Notes from the trail

Important lessons learned on the Rogue River Trail.

When you reach my age (64 and closing in fast on 65), you tend to dream up things to do to prove to yourself you’re not really getting old. Many of which are: (a) unrealistic, (b) delusional, (c) potentially fatal (d) not even things you could have accomplished when you were young.

My original plan for the summer involved walking the length of the Oregon Coast Trail, some 360 miles, camping along the way and seeking spiritual enlightenment. This plan ran into some immediate problems, the first of which was my inability to interest anyone else to tackle this project with me. Responses ranged from: “you must be high,” to “sounds great, can I have your golf clubs?” to “you wouldn’t know spiritual enlightenment if it jumped up and bit you in the yin or yang.” Okay then, perhaps it was time to try plan B.

My son Rob, who initially thought he might come along on the Oregon Coast Walk (I think he decided someone needed to be on the trip who knew CPR), suggested we scale back a skosh.  After some palavering (like negotiation done while hunkering), we decided to take a week, jet boat up the Rogue River and hike, camp, and fish our way along the trail. I jumped at the idea—a chance to reconnect with my son, eat freshly caught trout and sing campfire songs (turns out neither of us knew the words to Kumbaya). What’s not to like? Plus, if I could get spiritually enlightened in three weeks, I could be 1/3 enlightened in a week, right? 

It was a great experience, one I would recommend to anyone who wants to spend time away from cell phones, television, people and light pollution. The scenery is eye-popping, the air is clean and it’s amazing how you can learn to love food that only requires adding boiling water. Here are lessons learned and more pictures. 

Lesson #1.  The jet boat up the Rogue River can transform otherwise mature adults into a giggling, gasping, gaping 3rd-grade class. I’ve never heard so many grownups scream whee!!!in my life. Here we are admiring turkey-buzzards snacking on a dead sturgeon. 

Not a big  fan of carrion? We also saw ospreys, eagles, deer, otters, river seals and the occasional dinosaur. 

 Lesson #2.  Hauling a 40 pound pack up a rocky trail is hard damn work. I’m reasonably fit, but damn. Schlepping a backpack 360 miles for 3 weeks? My initial critics were right, I must have been high. We didn’t hike any killer distances.

The two camps we stayed at were between a mile and two and a half miles away from the lodge where we caught the boat home. .  

 Lesson #3.  If you’re going to wash your clothing in a fast-moving creek, be sure to grip it tightly. Some lucky rafter is now the proud owner of a pair of 38-30 cargo pants that descended from heaven via a stream-fed waterfall.

 

 

Lesson #4.   You learn amazing things about people you’ve known all of your life when you camp with them. 

I learned that my son, who never picked anyting up off the floor in all the years I lived with him is an accomplished and conscientious outdoorsman. 

He can light a campfire with wet wood in a torrential rainstorm, pitch a tent like a pro (is there a league for that?), and identify all kindsof plants and animals. 

For example, he knew instantly that this was a deer. I was under the impression it was some kind of horned fungus.

 He also insisted we leave our campsites cleaner than we found them. Who knew the kid who grew accidental biology experiments under his bed would be so tidy?

Lesson #5.  Sodden is an entirely descriptive word for a certain state of being. It rained hard for one day and most of another. When I awoke on Wednesday morning, everything I had with me was saturated. I was ready to break camp, hike to the lodge and thumb a ride back on the jet boat. Rob calmly spent an hour and a half starting a fire, making us coffee and telling dad to mellow out. 

Lesson #6.  Nobody likes a hardhead. Thursday morning Rob even allowed as he could be convinced to go hole up at Paradise Lodge for the final night. The tipping point was the realization that we were out of coffee and would face a decaffeinated scramble to catch the boat on Friday after breaking camp. Both of us craved a shower, a meal someone else prepared and drinking a beer (or eight) on the deck and watching the rafters float by. Sleeping on a real bed after 4 nights on rocks and dirt? Near orgasmic. I recommend this place. It’s a tad spendy but includes meals. And the view is phenomenal.

Final and best lesson.  I may joke about it, but there certainly was an element of spiritual enlightenment in my trip up the Rogue River. Even as an agnostic, I felt a level of inner harmony and peace that seems impossible to accomplish in the confines of a city. You look at the sheer cliffs, magnificent trees, abundant wildlife and star-packed skies and wonder whose plan this might have been. 

DISTANT VOICES, INSTANT MEMORIES

My son, Rob just turned forty, two weeks before my sixty-third birthday. I spoke to him the other day, teasing him gently about the inexorable march of time. His response was good-natured, but still, I could hear in him the tone of disbelief that his youth was a distant dot in his rear view mirror and that middle-age was more than something to await, poke fun at and dread. It is, instead, his present reality. He has transformed from the straw-haired gamin-bodied boy of the fading photos in my album to a bald (a gift from his mother’s side of the family, I think), somewhat thick through the waist, hard-working globe-trotter of the first order. His job, coordinating webcasts for Intel studios sends him all over the world. Sometimes, it seems like he spends more time in airplanes than his apartment in Hillsboro. Recently, for the first time in his life and mine, he got a raise and moved into an income category I never attained in my forty-three years of broadcasting. This is a good thing, and I reminded him of the many times he slept on our couch and occupied our spare rooms during the student/multi-hair colored thrash rocker/between jobs phases of his life. “Buy a king-sized futon,” I advised him. “You never know when Carolyn and I will show up at your door.” He laughed, but I detected an uneasy quality to his guffaw.

Coincidentally, about a week before our conversation, I’d discovered an unlabeled flash drive in the glove box of the Prius. It moved to a counter in the living room for a few days and finally, I took it down and plugged it into my computer. When the menu came up with the contents, I remembered where I’d gotten it—a birthday gift from last year’s birthday from Rob.

When my son was nine or ten, a small portable cassette tape recorder became his toy of choice. At the time, I co-owned and operated a four-track recording studio and creative advertising concern with my friend Rick Huff. Rob spent quite a bit of time there and even voiced his first paying commercial, a cute testimonial for McDonalds that padded his Chuck E Cheese arcade game contingency fund by $25. Soon, he was “laying down tracks” of many of the events of his life.

The flash drive contained dubbed-to-digital snippets of Rob, in a quavery sing-song boy-soprano commenting on our day to day life in Albuquerque, spinning stories about imaginary super heroes and editorializing on the “weirdness” of his dad and his partner Rick. This last part is hard to deny—it’s a matter of record with dozens of eager-to-testify witnesses. He also invents and sings songs—about his pets, about school and makes the random joyful noises only a kid knows how to generate. There are also clips of the television shows he was watching, including running commentary and several minutes of me, co-hosting the local segments of the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

I’m not overly sentimental about the past (Who was it said nostalgia’s not what it used to be?), but hearing his voice (and the younger version of my own) put a lump in my throat the size of a ruby-red grapefruit and dampened my eyes. He was a great little kid, a difficult, but still quality teenager and young adult. Now he’s a middle-aged man I’m proud to call my son and my friend. The flash drive is a sobering reminder that I don’t see as much of him as I’d like to.