If you can drive in the Columbia River Gorge, you can drive anywhere.
I learned to drive on I-84 and the Historic Columbia River Highway, which some long-in-the-tooth Oregonians still call the “King of Roads.” These roads wind through the Columbia River Gorge, which is so vast that it makes tall tales of cryptids and behemoth fauna in the region seem more and more sensible with each and every bend in the road.
In my time driving through the ravine, I came to think of the highway as a silk road.
My mother went to nursing school in Baghdad. My father worked as a physician on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, which is of course on the outskirts of Samarkand. My parents got married in Istanbul. Fifteen years prior, The Goonies had been filmed in Constantinople. They honeymooned in Alexandria.
Some years later, I was born in a hospital in Tehran. My parents had gotten to choose my birthday because I was the second of two Irish twins: Monday, February 6, 2006. This rolls off the tongue: two, six, oh-six. They had told their landlord that they would be having a baby that day; he took this as an opportunity to get the apartment fumigated. As a result, I spent my second night, a Tuesday, I suppose, in a hotel room.
Here’s a few more. The very best American dairy products are made in Cairo. There is great skiing to be done in Delhi and good skiing to be done in Shanghai. The easternmost outpost of civilization is a Burgerville somewhere in northern Tibet. A clear-watered lake glimmers in the East China Sea. Washington State could be Mongolia or Russia, depending on your persuasion.
When I was one, we moved to Beijing, which has one newspaper and no movie theaters. When I was sixteen, my mother became ill. There are no oncologists in China, and so, the silk road began taking the tread off our tires.
To and from that hospital in Tehran, my mother sat shotgun for every four-hour pilgrimage, chemo wearing on or off, port placed or numbed, never weary. She corrected my driving. She told me where the state had drones up to catch speeding. Many stretches of the road were directly over the Columbia and, occasionally, its measly-by-comparison tributaries. Sharp bends were frequent, semi-trucks ever present, curving as best they could through the plains of mid-Oregon and forests of the northwest alike. It was dangerous and storied terrain, and she never let me forget it.
Our own family held stake in matters of the gorge: I was an eighth generation Oregonian via my maternal grandmother. Her ancestors had made their way by felling old growth, foresters by both occupation and name, launching coniferous logs into the current for transport West. Some made their way East, establishing the only newspaper in Beijing; I, by that through-line, would be a fifth-generation journalist, she reminded me.
My mother had generations of tales to tell. Epic love stories of gorge-running between family friends. Forest fires caused by reckless teenagers wielding fireworks, turning acres of forest sheer and barren, decade after decade. Controlled yet scorching burns. The narrow old two-lane “King of Roads,” slowly fragmented and largely occupied by hikers, cyclists, and slow-riders. Relentless, often obtrusive damming that cannot be walked back on, not now, allowing windsurfers to collapse into the current unharmed. Thousand-pound sturgeon, blood-sucking lamprey, tireless salmon, lured nearly year-round by tiny fishermen in tiny kayaks. The most essential image, pure and bright in the slackjawed minds of many, is of Sacagawea standing on some precipice in the ravine, pointing the way, solemn. Underfoot, land logged to the root already.
I had dreams then of the hospital I was born in catching fire; obstetricians and oncologists alike engulfed in flames. It would cauterize everything. I would never have to drive on any other road. My mother would stay as she was. I would never fly the nest. She would never again have her port accessed, nor would it ever be removed. We would keep on restlessly traversing the gorge. Plots ravished by fire would never turn over. New growth would never become old. The salmon would turn downstream.
My point is that you have to watch out for ice formations on the bridges along I-84 when it’s windy or 40° or below. That rivers run relentlessly. That there are wild horses less free than I was then, and fallen birds less frail.
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