Deep Now : Part 2

DEEP IN THE MAINSTREAM
Anna and I are driving from Western to Eastern Oregon, off to see geology and fossils and deep time in Eastern Oregon. But before we even begin our exploration of the ancient, we must finish getting there, five hours by car. And on the way, we've got to pit stop for food and gas. In spite of deep time—the earth dating back 4.6 billion years—life is still made up of the countless daily due. And, while stopped, we find ourselves among something curious: the world ongoing, overrun by humans. 
Deep time in midstream.

ECHOES, ECHOES, Echoes

The booth was chockablock with locals. Men and women in equal number, interlarded, shoulder-to-shoulder. The men wore loose fitting wash-n-wear shirts, blue jeans, and cowboy hats. The women donned white blouses, yellowed, brocade sewn round the sleeves, and slacks in pastel colors, permanent-press creases running thigh to ankle. Everyone’s hair tolerated feral strands of grey, fraying. They spoke loudly, unconcerned with being overheard. Their talk was punctuated with the practiced pauses of pulpit preaching, those intoned corrections, shepherd to the lamb. Yet, unlike the preacher, they spok stiffly. The words numb on their lips, this was not ranch talk but something transplanted

“To remember is to resist the silence that history imposes on the voiceless.”

One cowboy disparaged a political enemy. A woman, responding, chimed approval and pitched in an insult. Another woman anted up an animosity. They laughed without mirth. Then they were silent, looking away, avoiding each other’s eye. Everyone sat together, warming themselves over the talk, amicable in their field, chewing, rheumatic, staring. While the talk sounded shallowly rooted amongst the ranchers, the rhetoric itself was familiar to a far away place.

The Sunday gathering at the former synagogue in Zagarė. Photograph by Ingrid Solberg.

Somewhere in the distance, far from this small town café in Madras, talk show hosts were shouting the selfsame words into microphones. Further off, in think tanks and PR firms, consultants sat in brightly lit offices and forged those words. Words they blew into cables and shortwave, words that traveled far and that sprang out of speakers and bounced off the walls of a vast human landscape, where those words were recited over and over by listeners: listeners who repeated the words like echoes off the walls of an ancient canyon, listeners who went to lunch with friends yet spoke not of friendship, or of horses or ranches or work or love or loss. People who were friendly yet spoke in unfriendly voices. 

The rancher’s table talk drifted and overlapped the booth next to them, where Anna and I sat conferring about destinations, maps, and plans. Every so often, we peered out the window at the cars and trucks passing by and, just behind that, at the scrappy uprise blocking the horizon. For me, the cafe scene was like a cult film, wherein earthy ranchers had been dubbed over with the voices of Gucci politicos. 
After we finished our sandwiches, I bought a cookie, and the two of us headed back to the car and back onto the highway. We were on a sojourn to see fossils and ancient ash and rock and river, things that gave testimony to all that has gone before, to history, to pre-history, to deep time. All the same, our trip was becoming more than that. Thinking about time past had us doing a double take on time present and everything in it. 
People. Buildings. Towns. Roads. Buttes. Boulders. Basins. Grasslands. Plants and animals. Canyons and cliffs. Fossils. Volcanoes. Snow and rain and sun. 
Sky.

AGINNG FACES
Along the highway, the roadway was grinding beneath the car tires and we listened. The lines in the road disappeared beneath the front bumper and we watched. The scenery rolled along beside us and we took it in. 
Along the highway there were dusty hills—strewn with rock and boulder and tufts of grass and mangy bush—that rose abruptly up and fell away, each its own denouement. And we drove. 
At times we talked. 

At times we were silent, watching the show. Canyons, yawning, narrow, and somber, snuck up from the earth to run next to us, or to swallow us, the highway drifting down into a canyon gullet. At times the canyon walls were lizard skinned, cracked and scaly, armored and ancient. At times they were burnished by the wind, who rubbed stone until it took on the wind’s smooth shape, who made such sculptures just because, and whose sculptures are everywhere.

“Memory is not solitary. It is choral.”

Along the highway the grey sky dissolved to blue, the white clouds streaking across the dome. On the horizon before us were shape-shifting ranges, mesas lit by a tangerine sunlight that cut craggy shadows into bluffs, fathomless and two dimensional lines worn into aging faces. Aging faces that could have been any of the café’s ranchers. 
Along the highway, time itself let slip a wink in our direction. 

 DICCOUNTED MOTORCADE 

And we drove on. 
We were coming to the point of no return. The next hundred miles were dry county for gasoline. We had been so warned. Back and forth we went through the streets of Prineville, where we had detoured, last chance gas. Back and forth we went, eyeballing anything resembling a gas pump. Anna, situated in the passenger seat, trip navigator and trip designer, was working the mobile Internet, which was proving of spotty value. 
“Have you found anything?”
“Nope.”
It was Veteran’s Day. Prineville’s main drag was lined with American flags, staked at regular intervals, large flags of uniform size, some fifty feet apart toward the horizon line, on both sides of the road. The air was still. The flags hung their heads. As we passed between the two rows, it felt like a discounted presidential motorcade. All that was missing were tiny flags fluttering on the fenders and a presidential wave. 

The complaint could be made that the number of flags overstated their point to a degree of amusement. It caused me to bust into a smile. But this was clearly a bosom message among locals, not intended for the outsider passing through. Prineville, abandoned by its economic meat and potatoes, Les Schwab and his tires, had more recently attracted Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and his server farms. An explanation for the excessive flag arrangement may, in part, be harbored in the flapping affections of such well-endowed yet fickle industries. Whatever the reason, the display left no doubt regarding the town’s enthusiasm. 
Meantime, between flags, Anna and I found a refueling station. And pulled in. 

“Is the town of Mitchell that way?” 
Talking out the driver side window to the station attendant, I pointed behind me. 
“I… ah. I don’t know,” the man stammered. 
 “That’s okay.” 
The attendant appeared startled by the question. And he frowned. 

Seeing the attendant’s reaction, I felt bad for asking. Yet his response was curious, considering that, although fifty miles away, a long stretch of road through the Ochoco National Forest and beyond, Mitchell was the next town over. And Mitchell did not have a gas station open to the public. You’d figure “Last Chance Gas” would be all part of the Prineville shtick. Apparently not. I felt like a real city slicker. 
I peered into the side view mirror at the pump nozzle, stuck in the rear quarter panel, refueling the car. The gasoline powering our trip through time was itself a product of deep time and history. Dead plants dating back millions of years, fossilized, pressurized, and cooked by the earth, were this very day providing us locomotion along the highway, where we planned to check out vestiges of deep time. Deep time fueling a trip through deep time. This was deep time in midstream, after all, and things were not what they seemed. 
I paid the attendant, who beat a hasty retreat, and we pulled out of station, hooked right, and, sure enough, we were on our way to Mitchell.

DRY AND DESOLATE
On the road through Prineville, I noticed the same terrain as earlier in Madras. The same fluorescence and kitsch and colored stores and colorless box stores and uniform houses, salted with bits of historic architecture, against a backdrop of demonstrably wild nature. Car dealerships shone under tall silver poles supporting incandescent bulbs, blazing white light, illuminating row after row of new automobiles on sprawling lots. Real estate offers promised and prompted and teased from road signs and shoebox offices, glowing like fresh paint. Cafés contended for the affections of highway traffic, gritty neon and clapboard and hand-painted signs, dusty with promises of breakfast lunch dinner, put forth a world-weary effort, like middle-aged singles lining the walls of a tired dance hall. 

Sprinkled throughout were the neutral bromides and fast food doldrums of chain stores, confirming that you can now go almost anywhere on earth, no matter how far fetched, and find the exact structures and business and products and ideas, saturated with red and green and orange and yellow. Amongst it all were people at work and life, teaming, propagating, and broadcasting. Their homes, the family housing of Prineville, drew lines, with persistent regularity and uniformity, into the eccentric natural landscape. Quirky hillocks rose in surprising locations, oddball sugarloafs and basins. Stubborn rocks and boulders of every shape and size scattered across fields, up the slopes of hills, and resting in depressions. Motley grasses and bushes and trees, their unkempt heads of hair, twisted vines, leathered tree trunks and knuckled branches, suffered openly, reaching and variegated.
	  

Prineville sponsors a message for visitors, which is worth reading. A message that addresses the landscape, as follows. At first appearance the countryside might look dry and desolate. A closer look, however, finds golf courses, fishing opportunities, tall timber forests, a busy community and happy people. The tone of the message was like a note of apology for having left dirty dishes in the sink, belying a sense that unbridled nature is foreign, a stranger to man, and therefore suspect: dirty dishes in need of a good scrub. 
For my part, however, I found the landscape deeply attractive. And not once did I doubt the happiness of the locals. Okay, well… maybe a little. Especially the gas station attendant. 
But I did not blame the bitterbrush. 

DAYDREAMING
And we drove on.
We passed a sign. It bore a name we’d seen a lot of since crossing the mountain range. There was the town John Day. The river John Day. The John Day fossil beds. John Day Dam. And Dayville. 
From all the honorarium, you’d think John Day to have been a noteworthy explorer, statesman, nonpareil, a local hero. Not at all. Unlucky. Mad. Depressed. Known exclusively for coming to Oregon in frontier times, and, in so doing, coming to misfortune, John Day from Virginia distinguished himself for his lack of fortune. Ill on the trail and nearly died. Helped by an Indian. Robbed and stripped naked by other Indians, left to die. Helped by Indians. Eventually, the fellow snapped, insane and suicidal. John Day, hunter, trader, trapper, and miner, a man of middle age, made the muster of history for being jinxed. 

And we drove on. 
Winding through highway turns and into the Ochocos, surrounded by ponderosa pines, whose high-wasted and spacious foliage broke the sun’s rays in dappled light, I had plenty of time to both take in the sights while daydreaming about this fellow, John Day. As a symbol, the man was growing on me. His name marks today’s Eastern Oregon as randomly as he would have marked the bushes near his campfire. Yet, unlike the traditional prig in powdered wig and cast in bronze, riding a horse or riding some justice, there is a humanity to this man’s story. A humility—of smallness and strife. Of the ongoing catastrophe of things. His infamy gives off a sense of history as something… arbitrary. Accidental. Scruffy. 
He fits right into the landscape. 



Stay tuned for more offbeat adventures and people and creatures, palisades, mudflows, fossils, and painted hills in The Deep Now part 3!