The curtain has come down, Memorial Day weekend is over. Hood River on the Columbia River gorge parking lot’s revert to prior rates of use— the overpacked cars, campers and Harley’s are homeward bound.
The town of Hood River has emerged in the last decades to become Mecca for kite surfers. Stout breeze howls most days in their relentless march eastbound toward Pendleton where vast fields of wheat are planted by farmers hoping as all farmers do for solvency and a fair price for a bushel to save them from their commodity growing folly.
Here along the western frontier our experiment in self-governance continues. La Paz in Baja remains a distant difficult to get to outpost for the footloose souls still yearning to rub elbows with Mexico’s famous cartels.
No such luck in Bend, Oregon where domestic migratory patterns have tossed the local planning commissioners into the excruciating challenge of rationalizing overdevelopment. Who needs the Sinaloa Cartel when we’ve got the Chamber of Commerce flogging a geezer’s political passions.
There is no such thing as congestion in La Paz, Mexico. And there is no such thing as empty space in Bend, Oregon. Worse still is you can see emptiness in Bend, you can feel the emptiness, but you would be hard pressed to experience the tonic that is solitude if you come to this corner of America’s latest fashionable demonstration project for infinite growth.
I’m not sure any commoner surfing upon the eons of time can fully appreciate how peculiar it is that a nearby place to Bend like Madras, Oregon would become something of a boom town, but here it is, here in all its vulgar highway congested glory, here in all its irrigated alfalfa yield hopes for a bumper harvest. Madras was never intended to be up and coming.
Where once I came to the county fair here in Madras to entertain the pie bakers and quilt makers, here where from sunrise to sunset, from dusk to dawn nearly nothing much has ever happened unless you count on sheep being a topic of conversation and future livelihood. The trouble with Madras is it is too damn easy to get to by an out of towner type from a visiting citizen that is too damn sure they’d like to have this woebegone frontier accommodate their sense of municipality.
Even if you’ve heard of La Paz, you’ll still find getting here a steeper challenge. You have to be willing to take the path less traveled. You have to answer to the beat of your own inner tourist destination provider.
If your quest to be everywhere has overtaken your provincialism, abandoning your deeper drive to remain firmly potted and planted in one place versus your whimsical passion for seeing everyone and doing everything, it is because of these inner travel urge demons, these unresolved appetites that the fool wanderer will be forced to confront their personal cognitive Little Big Horn.
Modern life has shrunken infinity’s sight-seeing scale. The Mexican American West’s walls are closing in on all this undeveloped nothingness. It is time to admit that the folding chair you’ve purchased at the local Ace Hardware Store will by congestive inner urban density become your personal poor man’s porch where you may witness firsthand the onslaught of Caterpillar’s earth moving equipment. As my Zen Master said, there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to do—
One of the Northwest’s great illusions are its forests. Like water it is impossible to imagine that there is a shortage. No such problem in La Paz where the organism we know as a tree is almost nonexistent. Yes, there are sunny days in Bend, and it does rain in La Paz, but in both instances the supply is limited and best regarded as irrelevant fact. You want rain and trees you go one place, you want sunshine and corn tortillas you go to the other.
People sick of the rain will travel to La Paz to seek the sun and find a cure for the gloom their heavy hearts are drowning in. These winter birds then fly north in late spring to pretend here in the Northwest during its very short summer season that somehow here is almost perfect, here is somehow a place where mud, muck and pine needles entomb these luscious long summer dusks into a persistent illusion.
The intoxicating light of summer is a fallacy spurring your mind into believing you can make it through the winter rains without the inevitable emotional cave-in you know is hunting for you, that point where you are compelled to find your way by plane, train and cocaine back to this fragment of isolated opulence that is the treeless solitudes last best gasp— La Paz beckons your rain weary soul to open your mind to the merits of finally learning to speak fluent Spanish.
The tug-of-war between the have to go and the have to stays, between the sprawling overgrown towns of America’s tomorrow and the desiccated outposts of Baja’s yesteryear, all those Samsonite handle-hauling desperado’s looking for a slice of life’s creamiest Key Lime pie can come coin toss their currency exchanged pesos into the unending respite from the jaws of voracious growth.
If only nowhere had access to fresher arugula and fewer rattlesnakes our passion for paving every last inch of paradise might finally meet its demise.
The bean counters and actuarial tables be damned, we really do not at this moment in our history need more of us piling onto the planet all at once to stave off capitalism’s addiction for unending growth. I’m not sure how this memo never quite gets to the Big Boss’s desk, but it is not your imagination, there is in fact nobody in charge and since modern man finally took over evidence now clearly spells out that we have the big mo— we have the momentum— we’ve taken the initiative— it’s all fool speed ahead.
