Crescent City to Grants Pass, 82 miles (with a stop in Brookings, Oregon).

Robert in Crescent City

I woke up to the pounding surf and a misty morning, a theme on this trip, and decided Robert needed to sleep in, so after a weird Keurig malfunction—making coffee into the ice bucket, I feel the need to tell fellow travelers that while the Crescent Beach Motel is a lovely place to stay, they have some weird practices, including providing Keurig style machines with no coffee pods and needing to rent a fridge, and no microwaves, although I suppose you may rent one? I never investigated that mystery, nor did I use the one microwave near the office with “Breakfast,” but after making hot water and using the ice bucket to collect the overflow, I had some coffee-like substance and headed to the beach. I stopped to smoke and see the local attractions sign, a sign Squishy the Sea Turtle hates.

The night before we hadn’t actually made it to the sand because there was a large rock breakwater that looked treacherous to climb in the dark, but in the clear if foggy morning I found there were actual stairs, and so I made my way to the beach, which was covered in foam from the breakers, and I wandered the shore, seabirds my only companions. Now that my Bus fears were a bit better, I moved on to worrying about the memorial.

Would everything be OK? And by everything, I mean me singing in public. With Robert we had a band once, a band that played in our living room, our bedroom, and of course a series of campfires, but I had never sung anything in public before. I wasn’t worried about speaking to the folks at the memorial; I work at a large University (Cal State LA), and I have spoken before events with 500 students, and I teach classes, but singing is a whole different thing. It is different because even though I write songs and sing by campfires, I don’t have a good voice, I am tone deaf, and then there’s that whole gendered thing about women singing, with the expectation that women who sing need to have a pretty voice, while Bob Dylan can sing whatever he wants however he wants.

Anyway, that was my state of mind on the beach that morning, but then Robert woke up and we made a plan. We knew we needed to get to at least Grants Pass, just north of Ashland, to get to Paula’s house early, and we knew it was hot inland, and neither of us do well in the heat. My sister Ariana always calls Grants Pass “the hottest place on earth,” and that’s been my experience, too, so we were in no rush to get there. We decided to enjoy the coastal cool and detail the Bus to get him ready for the memorial before driving inland.

We drove up to Brookings, Oregon** first sighting of the Beast of Brookings, a giant camper thing we wanted Tom the Magnificent to know about** and had some capitalism at the Fred Meyer, then found a carwash to vacuum the van, but we did not use the spray bays because Robert had learned from the folks who did the door restoration after an encounter with some parking poles at a gas station to NEVER use spray bays as they get water in all kinds of weird places. We were looking for a park to set up in and clean the Bus, but on the end of town there was a Rest Stop, and my father always loved Rest Stops, so that is where we ended up. We found a morsel of shade and started with the inside, cleaning and wiping parts that were grimy, but as we always say, it’s patina, and then the inevitable Bus guy arrived.

Bus Guys are endemic in campgrounds (and gas stations and parking lots and basically everywhere), and so this guy pulled up in his Aerostar van, talked Bus with Robert (What year is it? What kind of an engine do you have in there?) and then parked and returned to regale us with the stories of busses and bugs he had known. His name was Joe, and he could talk, and talk, and talk. While we listened to Joe, for he needed very little feedback from us to continue, we moved from the interior to the exterior, spraying the Bus with a plant mister, using soapy water, spraying again and then lots of wiping. The sun and the fog were engaged in their eternal battle, the sun mostly winning, and it was something to see the Bus all gleaming and ready for the memorial, his chrome and windows polished, and I was thinking of my father and how perfect it was that we were doing this here, I n a Rest Stop, just the sort of thing dad would have done.

Finally, Joe said goodbye—for Joe was still there, telling us stories about VWs, his life in Brookings, his Aerostar van—and we drove off, loaded with all the dirty rages, and went in search of a laundromat because we were in no rush to get to the Hottest Place on Earth, AKA, Grants Pass. We found a laundry in Harbor near Brookings and set to it. The laundromat was in one of those old mini malls, apparently once anchored by a roller rink, and like laundromats everywhere it was filled with some odd folks, but it was all cool, and we met yet another car guy, although he liked muscle cars. We were chatting with a lovely couple who stopped to admire the Bus when a sad cat with dreads and a shambling gate approached, asking if we had weed. The lovely lady in the truck who had been telling me about cool camping on the Chetco river did not break conversational stride as she said,” We don’t have any weed,” while smiling at me.

Finally, the laundry was done, and we headed back to the 199 to take us inland. I remember the 199 well from my many childhood trips to the coast and from our honeymoon and inaugural Bus trip, so I told Robert stories about swimming in the Smith River off the highway, getting good and wet as we drove inland to the heat, my father’s idea of air conditioning in the Bus. However, there was a terrible forest fire some years ago, and so the forest I remember from my younger years is now gone. Fires were a part of my childhood, and because he worked for the Forest Service and had so much Smokey the Bear stuff, I thought my father was Smokey the Bear when I was a child. What? My father wore the same outfit, and he had all this stuff, posters and a Woodsy the Owl Trash bag (Give a Hoot—Don’t Pollute) always hung in the Bus, so it makes a sort of kind of sense. Working for the Forest Service, even as an Engineering geologist, Dad did have to attend fires, and when I was quite young, he took me to the command center for one, and all I remember is people, smoke, and the inflatable blue air mattress from the service that I fell asleep on.

But the fires now are different, as I realized when one burned my parents’ house to the ground in Talent, Oregon, and as I look back on the easy nonchalance, we saw fire as in the 1970’s, I am worried that we aren’t seeing the reality today. Driving through the burn, we were worrying about where we would land, and as we went through the tunnel in the mountain heading inland it got hotter. We didn’t want to stop for gas in Cave Junction (see Garberville but weirder), so we pulled into O’Brien, a “town” in the middle of nowhere, where a man was blasting Pantera. Robert went to the store in search of coffee, and I took in the funky place, old cars, a train, and then we were on the road again through the dry, dusty desert-like part of the road, the tall pines eerily standing, and with each mile it got hotter and smokier.

Back at the laundry Robert had called ahead to make us a reservation in Grants Pass, so we had a place to land, although we also had a camping reservation at Lake Selmac, a place I wanted to visit because it was special to my father, and because we had tried to stay there before but lost out to an earlier forest fire and then to timing. We were glad to pass it by this time again, 100 degrees and smoky, and then we were in Mordor, the outskirts of Grants Pass, hot and smoke so thick Robert put on his N-95 mask. We went the wrong way on the 99, passed the Denny’s where I started smoking (long story redacted), and then found our way to the Rogue River 99 road, counting addresses all the way, looking for the Motel Del Rogue.

Unfortunately, we had not stopped to get food, and no one would deliver, so it was another night of picnic in the motel, eating bread, apples, hummus, and cheese. We used the deck overlooking the river to do yoga to stretch out after a very long day, and then we opened the screens to the deck and fell asleep to frog and cricket song.

Looking back at the card from the Motel De Rogue and remembering I need to send Kevin a postcard—for he has stamped postcards in the lobby because he is a fan of the postcard, just like me, I think of what his actual card says: “Heartfelt hospitality on the banks of the Rogue River” and that is a true statement, and I thank Kevin for his hospitality.

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