Escape from Banjo Land

 

 “It’s rush hour now, on the wheel and the plow/and they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” Bob Dylan, Ring Them Bells

I picked the wrong time for my annual trip to visit my brother in Tillamook, Oregon, and the wrong means of transportation. Uncomfortable about flying due to the risks of Covid-19, I decided to pack the 2008 CRV and do my version of a Sam Shepard/Bruce Springsteen/Hunter S. Thompson road trip, driving a long distance alone, with 9 hours of music on a Spotify playlist I created to keep me company, GPS for navigation, and some snacks to munch on. I knew when I made this decision that California was in the grip of the Summer of Fire, a gruesome preview of what is coming if we do not stop pretending that the devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods happening all over this planet are caused by some force other than human activity. Climate activists, scientists, and indigineous people have sounded the alarm for decades, to deaf ears and blind eyes. The climate crisis is happening right now, before our eyes, and we are ill-prepared for the shocks to come, the consequences of our actions. Our obsession with bigger, newer, shinier, cheaper, faster, and more profitable is threatening our ability to live. 

Not in play at the moment of my decision was what would happen in Southern Oregon only a few days after I arrived in Tillamook. 

The drive to Oregon was mostly uneventful. It was warm and sunny the Sunday I started north on the 101 freeway. From San Jose to the California border the sky was smokey and the sun the hue of a ripe peach . When I reached Redding in the late afternoon it was 111 degrees. At six the next morning when I headed out it was already 71. When I pulled into my brother’s driveway in Tillamook, just after noon on Monday, it was an astonishing 85 degrees, cloudless blue sky overhead, and windless. When I called my wife to let her know I had arrived safely she told me it was over 100 in Santa Barbara. 

By three a.m. on Tuesday morning a hot wind was howling with gusts up to 70 mph. When I went outside in the morning the CRV was covered with dust, trash cans lay on their sides, and drifts of leaves had collected against the fence surrounding my brother’s yard. The leaves were green, torn from the trees a month before they would have fallen on their own. In other parts of Tillamook the wind uprooted trees and downed power lines, forcing road closures. My brother moved to Tillamook in 2006 and has seen all kinds of weather, but never before had he experienced a freak windstorm that pushed an overheated wind like a California Santa Ana. 

Do we have nothing in common? Do we disagree on everything? When did we become so distrustful of one another? When did we lose our confidence as a nation and become so fearful of the world? 

We left Tillamook on Wednesday morning, headed for Westport, on the south side of Grays Harbor in Washington. It was warm and the sky was hazy with rust-colored smoke. We loaded bikes on my brother’s Jeep Cherokee and started out. Before we got out of town we saw the plume of smoke rising from the forest behind the golf course. For more than twenty years my brother worked on Hot Shot fire crews in the Los Padres National Forest and northern Arizona. “We normally get about 90 inches of rain a year,” he said. “This year it’s down to 60 inches. It’s dry back in there. If that fire  spreads fast it could be a big problem for local firefighters. They don’t have much experience with wildfires.” The 101 northbound was open so we headed on, crossing the Columbia River on the Astoria Bridge into Washington about four hours later. I noticed at least a dozen dead birds on the bridge. 

My brother sarcastically refers to Tillamook and other small towns in Oregon and Washington as Banjo Land, meaning Hicksville, populated with rednecks and narrow-minded folks, a generalization he knows is too sweeping to be true. But when you are Santa Barbara born and raised it’s hard not to make comparisons -- and find nearly every other place wanting. It’s rare in Santa Barbara to see the front yard of a house littered with the hulks of old cars, refrigerators, tires, and junk. It’s equally rare to see Trump 2020 yard signs. But like the rangeland around Yreka in northern California where I saw signs that read, FARMERS FOR TRUMP and SAVE BABIES, VOTE TRUMP, the rural towns we drove through looked like Trump country. I saw many American flags and a dozen Trump 2020 signs. As the scenery passed I thought about these small towns, and how they contribute their sons and daughters to fight America’s wars. Proud and self-reliant, these people don’t like being told what to believe or how to live their lives by people of my bent or the federal government. They vote Republican. God, America, guns, freedom to own a big gas-guzzling truck. I think the honest ones know that climate change is caused by human activity. They may not have liberal-style sophistication, but they’re not stupid. From what I saw, they are practical, capable people making their way through life, raising families, working the fields or the rivers and sea. I’m not willing to write these people off, even though I assume we would disagree on many subjects. I want to know why they see Trump so differently than I do. If nothing else, we’re still Americans. That meant something before the working-class got hammered by big money titans on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and divided from each other by racial animosity, religion, guns, immigration, depictions in the popular culture. Do we have nothing in common? Do we disagree on everything? When did we become so distrustful of one another? When did we lose our confidence as a nation and become so fearful of the world? 

We rode the bikes around Westport, checked out the boats in the harbor, followed a bike trail to the beach where many surfers and stand-up paddle boarders were enjoying the gorgeous afternoon.  A few hours later I stood on the jetty and watched the sun dissolve into a nearly horizontal line. There was a cool breeze, the sound of the waves, an uncommonly lovely moment that I wished I could share with my wife and kids. Peace is very hard to come by these days. I closed my eyes and breathed in the sea air. 

Back in Tillamook on Thursday, the sky was hazy with smoke and very fine ash.  My brother cleaned the Jeep while I read. We smoked some weed and listened to Mojo Nixon’s Outlaw Country show on Sirius XM. We watched the Weather Channel. We talked about our parents. 

My plan on Friday was to drive down the 101 to Eureka, spend the night, and then continue on my way home. I’ve never driven the 101 from north-to-south, and I thought it might be cool to hug the coast. I felt some apprehension about the fires, but the 101 was open when I started out at six a.m. My Road Trip playlist was on as was my GPS, and I was feeling fine until I saw the flashing red and blue lights up ahead, and then the orange letters of a sign announcing that the 101 southbound was closed. The GPS tried to re-route me down a country road but that road was also closed. The next route the GPS suggested was blocked as well. I was starting to feel trapped. Eureka wasn’t happening. To get home I would have to return the way I came, on Highway 22, then 18, then I5 through Medford and Ashland. I pulled into a rest stop to cancel my hotel reservation in Eureka and call my wife. By now it was 7:30 and the sun was behind a dense dome of smoke. My phone was down to 10% battery power. What the fuck? The charging adaptor wasn’t working. I switched it out for a spare and that adaptor also failed. Neither adapter worked in either port. No phone. No GPS. No paper map. I had had no problem charging my phone on the way to Oregon, but now, when I needed it most, it was useless. After a couple of wrong turns I found my way back to highway 22 heading east. The smoke was still thick and visibility poor. 

At a gas station mini-mart I bought a new adaptor, two cans of Red Bull, and a cup of coffee. Fortunately, the new adaptor worked. I called my wife and asked her to cancel my hotel reservation in Eureka, and then I settled in for some serious driving into what looked like the apocalypse. Passing through Medford I saw the destruction, like a bomb had been dropped. Buildings leveled, metal twisted, cars burned out, a chimney here and there. It reminded me of the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara more than a decade ago. All in all it was seven hours before I crossed into California, and another ten before I reached Santa Barbara at 11:30 p.m. I only stopped to pee and get gas. When I crawled into bed, my comfortable, familiar bed, I still felt as if I was moving, driving fast on highway 41 in the pitch black night, the smell of smoke in my nostrils, and Bob Dylan whispering in my ear.