The next morning we broke our fast at Cousin(s)('). Whether only one cousin opened a restaurant called Cousin's, or a plural number opened Cousins', or one person named Cousins opened Cousins's, was unclear from the variations on the signs and menus. I took a pot of crayons from a shelf and asked the server for something to color on. She brought me the same coloring-book style placemat I saw in front of the other children. Crayons and misspellings often promise good food, and our waffles with marionberries were yummy. What is a marionberry, RDC asked? The mayor of DC, of course, I said, but he didn't believe this place offered that kind of barbecue and asked the server, who said it was a hybrid of logan and another variety of berry. Good berries and lots of them, hiding in the crannies of the crisp waffles. RDC found the berries to be too much, but I had had the sense to ixnay the whipped cream, which properly should exist only melting into cocoa.

The menu scared me, as did most in the western backwaters we stopped in. I suppose New English menus are just as frightening to rural westerners while to me they have at least the virtue of familiarity. The vegetarian breakfast was eggs with biscuits and gravy, and even if the biscuits didn't have lard in them, the gravy must have had something with legs in its heritage.

On the way to Portland, we saw a Wal-Mart off the highway. Its doors darkened me for the first time in several years and we rectified the pad situation. Are there guns in every Wal-Mart? When they don't carry any music with PMRC warnings? These mats aren't as cushy as Therma-Rests and didn't compress nearly as thoroughly: they'd slowly expand and then pop out of whatever roll I'd beaten them into until I thought of tying a towel around them. Incorrigible things. They would beat bare tent floor, though.

We admired Portland. I only seldom read LA Stories and only on the day I left did I learn through Xeney's forum that Amanda had moved back to Portland. And Beth of Atropine has left. And I wasn't sure before I left that our time would have permitted a Portland visit at all, let alone at 11 A.M. Excuses excuses.

I didn't have to press RDC very much to go to Powell's. It was perfectly easy to find, despite the expected one-way tangle downtown. 1005 West Bainbridge, and I navigated RDC to park right here, and we got out of the car and he asked how far the store would be and, speaking before I turned the corner, I said, "Right around this corner." And there it was.

I navigate well. A woman we know claims that any woman would interpret an up arrow on a map as meaning uphill, not north, and that standard maps are sexist. She grew up in Queens and didn't learn to drive until, in her 30s, she moved to the middle of nowhere that is Storrs, Connecticut. My father lost me in the woods when I was a child to see if I could find my way home. (I think he could see me, if not I him, particularly since the dog stayed with me. I wonder if Sagi would have stayed with me instead of going off with RSH, if he had left; I relied on her to get me home.)

RDC was pleased with Powell's Lit Crit section, since both Tattered Covers cram their piddly ones with literary essay and also non-literary essay like bathroom joke books and Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. I found We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea but was disappointed that The Picts and the Martyrs was available only in some Other design in a pulp format. I stupidly had not brought my list of OOP titles I want and eschewed other purchases as more easily bought at home from Powell's or elsewhere.

I also bought three postcards, for CLH, DEW, and Shelley. I didn't think sister-granny-Shelley altogether (sorry, Shelley) but instead happened to see one particular card for her while searching for my family's: a paper doll with three (3) outfits illustrating Miss Lang, career girl. Anything paper dollish reminds me of her meerkats.

A box of no discernable purpose caught my eye, with the Little Prince on the outside and his sheep on the inside. I resisted.

Although we found Powell's without incident, we didn't get out of Portland as easily. That was okay, though, since Portland looks like a good town (I didn't see its airport, though). Northward over the Columbia and into Vancouver, Washington, motored we, and turned west again toward the Washington coast. We passed through, or near, Long Beach, Washington (so I again thought of Shelley) which had a lovely, miles-long skinny park full of good trees. Big uns, deciduous too.

We passed two restaurants called the Boondocks (well, one was the Boondox), and wound up at the Riverview CafŽ in Cathlamet, Washington. Its lounge, which permitted smoking, had the only river view; in the dining room ("with no view, and a long way apart") we participated in the birthday parties of the waitstaff's children, two or three kids' hatchdays plus a bunch more. A two-year-old was given a push-ride train, and everyone took turns pushing the kid, who also scooted himself along. It was a mostly fun train, except it made its own battery-operated whistles and choo-choos--isn't making the noises yourself half the fun?

After Cathlamet, we entered timber country. Also no-longer-timber country. It was ghastly to see the ghostly raw killing fields, and not just because of the fog. I had heard and saw confirmed that a thin skin of trees is often left along roadsides as window-dressing, with daylight from the clear-cuts glimmering through.

I often feel stupid and consider myself apathetic for not reading a daily paper (and spending more online time than I ought with journals instead of CNN or the New York Times or even the Onion. But I am glad to keep my journal primarily electronically rather than on paper (although I do debate its on-line aspects) and as soon as books are as available, skimmable, browsable, annotable on pixel as on paper, I'll live easier in my own skin.

RDC wants to find good images of clear cut to illustrate this fall's syllabus, which he has distributed only on-line for years now, because this quarter is going to use only electronic texts. (Students submit their work only electronically as well.)

We detoured up a side road to see a salmon hatchery, which was pretty interesting. Not a salmon farm but a regeneration station. The water the fry live in is diverted from the nearby stream so that they learn its individual scent, in order that when their time comes to spawn, they can find their way home, from the ocean to the shore up a river to this little one particular stream.

Onward and westward, through patchy sun and fog, through countryside that looked, when it existed, immediately familiar to me. I think this is why eastern Oregon left me cold but the stretches of Washington Route 4 with the Columbia on one side and cliffy forests on the other felt comfortable to me: simple affinity. I did not grow up with broad swathes of farmland, but an orchard or a field is pretty; I did not grow up in arid hills, and barren waste is not pretty--to me. But a river and good trees and glaciated boulders--that's my kind of scenery.

Onward and northward, near now but not yet within sight of the ocean, we detoured around a little peninsula whose southern border is Willapa Bay. The town of Willapa ("A fine place to raise a family; a great place to retire") is on the bay, and the bay leads out to the ocean, and thither we hied ourselves. Abruptly, the clouds ended, the horizon leapt away from us, and here was the open ocean.

I leapt from the car, over a jetty of boulders, down over sitka spruce giant driftwood, and over the sand, through a flock of seagulls. I ran. (I slay me.)

Ocean. Immediately I was in up to my knees. Cold! I dipped my fingers, kissed them to the sun. I unbuckled my watch and ran back toward RDC, who approached more sedately over the beach (after all, he had gone to Monterey while I was in Flatland). As I zipped it into his parka pocket, he protested, "You're not going in!" Currents, frigid water, air too chilly and damp and sun too wan to warm myself in after a plunge into hypothermia: no, I wasn't going to swim. Just dabble.

Might we see whales on this trip? We hoped to. We strolled along the water's edge, feet in the surf, toes in the sand, the wind pulling open the buttons of my skirt, whose tails I tucked into the big pockets below my hips. There, on the horizon! All that blow! Plumes of white flung into the sky. We watched, riveted--whales! A moment later I broke that bubble of elation: "Either that's a huge pod of asthmatic whales breathing every ten seconds, or there's a reef out there." RDC, who finds bear sign in a washed-out footprint, agreed. Oh well.

Soon we turned back to the car and followed the coastline to Aberdeen. We passed a few of this sign: "Our government is being run by environmental communists." We passed Uncle Sam hanged by the neck and Confederate flags (in Shoalwater Indian Reservation) and saw that the interior of the peninsula, away from the main view, was clear cut.

I use paper. I read books--and own them. I like toilet paper. I work in an office that I cannot imagine going paper-free. Clear cut scar tissue hurts, but I have less chance of going paperless than I have of stopping eating meat that doesn't come from an abbatoir.

Finally, Aberdeen. Stuart had warned us that Aberdeen was a weird place. I figured his lack of detail had something to do with being a native of the state and having to take a blood oath such that if you told unsuspecting folk what could happen to them here, the same thing would happen to you, except worse.

Aberdeen was weird.

The first business we saw in town was the Nordic Inn (cf. the Confederate flag). I figured we had been clever to come in from the coast, because if we'd come from the inland side, we'd never have found it. It billed itself as a convention center. For quilters or backgammon players, maybe. Indianapolis bills itself as the crossroads of America, a self-styled epithet at which I scoff (have they heard of St. Louis?), but as a convention site, it works. RDC just got back from Santa Clara, which was really swanky. The Wayside CafŽ in Idaho and Cousin(s) in Oregon both sold the owner's roommate's cousin's tailor's (or someone's) self-published books on the tables; this place looked like it would give away free copies of the Turner Diaries. It was the only place we'd found on the web anywhere near our planned itinerary, though, so we had reserved a room.

"D'you know what's weird about this hotel?" asked RDC.
"Besides the taxidermied animals in the lobby and the two sinks in the room?" (not elegant double basins, either).
"That, and that although there were supposedly no vacancies, there are only three cars in the lot."
The taxidermied animals should have been a clue. The other cars were in the swamp.

Perhaps everyone was at dinner. Or out looking for dinner, anyway. We tried to find it ourselves, wanting seafood and thinking that hey, we're on the sea coast, seafood can't be too elusive. Eventually we ran a non-chain place with a seagoing name to earth, and there ate indifferent clams and halibut before the place closed at 9:00.

The whole reason we stayed in Aberdeen is that we didn't think we could find a campsite as late in the afternoon as we figured we'd arrive. Having the reservation despite stopping as close as The Dalles made for a leisurely last driving day with Powell's and hatcheries and walks along the beach, and despite a dinner we might have had in remotest South Dakota and the six-foot bed, the strong smell of spruce and salt and the abundance of oxygen made for a lovely night's rest.