After three months working alone on my book, I don’t find it easy being trapped in this little Toyota with another person, even one I love more than I ever thought possible. How can I think in this Echo? Wayne won’t be quiet for long. He has a penchant for golden oldies: he worked as a DJ in high school and knows all the words to all the songs up to about 1968. He has quite a good tenor, of the Gerry and the Pacemakers variety, so I don’t mind sitting through endless verses of “The Sound of Silence,” “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” But driving through this blackness, I long for the Blues. Maybe a little Dr. John crooning “Such a Night,” or Sippie Wallace doing “Suitcase Blues,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe belting out “Didn’t It Rain,” or B.B. King. I can almost hear him . . . Gonna roam this mean ol’ highway until the break of day.
It’s not really a mean ol’ highway. In fact, there’s something about driving through the gathering nightfall in the rain that feels almost cozy. Not fearsome or alien, though I can see how some might see it that way. The damp darkness outside our windows is impenetrable; the headlights obliterate the landscape, force our eyes down wavering tunnels spiked with glinting needles of rain. There’s a rhythm to the slap of the wipers that lets me sink into myself, just as Wayne has sunk into some contemplative place of his own. We are making this journey together, but separately, too.
WE’VE been vagabonding in America, meandering the day away, eating in the car, drinking water from our metal bottles. We’re more than ready for dinner. We arrive in Astoria just as the street lights are making pale, yellow smudges in the misty rain, but even so the streets look dark and deserted. Few of the storefronts are lit up, and our hopes of finding a quiet, excellent restaurant fade.
The main thoroughfare, Commercial Street, which we’re on, is a miracle of Victorian bakeshops, olde innes, souvenir and gifte shoppes, and the like. The Liberty Theater, built in 1925 and recently featured on HGTV’s Restore America television series as one of its twelve American Treasures, appears to be dark tonight, and is likely to stay dark until spring. Ah, well. According to the Visitors Guide, the town fairly hums with life in the summer: visitors flock to the Fort Clatsop National Memorial, and on the waterfront, a “beautifully refurbished” 1913 trolley car runs between the port and the East Mooring Basin. But it’s winter, and the town seems moribund. We drive through the business section without stopping and soon come to a huge, steel-girdered bridge that soars upward and off over the Columbia River, somewhere to our right. Almost directly under it, jutting out into the river, is the Cannery Pier Hotel.
The building was built as a fish cannery back when salmon runs in the Columbia River were the biggest on the coast and Astoria was the second-largest city in Oregon, after Portland. Most of the fish plants shut down in the 1940s. Although this building has been fully restored and turned into a boutique hotel, the area around it still looks fairly desolate in the dark. To get to the parking lot, we have to ease the Echo over a dilapidated dock that must still be on the town’s to-be-improved list.
The hotel looks like a Mississippi riverboat moored to the dock, flags flying, lights ablaze, ready to cast off and float off down the Columbia. Merilyn goes in to negotiate a room while I sit in the car, twirling the radio dial to find a baseball game. Instead I get Miles Davis, so I turn off the wipers and let his smooth, muted trumpet ease the rivulets of rainwater down the windshield. When he was on the road, Davis used to send his wife, who was white, into hotels to secure them a room, figuring she wouldn’t be turned away and might even get them a deal. I’m doing the same thing. The Cannery Pier looks expensive, and after our small flurry of spending in Seattle, Merilyn and I have decided on a limit of $100 a night for accommodation and another $100 a day for meals, gas, and various other necessities, such as books and wine. It’s an arbitrary figure, but this is our first night and we think we should be setting ourselves a good example.
Merilyn comes back to the car smiling. “The woman at the desk was reading a book,” she says.
I take that as a good sign. “What was the book?” I ask.
“I couldn’t see the cover,” she says. “She told me the rooms were $160. I told her we didn’t want to pay more than $120, and she said, ‘I can do that.’”
A hundred and twenty is more than a hundred, but maybe we can skip a meal tomorrow, or a quarter of a meal over the next four days. Instead of steak, fries, salad, and a glass of wine, I’ll just have the steak, fries, and wine. A budget is a budget.
The foyer is a marvel of modern architecture, all plate glass and weirdly angled Douglas-fir beams bolted to gleaming hardwood floors.
I admire the view over the river, with the bridge sweeping overhead like an inspired brush stroke. Classical music plays softly from speakers hidden behind fabric wall hangings. The night clerk has gone back to reading in a soft leather chair by the window. A thick paperback with a glossy cover, but at least it’s a book. She gets up and pours us each a glass of wine, “complimentary to our guests,” she says. Merilyn doesn’t drink, so I take hers, too, as we climb the carpeted stairs to our room.
It is spacious, with, as advertised, a fireplace, a narrow balcony overlooking the river, a claw-footed tub with a view, and, yes, Terry Robes hanging in the closet.
“It’s gorgeous,” Merilyn says, running the bath. I find a corkscrew on the side table and agree.
In the morning, we go downstairs for our free continental breakfast and carry it up on a tray to our room. We’re not being anti-social; there are no other guests in the hotel. From our balcony, we watch a huge grey freighter slip upriver past the hotel, inches, it seems, from our wrought-iron railing, so close we can see sailors through the portholes having their bacon and eggs and hash browns. American coots and western grebes paddle about in the ship’s wake. On an adjacent, equally dilapidated pier, a lone fir grows improbably from a pile of rotting boards. It looks like a Christmas tree. We note with approval that no one has crawled out onto the pier to festoon the tree with coloured lights and tinsel or heap fake Christmas presents around its base. Maybe I could like it here, after all.
MY first impression of Oregon is that we have entered a no-nonsense state. Gone are Washington’s chatty road signs: Watch for Falling Rocks, Slippery When Wet. The yellow diamonds now bark single words. Rocks. Slides. Ice.
I’m inclined to pay attention. Not much more than a week ago, safe in my Vancouver room, I anxiously followed the fate of the Kim family. James and Kati Kim and their two young daughters, Penelope, four, and Sabine, seven months, had spent Thanksgiving in Seattle, then continued on the I-5 to visit friends in Portland. On their way home, they decided to cross the coastal mountains near Grant’s Pass in the southwestern corner of Oregon and spend the night at Gold Beach, before continuing south the next day to San Francisco.
When they turned their silver Saab station wagon off the I-5 onto what looked like a decent highway, early snows had already softened the landscape and whitened the road, so they were well lost by the time they realized they must have taken a wrong turn onto one of the myriad logging trails that meander through those rugged hills. They hadn’t noticed the sign in the corner of the map: Not All Roads Advisable. Check Weather Conditions.
No one knew their itinerary. Days went by before friends and coworkers reported them missing. A full week after they’d run their gas tank dry to keep warm, the search began for the family. It wasn’t long before a local pilot found Kati waving an umbrella as she ran up and down a road beside a giant SOS stamped in the snow. The mother and daughters were hungry and cold but otherwise fine. On Saturday morning, James Kim had struck off on his own to find help. The Kims had no GPS, but they calculated from their map that they were only four miles from the nearest settlement. He left at daybreak, promising to turn back before sunset if he found nothing. He hiked