foot, two pronged weenie roaster that I thought I might do the trick.  With my prize in hand I staggered through the dark back to our tent – a treacherous expanse of at least 12 feet – to find that Maure was now outside on her knees instead of inside on her knees and Sue had moved inside and was sitting on her bed.

The weenie roaster proved to be ineffectual for reasons that I could not fathom at the time, but upon more sober reflection I realized it was because the broken bit of tent pole was glued into the coupler.  In the moment though, I was starting to get testy and I decided that real tools were needed, so I left the tent again and trudged across another dark and treacherous ten feet of open land to where the van was parked, and got two pairs of locking pliers.  I used one set of pliers on the coupler and the other set on the ragged end of the broken pole, and I pulled with all the might of a highly irritated drunkard, and after eight or nine tries, I managed to clear the coupler.

After that, putting everything back together was a breeze, and the tent regained its normal posture.  Maure crawled back into the tent on all fours, Mom took some pills for her toe, Joel gave a mighty snort of congratulation, and I finally got to go to sleep.

We awoke the next morning around 9AM and slowly set about breakfast preparations.  Joel and I were supposed to go bike riding, but not surprisingly, neither of us felt much like getting on our bikes right away.  Soon enough it started to rain again, so we decided to put the bikes on the van and do some sight seeing, and if the weather improved we’d have the bikes with us.

Our first stop was supposed to be the Clarno Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds, but as we were passing through the small town of Fossil, Oregon we came across the Pine Creek Schoolhouse as well as a museum for the town, so we decided to stop and check it out.  The schoolhouse was built in 1889 and they had teaching certificates on display for its teachers dating as far back as 1901.  It served as an active school until at least the 1940’s before being moved from its original location in rural Wheeler County to Fossil in the 1980’s, where it became an interpretive center and historic attraction.

I really loved the wild Oregon roses along the one side.

After that we proceeded to the Clarno Unit and the fossils that it holds.  It took a surprisingly long time to get get there, but when we finally did arrive, it was well worth the trip.  The first thing we came to were the Palisades, tall pinnacles high up on the cliffs which had been formed by massive mudflows (called lahars) following a series of volcanic eruptions 40-50 million years ago.  This same thick, sticky mud is what created the fossilized impressions of leaves, vines, branches, nuts and all matter of other prehistoric vegetation, as well as capturing a few unfortunate animals and preserving their skeletons for all time.

The first part of the trail out of the parking lot is pretty boring, but after about 1/4 mile you get to the really interesting parts where you can see the fossils, mostly of leaves and branches or trunks which were caught up in the lahars and frozen for all time.    The two pictures here show one of the better leaf impressions as well as a 9 inch tree trunk.

After that our destination was the Painted Hills Unit.  I had seen pictures of this beautiful treasure, but I had never been there myself, and this was the primary reason I had wanted to come down here.  We walked back to the car in the leading edges of yet another rain storm, then made the approximately 90 minute trek west to the Painted Hills.

The incredible, layered colors of these hills are a result of the millions of years of river and mud flows, eroding parts of the John Day formations and leaving vast amounts of a clay-like substance which is apparently used today in cat litter.  This extremely moisture-absorbent material captures nearly every drop of water that falls on it, continually expanding and subtly changing the shape of hills, along with the hue and intensity of the colors.  According to the locals, you can visit the Hills many times over and each trip will reveal something subtly different than the last.  The clay is so absorbent, in fact, that virtually no plants are able to grow on it, because all of the water is locked away in the hills, leaving nothing for struggling roots to feed on.

As it turns out, the rain which I had been cursing all along turned out to offer two very positive experiences at the Painted Hills:  The colors in the thoroughly soaked Hills were particularly vibrant, and when just a little bit of sun peaked out through a hole in the clouds, a beautiful rainbow appeared.  It was fleeting however, only lasting a couple of minutes before the dark and foreboding sky closed in again.  Fortunately, I was actually in the right place to capture the rare moment, for a change.

Just before sunset we trooped about a mile down the road to Painted Cove, a smaller area consisting of miniature versions of the Painted Hills that you can walk through – so long as you stay on the elevated pathway.  The clay of the hills is very soft and is easily eroded and destroyed by even the slightest trampling.

After that, at my insistence, we went back up the hill and stopped along the access road so I could get a few sunset pictures.  They weren’t quite as dramatic as some that I had seen, again due to the mostly-cloudy skies, but I think the panorama turned out pretty well nonetheless.

Now that the sun was down and the picture-taking was basically done, the clouds quickly dissipated and left us under a beautiful but very cold Eastern Oregon sky.  We got back to our camp late and ate dinner quickly.  We’d already consumed most all of our booze, so we did not repeat our misadventures from the previous night and hit the sack pretty early, comparatively speaking.  The next morning it started raining again just in time to pack up, so everything went away wet, which sucks.

On the way home we stopped in the small ghost town of Shaniko, Oregon. For about 20 years in the early 1900’s, Shaniko was the country’s largest exporter or wool – if not the world’s largest.  But when the wool industry went south, the town of Shaniko more or less died.

In more recent times Shaniko revitalized itself by becoming a darling little ghost town with a great old hotel, a neat museum, a smattering of old buildings from the last century, an RV park, and car museum with a collection of antique cars and sleighs – including a 1918 fire engine, a horsedrawn stage coach, a horsedrawn shepards wagon and a collection of cars from the 30’s and 40’s.  The town was tiny to be sure, but it was cute and had character and had carved out a little tourism niche for itself.  All that changed a few years ago when some developer came to town and bought up a bunch of the buildings and surrounding properties, telling the local people that he intended to keep things going much as they had been.  But then after the sales went through, he announced his intentions to tear down several of the properties and build new homes and condos in their stead.  He even went  so far as to demolish two wool silos which were on the Historic Register, which is plainly illegal and he did get in some trouble for that, though it did not slow him down at all.

The townspeople objected and raised a mighty fuss, refusing to sell the remaining land and properties and throwing up any and all legal obstacles that they could.  So the developer tried to buy the water rights for the whole town so he could force their hand, and he resorted to bribing several officials to get it done.  Apparently the plan backfired though, and he was caught giving the bribes, so that water-rights deal fell through.

Stymied by the resolute local residents, the developer decided to starve them out and closed the Hotel, the RV park and the museum and has left them all closed, vacant and unkempt for a couple of years now.

That sort of thing makes me sick.  I’m not sure how you can do it, but it seems like there should be a law against it.  I wonder if anything can be done by attempting to make the buildings (or the whole town) a Historical Monument.  I’m pretty sure there are rules about at least keeping those properties in good repair.

That was about it for our trip.  You can find all of the rest of the photographs on the Gallery page.  I hope you enjoy them.