I am just now starting to feel human again. All of that rocketing about on spaceships can make a person feel a bit like driftwood washed up from those Pacific waves. The biggest plane we flew on went the shortest distance, from Chicago to St. Louis, so it’s clear American is economizing. Here I sit back in Missouri, but there is still sand on my Timberland dress shoes from Sunday’s visit to the beach. After all things nuptial had resolved themselves Beth and I decided to take the rental car across from Salem to the coast.

My father had told me that if I ever got the chance I should make it a point to see the rugged beauty of Oregon’s coastline. Beth concurred so we were out the door at eight a.m. to wind our way through the Siuslaw National Forest to highway 101 and then up the coastline to Tilamook, before we headed back inland for our one-fifteen flight back to haunts Midwestern. Siuslaw is very Black Forest and from all the German signage I’d wager there has been much cross settlement.


We made our sea fall at Neskowin where I got a picture of Beth’s first full encounter with an oceanic wave, until Sunday it had all been bays, gulfs, and inlets for Beth. When she told her father via phone during our Chicago layover that she’s finally tasted sea salt in the flesh, he confessed that he’s still never seen an ocean. We, the river rats of Missouri, content ourselves in knowing that in the Mississippian period we had an oceanic front porch view, so geologically speaking this ocean business is nothing new. We hit Cretaceous crustaceans every time will till a garden.

It’s no secret that I love to drive. Our Grand Prix rental took the curves of hwy six back into Portland at a pleasant seventy mph, but for the minivan in front of us slowing for the doe or possibly it was a young elk cow. I love driving the Blue Ridge, the Nevada side of Tahoe down and that stretch on Oahu from Honolulu over and through the mountains to Kaneohe; Oregon’s hwy six has now made my short list of favorite drives. That Grand Prix is no slouch either. Beth kept looking over at the speedometer to figure out why we were going so slow only to discover that we weren’t.

It was funny driving into Portland with Mt Hood ahead of us, and Mt St. Helens off to our left, to remember being in the third grade and getting little vials of ash from the eruption. You look at this mountain with the top blown off and immediately recognize it and then you look at the guy’s yard you're driving past and wonder how much ash per acre remains in the region’s residences.

It was an odd gesture to calm the kids and give them all some scientific kitsch. Can you imagine if we’d sent toxic little vials of all that left over sand from the flood of 93 out to grade-schoolers across the country. Instead we filled in all our old ICBM silos and underground bases with the stuff and sealed our local bunkers for good, well, most of them anyway. That’s a nice image, as the fires from the cold war dwindle we poured soggy sand into the military fire pits to make sure they were out. Silt in silos hardening to stone as the memory of the machines once housed there slides slowly into myth.

We used to break into them when I was a teenager; up in the woods around Alton, it was part of being a cold war kid. By the late nineties Missouri missiles had the same strategic value of wooden ducks on a pond, nothing but decoys and not even the good plastic kind. I was sad to hear they’d filled them in, but their fate as tombs for natural disaster toxins does seem poetic justice.

Ah well, must sleep.