Portland, Oregon: the hill work continues, but so does the food

I don't think I've quite solved my waistline problem. Yes, I do get plenty of exercise, but do I ever eat!

But first, back to this (Saturday) morning. I sadly left Deb and Tom's lovely house and headed south through Seattle, then east across the Olympic Peninsula to Aberdeen and the Pacific coast. I plan to follow the coastline on U.S. 101 and CA 1 all the way to Boulder Creek near Santa Cruz - more interesting than expressways, of course, and slower since I'm under orders not to reach San Jose too soon (smile), and also an homage of sorts to Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite writers.

At least two of my favorites among her novels, the richly imagined future of Always Coming Home and the lyrical present of Eye of the Heron, are set on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. I've done at least one earlier literary pilgrimage: Alex will remember the summer when I dragged him to the family peach stand that Dori Sanders fictionalized in Clover, another of my favorite books.

On the coast of southwest Washington the morning downpour finally let up, but here I met one of the few disagreeable sights of this journey: hill after hill looking like a battlefield, stripped of the glorious deep forests I've driven through everywhere else in the Northwest and littered with broken, uprooted stumps and other debris. Large Weyerhaeuser banners were planted along the road in front of many of these shattered landscapes. I know it's what they do and I'm sure it means jobs and money here, but it was hard not to be angry at the ugliness I could see and the habitat destruction I could only imagine. You're in luck (at least today): if Highway 101 had had shoulders or pullouts in these places I would be inflicting a photo of this ugliness on you.

Some of the hills had the beginnings of green underbrush and weeds hiding some of the scars, and others had a new cover of small evergreens on the scale of a Christmas tree lot, but for mile after mile the forests were gone.

At Ilwaco I met the huge Columbia River near Cape Disappointment where Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific in 1805. I followed the north bank of the river to Fort Columbia (official site), which offers great views of the river and the Pacific as you can see here and of the Oregon hills.

A bit farther east I crossed the river to Astoria, Oregon, on a 4.5-mile-long bridge that is level (on truss spans and a long causeway) until just before the Oregon shore where it soars high over the ship channel, so narrow that it looks like a breeze could knock it over. In fact it feels very stable and is surprisingly graceful. Here's a view of the very last descending sweep of the bridge from the point on an Astoria street where U.S. 30 begins its trip to Atlantic City, along the way passing close enough to my Indiana home town that I used to ride my bike to it.

I reached Portland in the early afternoon; neither of the people I had come to see was free but the sun had come out, so I headed up the Columbia River Gorge to revisit some of the spots I'd seen 14 months ago on one of my happiest days in the last couple of years. For those who've seen my photos of that visit here are two scenes I didn't see then:

I hiked to the top of the bluff where the main chute of Wahkeena Falls launches into space. This paved trail zigzags steeply up the bluff - not as steeply as the Grouse Grind and only a fraction of its height, but a thorough workout just the same. Here's one of the trail's dozen or so switchbacks, viewed from above. I find it scarier in the photo than I did in person, but it's plenty steep just the same.

Horsetail Falls is the last area before the Historic Columbia Gorge Highway forces you back on I-84. I ended up with both still photos like this one and spectacular video clips that I'll someday put online. Here you see the bottom half of the fall's multi-story final drop; it was too tall for the camera's frame even when I rotated the camera 90°.

Tonight I visited with Rachel's and my friend Suzanne, her husband Greg, and their children David and Leah. Then Suzanne and I walked to Vindalho for an awesome dinner - a quick one since they're heading out tomorrow for a week's camping. This Indian restaurant prepares unusual variations on traditional dishes using fresh local ingredients. (Its name is a variant spelling of the familiar dish vindaloo.) First they brought us papadam with a sweet dip of tamarind and dates. We ordered spinach and paneer (cheese) pakoras with tomato chutney as an appetizer. My entree was a Sri Lankan curry of chicken with asparagus, accompanied by rice shaped into a pyramid. It's past midnight and I'm still stuffed - so much for the hill workout.