Trouble in the Sagebrush

Udo only sang about half the day today. Somewhere in the endless sagebrush landscape that is Southeastern Oregon, his voice gave out. –Or maybe it was just the road smoothed and he resigned himself to lying on his pillow and propping his head between the front seats for a snooze. At least until he decided it was poop time. This was somewhere near Burns. Which if you look on the map you will realize is about 150 miles from pretty much nowhere. (The closest “where,” being Klamath Falls.) I don’t mean forested, silent nowhere. I mean pretty much, “Why in God sake did these people settle here and why bother stealing from the original natives nowhere?” It’s the decided views of sagebrush at sunset I’m sure. Burns did however have a gas station, with field for Udo to pucker the butt a few times, (someone else’s expression) and a Dairy Queen. One chocolate dipped, chocolate cone later and we were driving another 150 miles to Ontario. A town where Udo decided it was dinner time and opened up with a full aria. It lasted until downtown Boise. By this time the SO had announced “Overness” with sagebrush.

Overness with sagebrush? How could you get over it in just 300 miles? Nah, too really “over” sagebrush you have to really get acquainted with it. It has to be your endpoint in life. For four years, you have ride to and from school, on a 55 mile an hour bus, staring out the window at what just looks like one continuous grey tombstone. That same bus has to stop at a railroad track each way, which in all that time never, had a train on it. But the track was the only break in the sagebrush for ten miles, and it was so unusual, you started to treat it like a holy spot. It was place you really didn’t understand why the little yellow Blue Birds stopped in their migration, but they always did, so twice a day it was like someone praying to Mecca out of devotion to the unseen force. A force we hoped would one night fly in and carry us to a land with more color. Even, if just for one night.

Okay, I exaggerate. Once, in like 11th grade, we saw an engine coming up the hill, two miles away. You could see either direction for five miles, so no train was going to sneak up on the underpowered meek Blue Bird bus. There was a single diesel electric towing two coal cars that made once a month delivery to the Air Base heating plant. We (the sagebrush break worshiping students of Mountain Home High School) convinced the driver to wait. Wait for 10 minutes as the train climbed the grade to the road crossing. Then we all stuck out hands out the window and made the motion for the engineer to blow his whistle. He did. We all cheered like the football team had just won the state championship. Then we broke into a rendition of “I’m just a Bill, and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.” (Note: That bill in the School House Rock cartoon on how a bill becomes a law, was about the school bus stop law at RxR) We sang it, all the way through, twice. Maybe we did that for the train, because we never got to do it for the football team. I don’t know. Maybe we did it because we were over sagebrush. But we all went home that evening and told our parents that we’d actually seen the Mohamed’s winged horse at the temple today.

But that’s still not sagebrush acquaintance. To really know the grey brush, eat the deer your father annually assassinated that browsed on sage shoots. Have served a dinner quail, chucker or pheasant that just gobbled sage seeds before its soul was shotgun disembodied to join the Blue Bird rescue force. Masticate on that gamey, dry, sour, after taste, day in and day out for the entire season between September when hunting opened and May with “Mountain Stream” saved you with a switch to boney fresh water fish. To really “know” sagebrush, you had to figure out how to polish out the scratches you’re your Dad’s Jeep because you snuck into the stuff after another loosing football game. Was it to get a quick beer to deaden the taste or a forbidden body part from someone? Then when you are locking lips in the desert, and you realize even this other person tastes gamey and sagebrush like. So you do the only thing you can, get on your motorcycle and ride back out into that stuff, rifle and a few buddies in tow, and murder as many ground squirrels as five bucks of .22 bullets can. Then you switch to shooting the sagebrush itself in an attempt to cut it down. Twenty dollars in .22 bullets later the only thought is how to get out of the town, by college by the military, by hitch hiking, by……hoping a fucking winged horse will carry you away at the railroad tracks. That’s when you know you are over sagebrush.

Escaping the song of Udo.

It’s August. I’m on a bit of vision quest. To most people what I’m doing would be a vacation, a reunion, a recapture of lost youth. Significant other and German Short Haired Pointer in tow, I am headed for the land of my youth: Idaho.

This trip I intended to make last year, before a broken foot in a misstep of my staircase. What I saw outside my door window that I needed to gawk at rather than watch my step as went down for mac and cheese that December day, I’ve forgot. My mother has always told me to stop gawking. --My penalty for not listening, fifteen months of healing. Last summer I was still limited to walks of five or six blocks. So, I didn’t think I could make the trek from Big Trinity Lake, over the hill to Green Island Lake in the Rainbow lakes chain of the Sawtooth National Forest. This year, broken foot healed mostly, but twenty pounds heavier from excess work and no gym time I still have my doubts. But I’m not going to Idaho to hike. I’m going to soak in hot springs, to walk through sagebrush, to watch flames tickling up from logs in the fire die into embers late a night when there are no other humans to be found. Much as now, when the SO has gone to bed. It’s just me and the Pointer (Udo). He’s alert cocking his head to every sound he hears in the forest. A herd of cows is working its way up the Pit River here in Modoc County. He’s probably not going to sleep much tonight he’s so curious about area around our first nights layover. Why here? Because in the 28 years since I moved to California, I’ve always wanted to know what was in the remote NW corner of California. What in the world went on in Alturas?

Turns out, not much. It’s a small farming town on the edge of the Lassen National Forest, forty miles from Lava Beds National Monument. But it’s near parts of California you can still just get off the paved road, and drive down a few miles of dirt road and camp primitively. In fact the local BLM office hands out brochures suggesting places to do it. Not the kind of activity most people in the bay area even consider, it has a distinct lack of cappuccino, restaurants that mint garnish eggs forced into little soufflé molds with artistically swirled studio designed sauces, -- and all the spaghetti (not pasta) is cooked thoroughly, not al dente.

So here I am, tonight, the SO is in bed, and it’s just me, the cows snorting on the other side of the river and Udo. Quiet for once. (Udo, that is.) He doesn’t like the car, and sort of sings and howls as it goes down the road. I call it “The song of Udo.” It’s a bit like opera. It goes on for hours and it’s quite entertaining to imitate and make fun of, but not so great to sit through.

Udo’s operatic length solo’s over, I’m trying to think of the last time I heard this much silence. The Bay Area always has a dull roar in the background, --A bad libretto, like intermission white noise. To really appreciate it, you need to sit on a local mountain peak. 20-30 decibels of what sounds like a distant rushing river becomes apparent. But, its not, it’s just engines moving everything. Everything five million people need moved. –And a lot of crap they don’t. It's the noise that keeps me awake at night. The noise that has made me wear ear plugs to bed for the last 15 years, the noise that caused me to spend $30,000 insulating my house. (Well, that and the bus stop outside my dining room window.) But its libretto that’s not here. No, here it is just the mosquito in my ear, the steps of Udo on the pine needles, the crickets in the forest, the lick of the last flames of the fire, and the cows chewing at grass a half mile away. Yeah, I can hear cud chewing, that’s how quiet it is.

That’s this quest, the quiet of my youth. Escaping the song of Udo, the quiet I was too bored with at 13 to enjoy. The quiet I could use to sleep off a migraine headache, because the noise of Bay Area pounds in my head. And all the places I plan to go this week will be this quiet and in that silence, in the warmth of a hot spring, with the SO looking at me trying to figure out what I see in the two of us, but hopefully deciding, it doesn’t matter much, cause I see it. I plan to try and remember how those four years in silence and the noise I’ve kept quiet about for so many years.

My latest interpetation of my day Job.

My boss was out last week. She went Ireland, and a few of our systems (not one's my people maintain, but ones someone else that reports to her maintain) went South. I was filling in for her for the week, and the guy who was suppose to be maintaining the southern systems, went on vacation too. Antartica I think. He sounded like a penguin when he got back. That left me doing her job, and his job. I felt like the guy who casually mentioned a desire for a position of more challenge one day in a career counseling session, and the next was handed command of the Titanic. --Ten seconds before iceberg contact.

I did manage to save the ship. I mean it hit the iceberg. Twice, cause, the old captain failed to mention his steering officer was quiting too, and the guy who he left on watch was basically a deck hand.

Let's just say, I learned a lot about the ship quick, and managed to keep it from sinking and drowning anyone. I have one group of passengers and crew bailing water, and the band fixing the holes. We probably need to check into dry dock for repairs. Though I just a wireless message, "Glad to here crisis is over. When can you resume Trans Atlantic Service?"

Sounds like a good time to go on vacation and hand over the helm to someone wanting a challenge.