The Windmill Posts

It was a good day to drive. Storm warning had google telling me 101 was going to be closed, or was already. If so, there aren’t a lot of alternate routes, so I just plowed ahead. The rain was similar to yesterday. anything from Threatening to rain, to drizzle, all the way up to deluge. At one point I’m driving and it’s raining lightly, and then I look up and see water coming at me. Like someone had just thrown a bucket of water, I could literally see to coming for me. It hit the car and just kept coming. A true deluge. For about ten minutes. Regardless, roads were good. Sometimes single lane, sometimes Interstate type double. Passing lanes were often and useful. There were twisties galore, though in the midst of them there was an electronic sign saying “Sunken grade” meaning it was potentially an imminent slide right under the road. I felt like the sign was just saying “Good Luck!” I’m not going to share my feelings about the “Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan Veterans Memorial Highway” because it would be petty. IYKYK.

I concede ultimate boat nerd title to my sister, though I might ask why she doesn’t have a record of each ship she’s seen before 2018. I haven’t been recording mine for much longer than that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Oregon had a saying similar to ours. We say “If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes” – but I think in Oregon it would be “If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes, it’ll get worse.” Though I was buying items in a store and the lady asked if I was keeping dry. I mentioned the deluge and she said “It’s it great?” That’s one positive attitude dealing with what you get. Gave me a bit of a different perspective. That said, I like the rain and it keep the tourists away. Those other people on the beach really want to be there.

At one point I was driving around a curve and the cliff went straight down – quite a ways. But what was interesting was that sea spray from the surf was coming up over the road. Not water, just spray. That was cool! Finally, I have grown accustomed to the wind, and love just bobbing along. Between the road unevenness, the wind, and my steering against the wind, I feel I’m just bouncing along like a cartoon car. Jaunty!

Trees

I hate those smarmy people who say “Oh you simple must go to Majorca – I simply can’t tell you how blue the water is!” because it’s like “So why tell me?” Well, sorry folks, but I’m about to do just that.

You look on a map and see “Oh, yeah, the redwoods. I’ve heard of that. I’ll go look at them and maybe take a picture.” You don’t really think about it, it’s just another destination. Then you get there are are just blown away. I’d heard about the redwoods. Yeah, great, they’re tall. Woo hoo. And I’m sure people told me I couldn’t understand without going there. But for as much as I like to go on and on about describing something in form and vibe, I can’t do that for the redwoods. They’re just too much.

Like, nature puke amazing.

So I’m going to try anyway. Or share my impressions. And from this point on, pretend I’m whispering, because that was what I was doing to my recorder, and actually in my head too. Like someone whispers in church. I’m not churchy, I got burned out in eight grade. But when I get into the woods, I get reverent in a big way. Tomorrow is actually the redwood day, but I saw a sign for the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway. I saw on the map that it was just running parallel to my route, so easy enough, let’s go. (On the recorded bits I refer to we and our and such the absolute whole time. Dad.). This byway is part of the Redwood Highway, which actually stretched from Oregon through California back in the early days of automobiles.

The vast majority of the time I was the only one in sight, on the road or in the woods. The road was tight, greenery coming close on both sides, even a speed sign was half grown over with vegetation. The road is covered in what look like red wood chips. They’re actually needles, and it feels like the trees have laid claim to the road.

When the big trees started showing up in force I opened the sunroof. It was a rare moment of no rain, and almost warm enough. But it was worth it to be able to see the trees from bottom to top. Redwoods are not complicated. Not lot of branching trunks or huge branches. Just Big. Straight up. Just enough branches to hold needles. But you can see the whole tree quite often, and it makes them seen even bigger. Sunroof it less commitment than top down, but yields quite a view. I loved the wind in my hair. Also enjoyed feeling like I was on the third moon of Endor. Especially since they shot those scenes in similar forests.

Ok, let’s go to church, shall we? I had been seeing pullouts with informational signs on them, and eventually just picked one. Helpful map display there told me there was “Big Tree” (just the one?) on the path, but I wasn’t sure of the scale, so I didn’t know if I would go that far. Just getting into the forest on foot made you feel their presence. I stopped and just put my hand on one tree, just to see if I could feel something. I think my mind gave me lots to think about by doing that, but I felt no vibrations or energy. But I hoped there might be some getting to me somehow.

I came upon a downed redwood that had been across the path, but cut to make room for the path. This would have been a Very Long Time Ago. A regular tree was growing from the downed section. Gotta be pretty big to support a regular tree, 10 feet off the ground. I’m starting to feel it.

And I came upon a couple trying to take a couple selfie in front of a tree, and I offered to take their picture. I think I got a great one for them. Should have asked for the same. But this is when I start to understand why. This was The Big Tree. I have a picture, just for the numbers. But the only number I really paid attention to was its age. 1500 years. That’s a guess, sure, but. 1500 years. That’s not just before the revolutionary war. We’re talking about Romans and Dark Ages.

And they’ve just been there. Watching people and animals pass by, just growing a bit taller and adding a ring every year. Hundreds of years of standing silently over everything within their sight. Putting my hand on The Big Tree I still couldn’t feel anything vibrating to me. But I was touching something so old, so likely to outlive us all. And that made me feel something. My life is a twitch in that timeline. With any luck my children will have children and I’ll propagate my DNA and maybe someone in my own tree will do something to better the world.

1500 years. I just don’t know where to put me in that.

Ocean

I’d like to say trees are the big feelings in this post, but they’re not. It’s the Ocean.

When I went off to the Marines, I had never seen an ocean. I saw the great lakes, but .. they’re not the ocean. They’re great and all, I love them. But they don’t have salt in them. You can’t smell and taste them. Sometimes you can feel their power swimming in them, but they’re not the ocean. I’ve swum in the ocean and each time I was reminded just how little I am, and how dangerous it could be if it wanted to.

So there I am in boot camp. Further along than I think most of my family thought I would make it. And we were out camping and playing games and having picnics. (Maneuvers, wargames, MREs). We were on a forced march, and one of the tricks we had was changing socks. If you change your socks halfway through a long hike, you are renewed. It’s like starting over. Try it, you won’t regret it. Well we were about to stop for a “sock break” while marching through sand, and went up over a dune. And there it was. The Pacific Ocean. I was stunned. We all sat on the beach for a 15 minute break to change our socks and drink water. So there I am changing my socks and having a religious experience. It was so loud, the waves crashing in on themselves. Yet there would be moments between sets of waves that it would be absolutely silent. This thing that I could smell and see and hear was a thing of awe. We use that word a lot, but I always come back to the things in our lives that fill us with actual awe. A redwood. Your child eating. Someone you love caring for you. The Ocean.

Next, I was off to language school. This was in Monterey California and I accepted the new MOS in boot camp because my friend said Monterey was nice – they vacationed there. The choices of the wise youth. I frankly sucked at learning an extremely difficult language. a couple times I thought I “rocked” out but managed to pass by the skin of my teeth. I had a motorcycle, and i would ride it down to Asilomar beach, home of the great late night beach parties. But during the day, or better yet evening, I would ride down and just park at a little widening in the road overlooking some tide pools and, more importantly, the Actual Pacific Ocean. I was trying to escape from homework, the stress of being a new Marine (one with a secret, no less!) and just wondering what my future held. As a Marine, I was going to be out there. Either I would be going to Korea, as I hoped, to do my actual job using my poorly learned language. Or I would be going to Hawaii where the rest of my peers were going. From there I could go out on floats touring the rest of the world on water. I wish I had gotten that opportunity, to be living on the sea for extended periods of time! From what I hear of the cramped conditions I’m okay that I didn’t.

But my future was out across that scary intimidating beautiful monster, and I felt so many feelings. I think that’s where I fell in love with her.

The next time I got to interact with the ocean was in Hawaii. Every new Marine on the island tends to buy a set of fins and snorkel and mask. You use it once or twice, and then it goes in your wall locker for next time, Which may not come. It was fun to play around in the water, we were in an extinct volcanic bay and there was a ton of coral as well as a million fish. That was cool. But it was just swimming at the beach on base that I loved so much. It was across the flightline, so you got to drive over a runway to get there. Also, not a lot of people knew about it, so I was often there with just a few of my friends.

We had boogie boards by then but they were in the wall locker with the snorkel. We would just throw ourselves against the waves, or try and body surf back to the beach. You took a pretty good beating, but as Marines that just made us more thrilled with the experience. There was on occasion where the waves and the surf was monstrous. There were ominous dark clouds, and we just wanted to get in before it rained. And it was glorious. Crushing waves would just beat you and push you down to the bottom of the water. Just standing in front of a wave as if to defy it, you would get blasted back to the beach. I can still remember the strange light coming through the waves. Against the dark skies the waves seemed to glow. Not that pretty blue in the paintings of surf that everyone is coming nowadays. But a gray light, highlighting the shredded vines of kelp in the water. There was so much more of it than usual. One of my friends who was a surfer explained that the power of the waves, the reason they were pulling up so much seaweed, came from a tropic depression over Alaska. I don’t know if that was true or not, but at the time I was again in awe, considering our world’s ability to create a near-hurricane halfway up the world from us, and have that energy come through that desolate sea only to wash up on the beach in the form of these humbling splashes. Awe.

From there, it pretty much went downhill, my relationship with the sea. I got to visit California a few times, and would always go to the water just to feel that awe, but it wasn’t the same. I would visit relates on the east coast and get to what someone would say was the ocean, or part of the ocean, but the endless horizon was way over behind that land there. My first love will always be the Pacific.

And that almost brings us up to the present. Almost. A handful of years ago, more than I care to consider, I got sick. Depression and anxiety ravaged my career, my relationships, and everything I knew about the world. There’s so much right there. But recently, as my world continued to implode, I was preparing to lose my job – which meant the end of that career and everything I knew about what I could do.

“When I lose this job I’m going to get in my car and drive west until I find an ocean.”

And in a more prepared sort of way, that’s what I planned to do. Mere days before I intended to take the trip, I got word that my job was indeed lost. Reeling from that news, I attended a family member’s memorial which pulled my guts out, and came home to.. nothing?

A day later I got in the car and drove. And this week or so (time means nothing to me anymore) I made it to the ocean. I’ve had rain since the rockies, and maybe hoped for some sun. But when I got to the water and a storm was brewing oh so many days ago now, the “sea, she was angry that day.” I got to feel that power, and even if there was no silent portion to the crashing waves, it was like she was welcoming me back. Angrily, crashing loudly and full of foam, she knew what I needed, and that’s what she gave me.

Awe.

Deets

• License Plates: None
• States: OR, CA
• Departed: 7:48 am MDT, 55 degrees
• Original ETA 12:37pm MDT
• Arrival: 4:16 pm PDT
• Weather: Rain, drizzle to deluge
• Budget: Food well below, Hotel below
• Food: Fast food, Jack In The Box Ultimate Cheeseburger!
• Music: Funki Porcini – Love Pussycats & Carwrecks, Coldcut – Let Us Replay, Cujo – Adventures in Foam, Funki Porcini – The Ultimately Empty Million Pounds, Mix based on the previous

Observations

• Last night’s hotel smelled like dog, I hope
• I love the 24 oz coffees I’m finding
• Just took Tylenol maybe because arthritis? Hope not. Not old. Right?
• How many times in history has the one sole survivor been the idiot who got rescued because he did a stupid thing, and it turned out to be life saving?
• In California, all of the viewponts are called Vista Point, took me three of those to figure that out.
• Made it to a cell phone no fly zone and google maps was not happy about that. It was nice to be off the grid even for a bit though.
• Went past Elk Prairie, which was giant fields, on both sides of the road. They had wooden fences to keep Elk in people out, and I guess elk come and graze there from time to time? I saw no Elk. I did, however, see Elk in the next town, just grazing in front of some buildings.
• I still have to have appointments with my care team, and I today was the first one. I was worried about getting caught out in the no coverage areas, but planned a lunch stop for today’s call. I camped out in front of a Starbucks for their WiFi. Turns out I forgot to connect and did the whole call on 5G. Problem solved!

Pictures