There’s this town along the Columbia on the Oregon side called Cascade Locks. That’s a hundred percent true. There’s a good place to get ice cream. That’s 98 percent true given that good ice cream is subjective and place you get is subjective too, two percent is all the difference I’m giving for good or bad. I think it was sort of not a town until Roosevelt, the one in the wheelchair, and WPA funds decided to go all hydro-electric in the NW, and Cascade locks is one of those little towns that sprouted up out of the need to house workers. I’m not sure how true that is, it’s a hundred percent educated guess. I’m a google click away from dashing or confirming. I prefer picturing the town and guessing.
On a shady little swath of grass on the west end of the main street is a plaque. This is a hundred percent true. The plaque explains how that was the site of the bridge of the gods. It is 100 percent true that that’s what the plaque says. What the fuck is the bridge of the gods you ask the plaque. It’s just a plaque, it doesn’t answer questions, but, you know, if you read it it sort of answers that one. Something like ten thousand years ago there was a natural rock formation that spanned the Columbia. I don’t know how true that is, but it’s pretty widely accepted. I do know that the Columbia basin is lousy for finding artifacts, things like pottery or bows or tent poles. You can find arrow heads. It’s hard to fit an arrow head into the chamber of a gun or even a rifle. I assume there’s some kind of reason for saying there was once a bridge of the gods where there is now a plaque.
Up along the Superior coastline, on the Michigan side, there’s a plaque where Marquette preached to … I don’t know what the plaque calls them, whether it’s tribe, nDn, savages, I don’t recall. If I find that rock and that plaque I’ll let you know. It’s got a date and it was Marquette doing the preaching and you’d think it’d be near the town named after him, but it’s not, I don’t think. Doesn’t matter. The plaques. That there was a rock bridge over the Columbia and that some dead French missionary had the arrogance and compassion, the patience and cruelty, the … I don’t know. The French and the locals got along a lot better than the English and, well, anybody. I don’t think the Spanish ever came that far north. Most of the names of things in this State are locals and French.
Hmmm, I had an intent when I started this, I can’t remember it. I really need to go up north because it’s too far to get to the bridge of the gods. I can’t even remember who’s gods, I’m sure that’s a loose translation. I do know that if I were nomadic I’d be a lot happier stumbling across the Columbia than Lake Superior. I just mean it’s temperate, if windy, and sure it gets pretty icy in the winter, not the river though. People can swim in the Columbia in the summer. Lake Superior is beautiful, majestic, as unique in it’s way as the Columbia gorge is in its, but Christ it’s unforgiving. It doesn’t act like a lake. Where I’m going is like nowhere else on earth. I’ll take pictures if I can, but even if I were fucking ansel goddamn adams with a real camera and not some assclown with a cell, you can’t really capture it on film. Pictured rocks is a bit like the aurora borealis only in rock cliffs and it bends under the weight of the lake.
Ok. Be safe.
Loading comments...