Day 1 - Vancouver BC to Enterprise Oregon


Cletis with his dad

Somehow there are no Day 1 pictures on the site thus far. Some will come but they will not necessarily relate to anything said.

I left Victoria on the morning of the 11th with the usual trepidation that accompanies any trip to see Bob. This was good. Anything less would have had me anxious and uneasy about my lack of unease and anything more would have left me puking over the side of the boat.

Anxiety aside, I was pleased to be heading south into the summer solstice. I assume Bob was happy too, though I don't claim to have an accurate understanding of how anyone other than myself feels about anything - and access to reliable information about my own emotional state is often equally as limited. Hence the trip. Forty something and needing to search out the turth in order to come to grips with midlife, a series of incomplete projects, identity angst crap and the recurring nightmare of unearned success.

Off the boat at 8:40 - grinning ear to ear. For the first time that I can recall, Bob was on time.

We hit the border and duty-free by 9:00 and loaded up with a carton of smokes and a 40 of Wild Turkey.

We waited and cursed in line at the crossing for about 15 or 20 minutes before we met Officer Obie's grandson working as check-out boy in the custom's cubical/troll both. We're not sure what it was, but Officer Obie's grandson did not like our plan to go biking in the canyon lands of Utah, so he asked us to step inside and see his cousin Festus, another one of Obie's grandsons.

Festus wasn't interested in our bottle of Turkey or our smokes. To my surprise he wasn't even worried that we might be smugglin drugs or explosives across the border to fuel the revolution. The little pink card that that we carried inside and handed over to Festus told him that we were a possible concern for Naturalization and Immigration. This became clear when nobody ever came near our vehicle to search it, and Festus's questions included - "ya workin'?", "where ya live?", "do ya own yer own home or do ya rent?", "ya rent? - is your rent paid up for this month?", "how much cash ya got?" "Ever been fingerprinted, arrested or charged with anything while visiting the United States?"

"Uh, huh. OK." Festus continued in response to our mostly turthful answers to his politely formulated questions. "This 'ill just take a minute - you guys can sit over there on the Group WD40 bench next to that Taiwanese trio that is having their vehicle seized because they're English isn't clear enough for new recruit High Tower to understand."

Bob and I sat in relative silence, each of us certain that we had seen Festus lift an eyebrow when looking our names up on the computer screen. We also felt certain that the the Naturalization and Immigration Service had in their computer data base, information from ALL the paper records dating back 35 years from ALL the small town court houses in ALL the United States of America. From this we knew that Festus had found the record of our previous indiscretion that had lead to our being arrested with Woody Guthrie's son some thirty-four American Thanksgiving's ago.

We knew we were goin back to jail. Only this time we were going to be manacled to three Taiwanese tourists rather than our commie-hippie-folk-singer friend and the three migrant fruit pickers picked up on weapons charges.

Festus came and called us back up to the counter some 5 minutes to two hours later, handed us our identification and said "Thank you very much. Have a good trip".

I said "Why, thank you. Do we owe you any money?"

white knuckle at the wheel later in the day Bob pushed me out the door.

As I recall, I was intensely amused by this auspicious start to my mid-life misadventure/search for the turth.

Bob was not.

I pulled the truck out onto I 5 heading south at about 10:20. Neither of us felt like stopping in Blaine as would be our normal habit so I resolved to stop and fill up the cooler in Furball, about 12 miles south.

Less than thirty seconds beyond Blaine I felt the back of the seat shaking as Bob started rummaging around for what I thought was "yet-another-fuckin-map-to-keep-track-of-while-we-choose- which-route-not-to-take-based-on obscure-and-meaningless-criteria- which-change-whenever-it-suits-the-fuckin-driver".

Seven seconds later I heard the rip of the paper sleeve and the "pwop" of a fresh 40 ounce Thanksgiving Day turkey. The cab was filled with the sweet aroma of 101 proof bourbon less than a minute after we crossed into the Art land.

The first four ounces of sweetness from the bottle did nothing to improve Bob's sour disposition and I knew I would be stuck driving the rest of the day.

next day
back to trip map