I think I have a new favorite road, now. As usual with these sorts of things, an
accidental happenstance leads to a discovery.
When you are on the road for whatever reason, you are also on an
adventure, and should be open to new experiences when they present themselves.
In this case, we were on our way home with the dog, Nash, or
Fuzzbutt, as I call him, from the National Specialty show for the Bouvier des
Flandres breed, held this year in a suburb of St. Louis at a facility owned by
Purina Farms, maker of Dog Chow and so much else. The factory resembled the place where Soylent
Green was made, to me, but the show facilities were top-notch, even air
conditioned, a rarity in the Dog Show world where local fairgrounds are the
most common venues and rustic is the most common description. It turned out we
were right close to Route 66, the Mother Road, and I spent some time retracing
its path as I explored the neighborhood.
We were running a day late because we had gotten caught on
the east side of the Continental Divide when a big storm blew down from Canada
and blanketed the Great Plains with an unseasonal early snow from Alberta to
northern Texas and I-70 was shut down for miles west of Cheyenne, Wyoming,
forcing us to wait it out in a Hotel in Kearny, Nebraska. This was far from the worst case scenario,
given that the Seahawks were on the tube in London and the local beer was fresh
and good. We seem to have finally
arrived at the way things were back before Prohibition was enacted, with small
breweries in every town making great beer for the locals, and travelers lucky
enough to find them on their way through.
We finally got back on the road on Tuesday morning in
sub-freezing weather, but clear skies and dry pavement supported the decision,
and we made good time after that.
Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and most of their neighbors have a 75 or 80
mph speed limit on their freeways, which helps gobble up the miles.
On the morning of the last day we woke up early in our hotel
in Evanston, Wyoming and beat feet out of town in the shivering darkness on
Interstate 84. I have found that when
you hit the road early and wait a while before breakfast, it tastes extra good
when you finally find it, as if your body is celebrating the realization that
you weren’t actually trying to starve it to death after all.
We blew through the last of Wyoming and a good chunk of
northeastern Utah before we stopped for lunch in the very cool small town of
Baker City, Oregon. This is an old
Western town (1874, with movie-set buildings to back it up) tucked into a
valley where the burnt scrubland hills of Eastern Oregon give way to trees and
sheltered dales with cultivated fields and small-town cafes like the Oregon
Trail, where we sat at a booth and relearned that banana cream pie is a
universal language. Okay, okay, I will
stipulate any kind of pie, but banana cream is the one for me.
Of course, after lunch my wife had to get the dog out for a
walk before we left, which caused all of the servers and at least one customer to abandon their
posts for a look-see. A purebred Bouvier
in full show trim is a rare thing in these parts, apparently. You have to admire their innocence.
We finally got back on the road and drove through town
admiring the architecture and the old houses, only to discover that the onramp
to Interstate 84 was closed and locked with a padlocked gate! There were no signs, and nobody standing
around explaining matters as a steady stream of cars and trucks were detoured
back through town to state highway 30, which at that point had become a parking
lot. We skipped back to the original
offramp we had taken to get in, only to find it also locked down! The busy freeway was as empty as a
politician’s heart at tax time.
In the old days I would routinely stop at a hardware store
in these small towns and buy a Metsker Map of the county, which always had all
the back roads, paved and unpaved, on it, a useful source of information and a
pleasure to read later and mark the roads you had taken while setting aside
others for next time. Nowadays, I just
pulled out my phone and hit the Google Maps button. It seemed to show me that State Highway 203, otherwise
known as the Medical Springs Highway, which started right at one of those
closed-off onramps and seemed to head straight into the surrounding hills in
the wrong direction altogether, actually wandered about through those hills and
came back down to 84 some 35 miles down the road, which should have bypassed
whatever problem was happening on the freeway.
So that’s the way we went, up into the hills in search of another way
home. What we found was delightful.
As we later learned from an Oregon Department of
Transportation tweet, “I-84 closed in both directions between #LaGrande
& #BakerCity due
to a roll over crash involving a semi tractor-trailer hauling cattle. ODOT
attempting to round up cattle. No detour at this time. Extensive closure
possible.” Some poor cowboy bought the
farm out there, along with several of the cows he was hauling to market, while
we were having our lunch. The rest of
them wandered the freeway until people arrived to round them up again. I hope a few of them escaped to live an
outlaw life hiding in the canyons and gorges that populate that country. If they only knew where they were headed,
they would have all run for it.
But for us, the closure led us to this old back road that
twisted and turned up and down the scrubby hills outside of town for miles,
until it picked up and ran alongside Catherine Creek before coming to the town
of Union, which is where we picked up I-84 again, well past the chaos caused by
the accident.
There is a town called Medical Springs, out there in the
middle of nowhere. Blink twice and
you’ll miss it. It reminds us that, back
in the late 1800s, most of our ancestors lived in those small towns scattered
all over the West. Baker City was a
pretty big town for the times, and the idea of a Portland or a Seattle or a San
Francisco was too much to think about.
The State Park on Catherine Creek was beautiful, and empty
on that particular day. Nash got to take
a long walk on his leash, out over the bridge to look down at the creek, and
wander through the trees. Here’s some
pictures: 
Our restful interlude in a beautiful little park out in the
country by a creek was the high point of a day spent flogging our new van
through parts of four states toward a home that was all the more desirable for
the twelve days we had been away.
The best part of any journey is the homecoming. That, and the little adventures that soothe
your soul along the way. :-{)}
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