Geek Rant vs the Redwoods Rally: Stage One-Oregon Backcountry Expressway.

Greetings Geekranters!

Your friendly neighbourhood bloggerman coming at you once more with my overly eloquent recounting of my transatlantic life. Go on, carry on reading, you know it makes sense... Now, while its certainly true that when I think of the words that I write, they really do make sense, I'm not sure they do when they reach the page. Still, people still seem to read them, so something must be working.

So, when I last wrote my blog, I talked about the Pacific Northwestern city of Portland, Oregon and the beginnings of the epic West Coast vacation/holiday of Team Geekrant! (that's the wife and I). Now I find myself in another motel room late at night, with my wife already asleep in bed, while I try to put into words the last week of our lives.

Now that might sound overly dramatic, but no words can be overly dramatic when it comes to describing the landscape of the American West Coast. There are times, in life, when a place takes your breath away by simply existing. I believe that God created everything in this world and his workmanship is always fantastic to behold and in those moments his handiwork is seen. Then there are times, I believe, when God simply shows off, that in creating some things he just decided to blow humanity's mind. To give us sights that we truly struggle to comprehend with our senses. That is the category that so much of the West Coast falls into, as if nature itself was singing out "be amazed".

We got our first feeling of this, as we started to drive from Portland on a Sunday evening, we needed to make a distance of some 170 miles, at five o'clock in the evening. In truth, where I come from that's a journey you should be planning out well in advance and getting up early in the morning for, where my wife's from that's something you ram through in the evening so you can start fresh the next day. As we drove through the state of Oregon, we got our first glimpses of landscape that was like nothing we'd seen before. 

Leaving Portland, we drove though flat tan grasslands bordered by the deep brown of hills receding into the distance while far off in the haze of the horizon, we glimpsed the white capped tops of the mountains known as the Cascades. Gradually the land that we were driving through grew hillier and oddly shaped ridges rose seemingly from out of nowhere beside the roadway. It appeared sparsely populated, although there were many cars on the road. We were heading for a place called Roseburg, which lay roughly half-way between Portland and the Californian border. This was our first stopping point. It was a town held high in the arms of the advancing wooded hills which gave us our first echo of the Redwoods.

The Redwoods area of California, is I would wager, like no other area on Earth. Now, that, I now know could be said of most of the West Coast of the United States. Although close comparisons can be found for much of the landscape here, nothing quite fits or exactly replicates the almost otherworldly landscape here. The Giant Redwood is an incredibly tall and incredibly old tree. There are some that are thousands of years old and when you drive, cycle or walk amongst them, it is hard not to be affected by the sheer majesty of such ancient things. All other trees seem somehow merely a reverberation of these behemoths.



It is hard for a man such as myself, born on a relatively small island to see such vastness, so close. This is a land of discovery, so little of this area was mapped even two hundred years ago and even though the world now revels in GPS and satellite navigation, still we are dwarfed by the awe inspiring massiveness of nature. Can anyone ever truly know a place like this and can anyone ever truly know themselves in such a place.

The morning of our second full day on vacation/holiday, we woke up in a Motel 6 in Roseburg,. Motel 6's are, I'm learning, often the most bare bones basic motel chain found on the roadsides of America. They have a bed in the room and a decent and clean shower with a T.V. but no fridge, no ironing board, no kitchenette, no minibar with over priced selections of cheap rum and even cheaper blended malt whiskies. This suited us pretty well, as for the next few days, the moment we got to our room we collapsed into bed, exhausted. 

That day, we were heading for our first glimpse of the mighty Redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth. That meant crossing the border into California, it also meant an early start. For many Europeans, it is seldom that we will make drives of the length that we made during our trip. The size of this country still overwhelms me. By the end of our second day we already would have driven nearly 350 miles and that was just a tiny amount of our overall journey.

Having eaten a breakfast on the run and being fueled up and ready to go, we drove down Interstate 5 aiming for the dramatically named town of Grant's Pass. As the road kept on rising and vast vistas of evergreen covered hilltops and deep valleys opened up before us, I envisioned a hardy frontier town, a rural collection of wooden huts at high altitude with outdoorsy feel. A narrow rock cut through treacherous hills where many a pioneer died on his way to the coast... Yes, as so often in the end, the truth was a little more less epic.

Grants Pass was a charming and surprisingly busy town, lit brightly by the early morning sunshine. It bustled with activity and a good number of people. It would be our last reminder of anything remotely approaching a large town until we came to Eureka, California, a day and a half later.

We left Grants Pass by US Route 199 and headed onto the "Redwoods Highway", the local name for the collection of roads running through this area of north western California. 

It is fair to say that I seldom seem so much greenery in my entire life. Even before we reached California, trees seemed to be everywhere hugging every hillside, overhanging seemingly every roadway that we drove around. As we drove onward, it seemed as if we drove further away from modern civilisation, from a world of computers and mobile devices, tablets and smartphones, Kim Kardashian and reality T.V.  Here was a world seemingly untouched by the ever encroaching tendrils of modernity, the tarmacadamed surface beneath our wheels apparently the only ounce of tribute to any other world but this. 

These were true backwoods, a forgotten place, protected by the desire to conserve and preserve nature and filled with a collection of characters, who for whatever reason, chose to live so far away from the modern urbanised universe. Aging hippies, hillbillies, mountain men, the people were all of these and none of these. My wife chose to stop at a shop called the "Crystal Kaleidoscope", hoping that it would be a cute tourist shop with postcards and "I <3 Sasquatch" t-shirts, I thought otherwise... I was right. 

Now its not generally a sensible idea for a husband to declare his rightness over his wife in such a loud way and it is to be acknowledged that she generally has the drop on me when it comes to common sense, when it comes to weird however, I have a radar like no one else on this planet. After all, like knows like when push comes to shove.

Someone should have told the owners of said road-side attraction, that the 60s had ended, that crystals are not something one wants to drag around half of the American countryside with them and that no-one has had a dying need to listen to Enya since 1991. Still who am I to judge, if thats the shop they wanted to keep then that's up to them.

As we headed resolutely for the Californian border and the Redwoods, I reflected on just how disconnected everything was from the rest of society. If Portland had reveled in its socially conscious weirdness, shouting out to the world, spoiling for an incident and entreated you to do the same, then the Oregon back country simply didn't care what you thought, here was a place that was truly honest to what it was. It didn't much care who drove through, knowing that you'd be gone in a minute, heading onward to who knows where. They didn't seem to give much thought to politics or society although in the "Crystal Kaleidoscope" they were probably still wondering when Nixon was going to get impeached.

America is "one nation, united under God" but in truth, this trip is showing me that it is many nations, many creeds and many attitudes all looking into the wilderness and the raw materials of this land and trying to carve out a future. "E Pluribus Unum", so states the motto of the United States, "out of many, one", so much of what I have seen leads me to the conclusion that the question that has always driven the United States onward, is just how true is that motto and what does it look like in practise.

Maybe the U.S. is a nation always in search of its "better angels" and its American dreams. Already on this journey I feel that I understand a little more. 

Until next time...

Goodbye Geekranters!