The Oregon Trail

The plan was to fly out to Provo, pack Heather’s car and drive it back to Pennsylvania where I had a class to take and a gothic runway to walk down. But after talking to Cort about his upcoming vacation to the Oregon coast, we thought that might be a nicer way to spend a summer.

The first night at the coast, the sea was booming and furious. Boiler Bay—although named for a sunken boiler ship—was white with shaking Oregon’s coast. Later, below our balcony, white-crested waves crashed day and night: sometimes the whole lower half of the windows showed a frothy, white sprawl, sometimes the sea quieted down and we had to wait for a large crash to spread out across the rocks below us.

Then we found some last-minute, ridiculously cheap flights to New Zealand, so away we go. During it all I keep getting emails from my Dissertation Chair wondering when I’ll be back in PA to meet with my committee and get going on this PhD thing. I’ve replied with vague statements so far, but better give him a more definite window sometime soon.

And now we’re in Carson City. We visited an old Mormon fort today: Genoa, NV, the state’s oldest settlement. It got me thinking of Brigham Young and how many settlements he planned and sent people to in trying to create the mighty state of Deseret which would stretch from present day Utah down to the California coast somewhere around San Diego or Los Angeles.

Deseret didn’t quite pan out. Neither did the alphabet Brother Brigham planned out and wanted the saints to adopt (the more phonetically accurate alphabet would have made it easier for immigrants to learn English, and a similar project was funded posthumously by George Bernard Shaw in England.) He didn’t live to see the completion of the Salt Lake Temple either. Probably plenty of things didn’t quite work out for him. So, when I think of the lists and lists of things I’d like to do or write or read or see or research (i.e. accomplish) in my life, I feel (a) a bit comforted from my fears that I won’t get it all done by the realization that of course I won’t get it all done. Who does? Who can? (b) good that I have so many worthwhile projects to work on and dream about, and (c) spurred on to get working.

So plans change, classes wait, roads are and aren’t taken, and I get some things done and leave some newly-invented alphabets for another lifetime or world, and all the time keep moving from the almost violently beautiful Oregon Coast (note: highway 84 along the Columbia is a long, scenic procession of sharp slopes covered in green trees with intermitten cliff faces looking over a sometimes placid river broken by rushing waterfalls—i.e. gorgeous.), to the lovely Carson valley, to a warmer California coast and on to New Zealand which, by the way, is getting kind of close to the farthest point on earth from Hershey, PA where you can stand on land.