Oregon Back Road in the Cascade Foothills

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The past few pictures were from within Silverton. This was part of the road on the way there.

 

State Hwy 211 is a highway that runs from Estacada to Molalla. As soon as it leaves Estacada it ascends into the Cascade foothills that surround the town and in no time you're more than 1,500 feet ASL, what dwellings and farms there are fall away, and it's a two-lane paved road through thick forest.

There are some gorgeous views to be hand just from the car.  I got a couple more for when I have more time to post.

But this one charms because of the curve of the road, the minimal evidence of other highway engineering, and the power lines illuminated to remind one of spider webs. It's at once near civilization and remote, nowhere and anywhere, and demonstrates why just a trip between two towns in the back roads of the Cascades piedmont is like a tiny vacation.

Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 44: Farms of Polk County

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Salem and Portland are similar in that the metropolitan city has a west-side county that's still greatly rural that the main coastal route runs through but that's about it, really.

Polk County is no Washington County. It's more like Yamhill County but it doesn't take itself as seriously as Yamhill sometimes does. And there's certainly no sprawling western suburbs, no Silicon Farmland. 

Here's one of the farms we saw off OR 22 that day:

And here is the collection of buildings ... including no less than three grain elevators ... near Rickreall:

Hwy 22 is increasingly becoming a freeway as you pass through the farmland east of Salem but we don't sprawl here in Oregon. Development has not shot rhizomic tendrils out into that area, and it still produces the crops. And the fields all but abut the western city limits of Salem, which is a city of nearly 170,000 (the second ... or third ... no, second ... check back later ... city in the state).

It's timeless and sweet, not everyone's can of beer but for those who love the country, you don't have to go very far out of town to find it, here in the Willamette Valley.

The Steel Gray Of The River On A Cloudy Day

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The POV for this one was just above a short stretch of Willamette River left bank in the shadow of the Marquam Bridge called "Poet's Beach", and the color of the clouds reflected on the water caused the Brown Eyed Girl to exult about the steel gray color of the river water.

There are things about our individual worlds that can't compare to others'. For those of us who grew up in the Willamette Valley, the quality of the light here during days like this is like cloudy days nowhere else in the world; little wonder a great many of us act like Oregon (and particularly northwestern Oregon) invented the cool, cloudy day. But there's something to it, outside of parochial chauvinism; at least one of the actors in the series Grimm mentioned that the particular light of our area gave the production a certain feel it couldn't get elsewhere, like it was a character unto itself.

So, we get steel-gray rivers under torn, cloudy skies like nowhere else in the world, really, and it's not really an idle boast. This sort of light is the light that brings artists from elsewhere.

Howell Prairie Road, North of Pratum, Oregon, January, 2008

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I said I was going to post three but then I remembered I wanted to post this one and so I guess I lied but it was just a harmless one. 

This was taken on a road called Howell Prairie Road NE, about one mile north of a place on the plains east of Salem called Pratum. That's Pratum just ahead there, a small nowhere-place in the farmlands of Marion County with a couple of grain silos at a train stop where the freight trains that ply the eastern side of the Willamette Valley pause to pick up what the farmers make and take it to the world. 

Howell Prairie itself is the rolling farmlands northeast of Salem you have to pass through to get to Silverton. It's big and wide and the sort of place where nothing ever happens and the most interesting thing going in is watching the crops grow and actually ... that's a pretty excellent thing, because that's the way things should be, out here, where even though you can see the glow of town on the horizon even more than ever before, it still feels isolated and out-there.

[maps] Portland to Salem, from the Official Oregon State Map of 1956

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As a companion to the Portland-Salem map I posted a few days back, which see, I give you this clipping, which is from a circa 1956 Oregon official state map.

And what a visual difference there is.

... and what a difference there is, yes? This is handcrafted, a thing that went out of style in the Pacific Northwest for about half-a-century before coming back into vogue with the coming of the microbreweries. A steady, practiced, passionate hand accomplished this work. 

All the place names we know so well are there, including one that not longer is (note the "To Valsetz" director in the lower-left-hand corner of the map, a little south and west of a small place called Falls City). The footprint of the City of Salem was appropriate for the city limits during the 50s, but seemed to survive on Oregon state maps well into the 70s, after the city had annexed much territory (as noted in that entry on that map).

While the roads are largely where they were going to be, a few reroutings strike some intrigue. 99E and 99W area still US highways at the point. Longtime Salemites will no doubt be delighted by the old routes of Hwy 22 going west and east - particularly Hwy 22 to the east, a great diagonal expressway reaching out to just east of Stayton, follows a much more circuitous route. That can still be followed today, if one cares to, by going south on Lancaster Dr SE until it becomes Aumsville Hwy SE. Follow that back road to Stayton and you'll get a hint as to how our grandmothers and grandfathers got out that way.

You'll also find US 99 north from Salem in the familiar alignment of today's I-5. The Interstate highway system was just aborning at that point. The bridge over the Willamette at Wilsonville was, at most, only a fraction of a year old by this point (it opened sometime between 1956 and 1958). Also, State Hwy 217 in the Beaverton-Tigard area followed a route that still exists today as SW Hall Blvd to Tigard and SW Boones Ferry Rd from Tigard south to Wilsonville.

And, while well-served by paved roads, a great deal of the mid-Willamette Valley could only be gotten to by gravel roads. Modern times were still a few years off for some of these places (and indeed could be argued they still haven't gotten there - modern times being what they are, that might actually be an asset, these days)

[OR_liff] Portland-Salem Area Map, From ODOT, 1971

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This I'm just posting because it's map, it's dear, it's sweet, it's nostalgic, and it's Oregon.

This is a map of the greater Portland-Salem area, the population and power center of my state, from an offical Oregon state map of 1971, from ODOT:

Everything in this is the landscape of my childhood. Even so, the city boundaries are somewhat out of date, even for them; Salem only had a population of around 68,000 (it's over 160,000 today); Gresham has topped 100K; all the city boundaries have expanded considerably.

But the roads are still largely in the same place. It's still Oregon, that's for sure. 

[Oregon Eclipse 2017] Getting There Was, Actually, Less Than Half The Fun.

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It's not the destination, it's the journey, so they say. Stop and smell the roses is also what they say.

I'd like to find they and give they a swirly or something. Unless they has more constructive things to add, they can keep their lips well buttoned, as far as I'm concerned. They never had to commute to and from a total solar eclipse, did they?

Another thing they said there'd be is a literal car-mageddon. They were wrong, until they were right.

From the 1971 Official Oregon
State Map, published by ODOT

Now, as I've priorly regaled, I am a child of Oregon earth, specifically, that Oregon earth around Silverton. I don't need GPS or really even much of a map if I'm anywhere north of Albany and east of Independence here in the northern Willamette Valley, God's little half-acre, and I'm pretty good at south of that too. And what they were saying was that Monday, August 21st, 2017, was going to be hell-on-wheels, provided those wheels were on an Oregon road in the mid-Willamette Valley.

Still, we went for simplicity in the battle-plan. Head as far south as we could in the time we had. We started out from Out 122nd Way at around 8:15-8:30 AM. From the research I did, I figured if we could get anywhere south of Aurora, or perhaps Mulino if we hit Hwy 213 instead of Hwy 99E, we'd be in line for some worth-it eclipse viewing. As we headed south, I had a tab open to Google Maps traffic as well as TripCheck.org, the ODOT statewide traffic site. It was looking grim then, with notable traffic slowups reporting along 99E between Oregon City and Canby in the gorge stretch of the Willamette River above the Falls, some notable slowing in the area between Canby and Aurora, and at Hubbard. Hwy 213 south of Oregon City was reportedly a long, 2-lane parking lot with an accident, which also affected our Plan C: Beavercreek Road into the backside of Molalla. Hwy 99E looked like the best bet, all things considered, so down the Pacific Highway East we went.

Strange thing, though. By the time we reached Canby and scored some Dutch Bros, it was 9:15 AM and we were a little on-edge, but here's the bizarre thing: there were no real appreciable jams or travails. As a matter of fact, it was pretty clear. In a few minutes, we were almost to Aurora, which is three miles farther down the road:

Highway 99E at Barlow Road. No poblano.

About 3/4ths of a mile beyond the last photo. Just over this
hill is Aurora. Amusingly, the yellow diamond sign
to the right there reads CONGESTION.

Our blithe sojourn into the east side of Woodburn was scant minutes away.

So the trip down went. Happy, casual, relaxed. I had heard that the expected throng at the Oregon Coast was a no-show; could it have been similar to with the mid-Willamette Valley? The signs were promising.

It was a roadside sight
on the way down, now,
we call it home

That promise was actually broken after the event. It was time to go home and everyone left at the same time. Our vantage point was at about Young Avenue and North Pacific Hwy in Woodburn, as previously mentioned. After waiting a few minutes to let the rush of the event abate we too embarked on the northward trek home. We hit the old bumper-to-bumper on before we were even half-a-mile down the road in Woodburn; it was locked and loaded from just north of the Hwy 211/214 junction, just south of the MacLaren Youth Correctional Home, to Hubbard. This two-mile distance took more than 45 minutes to cover.

There was not only time to stop and smell the roses, there was time to smell the exhaust from other cars, the seething impatience of other drivers, the interiors of other cars (but be polite, always ask first!), to lick the roadsigns and electric fences, to settle down, marry, and start a second family. People would get to Hubbard, park the car, find an apartment and just live there because, hell, they weren't going anywhere anyway. It took so long to get from Woodburn to Hubbard that when we saw this sign, I got out, signed up for lessons, completed them, and by the time the car passed the other end of the property I had three offers for concert bookings.

It took us so long to get from Woodburn to Hubbard that I learned the
piano her. I open at the Keller in December; watch this space

North of the Hwy 551 turnoff the grinder loosened up a bit but it choked back up by the time we got to the east end of Canby. 99E was stop and go from the west end of Canby to just past New Era, then broke open again, choked up a little just as we got to the Oregon City city limit at Canemah, then was stop-and-go but a little less aggravating through Oregon City's adorable-yet-claustrophobic downtown. We stopped at the Shell station by the Arch Bridge for a breather.

The distance from the spot we were, in Woodburn, to the spot we found ourselves in, in Oregon City, is close enough to eighteen miles. We had made that trip in about three hours. Woodburn to Oregon City - at an average of six miles per hour.

If a total solar eclipse is a once-in-a-lifetime event, then so is that traffic. And if I ever get my hands on they, they's got some hard explaining to do.

And so it goes.

[OR_liff] An Oregon Solar Eclipse Journal, 21 August 2017.

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Welcome to a place whose descriptive phrase, the mid-Willamette Valley, cause my heart to sing like a finely-tuned instrument, and a minute many of us have been waiting for for rather a few years was impending.

Work let me go on time at 7:00 AM. We were on the road southbound by 8:15 AM, flying by the seat of our pants, as is our way. A number of plans danced through our heads up until now, but we knew, in our heart, the only practical one was hit the road and get as far south as we could by 10:15 AM, and that was the bones, sinew, and details of the thing. No more, no less.

At 9:40 AM, we found ourselves cruising down the main drag on the east side of Woodburn, Oregon, N. Pacific Hwy. Just north of Young Avenue, where Hwy 214 enters town, there is, wonder of all wonders - an Arctic Circle. We suddenly know where our eclipse brunch is happening. The latitude and longitude pair 45° 8' 15.468'' N, 122° 50' 36.8268'' W is near enough within a few feet where the nose of the old Subaru warhorse was parked in the parking lot, by the front door. Getting down as far as Woodburn was a boon, especially considering the traffic-ocalypse we were promised prior to the apocalypse. We saw many pullouts on our way down: the two weigh stations by the Wilsonville-Hubbard cutoff were neatly but tightly stocked with lookers, and there's a lot that the Hop Festival uses in downtown Hubbard that had happy people arrayed about in lawn chairs, eclipse glasses firmly in place, following faithfully the Horkheimer dictum keep looking up. 

On the 21st of August 2017, Hwy 99E was the place to be.

Once in Woodburn we started looking for a good parking space, which was also no challenge. When the Arctic Circle hove into view, The Wife™ squealed with delight and I found the empty parking lot most welcoming. Our meal, and our vantage, was set.

The remainder of this is a stream of pictures, arranged in the order I took them by the time coded into the metadata. The actual times may vary by several seconds, of course.

09:41 AM PDT

The view north (toward Portland) on N. Pacific Hwy.

... and the view south (toward Salem).

10:09 AM PDT. 

Our own 'pinhole camera': a square of foamcore which projected a little fingernail-shaped sliver of Sun on another white piece of foamcore ... or even the white tabletops outside the Arctic Circle.

10:12 AM PDT.

The Wife™ said she'd seen the sunlight go a little wan. I didn't see it at first, but comparing it with the first photos above, it's now kind of obvious. The sunshine is a bit off, almost imperceptibly, but it's going there. There's a sepia tone to the sunlight and the atmosphere now.

We are now about six minutes out from start of totality.

10:15 AM PDT.

I've just now noticed that the lights in the Arctic Circle's sign have come on.

10:16 AM PDT.

The contrast between the lighted sign and the environment is now more palpable. A sort of duskiness has begun to tone the sky down.

10:17:07 AM PDT.

While still quite light out, the sign lights for the business next door have come on. The dark feels as though it's an actively gathering thing. The sky is deepening to an indigo toward the zenith.

10:17:17 AM PDT.

As above, only moreso. Color is being neutralized from the world around us. There is now a strange tension in the air that I can't describe - or maybe it's just me, keyed up from the expecation.

We are just about one minute out from totality.

10:17:42 AM PDT.

The sky to the west (looking west-northwest over the Arctic Circle) seems to have acquired a delicate pall of darkness. We are  about 35 seconds, give or take, out from totality.

10:18:05 AM PDT.

It might be a subjective thing, again, but the feeling of being borne down on by the arrival of the umbra is a thing that is almost solid in the mind. Anyone who doubted that anything would happen would stop doubting now.

The visual contrast between the still-daylit (but just barely) sky and the now-energized lot lights and building illumination is so discordant that the mind begins to bend a little. On the horizon, in every direction, an orange tinge more appropriate for sunset than mid-morning.

Everything you look at contradicts itself.

10:18:20 AM PDT.

The edge of the umbra arrives at Woodburn, Oregon. The semi-darkness goes from unreal to surreal.

10:18:30 AM PDT. Totality.

It's a peculiar (in the singular way as well as the full-tilt-boogie way) darkness in the heart of the shadow. It's as dark as a moonlit night, but there is something about the darkness that it is imbued with an eerie light rather much unlike that of the full moon: it's a light inside the darkness. The air hushes, then a light breeze goes up. You feel the temperature decrease ever-so-slightly. The orange sunset is a 360-degree thing, anointing all horizons in every directions equally; you are struck with th realization that you are looking outside the shadow, which does a thing to your perceptive POV, and you realize that a mere handful of miles separate you from that area.

10:19:20 AM, PDT.

By my reckoning, we are a little more than halfway through totality. It took a few more precious seconds to find my foot in this fleeting new world than I'd like, because right now the mind is in overdrive, striving to create in the memory an indelible record of everything one is seeing.

Here, by the way, is the star performer:

It's not ideal, but for a snapshot on a digital camera taken without fiddling around with any settings, more than enough to be a lifetime's treasure.

10:19:40 AM PDT.

A tighter shot of the omni-directional sunset. A contrail glows there. The traffic signal at Young Avenue and Pacific Highway is neon in its scintillation.

10:19:49 AM PDT.

The obscured Sun competes with a streetlamp. The streetlamp is winning, for now.

10:20:05 AM PDT.

The eclipse about to do the "diamond ring", the gracenote that heralds the end of totality. We have been in the dark for pretty close to two minutes now.

During the times I wasn't snapping photos, me and The Wife™ were looking directly at the eclipsed Sun. They tell you not to look at the Sun during an eclipse, and that's true in the main. We take it as read that the Sun is incredibly bright; consider that you can have up to 99 per cent of the Sun's disk covered and it's still difficult to tell for sure that any light has been occluded at all. Partial eclipses are cool, but that's still the blinding sun, and it will damage your eyes just as surely as a totally uncovered sun will.

But once the Sun is completely occulted, and only so long as it's completely occulted, you can chance a look. One still must be careful; when you see the diamond ring, it's a few split seconds before you must look away. We watched that bead of light erupt on the rim of that perfect circle and then spread outward from there. We looked away before it got too bright.

Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun,
But Mama ... that's where the fun is.


10:20:36 AM PDT.

The light began to intensify and we're now back at a point where it's just kind of dusky.
That, and our minds are blown.

A once-in-a-lifetime thing. And if you couldn't be there, at least I could show you. It's a personal thing that will remain at the edge of my perception as long as I live now.

The drive down was - you might say - totally worth it. They don't leave total eclipses on your doorstep every week you know.

[liff_in_OR] Newberg's Classic Dairy Queen Sign

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Newberg is the first town you get into after leaving the Portland Metroplex going south on Oregon State Hwy 99W. It's the vanguard of wine country, the sentinel admitting you to that charming area known as Yamhill County.

At the entrance to the center of town, the highway splits into a couplet made up of First Street and Hancock, and this continues for about ten or twelve city blocks. At the west end, the two streets snap back together, cross the railroad tracks, and head on southwest to the land of the eternal traffic jam, Dundee. And, if you didn't look quickly, you'll have missed it.

404 West First Street. It's a DQ that looks quite a bit like just about every other DQ you're likely to see; cream-colored walls, red mansard roof.  But there's something that might catch the eye a little more than other things, especially if you have an eye for the classics.

Some ten-fifteen years back, the DQ wasn't the commodious sit-in place it was, it was a traditional drive-up. Anyone familiar with the adorbs little DQ drive-up and sit-out at SE 56th and Division here in Portland will be able to picture this. It was quite a bit the same. Well, about ten or fifteen years back, the Newberg DQ decided to give its patrons the inside-dining experience. I was sad, a little. It's nice to sit inside with your burger, but the old-fashioned burger driveups have a charm that can't be denied or resisted.

But they kept the old sign. Standing fifteen or twenty feet up, on a stout pole that shows a bit of rust, the stylized ice-cream cone keeps happy watch on the western entry to Newberg, taking in the equipment rental place, a Dutch Bros, a trailer court across the way, and a 100% Hispanic tire-seller across the street.

Whether or not you'd ever live in Newberg, there's a definite American-small-townness that recalls the rosy memories of prim little farming towns. The past wasn't perfect, but certain facets were adorable.

In Newberg, some of it can be found under the sign of DQ. Roadside neon, the way it used to be … and still is.

[design] Rose Valley Butter's New Package Design

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There's lot of good local to be bought in the stores of Oregon. A lot of it is provided by producer-based coöperatives; Darigold is one, and Tillamook's cheeses is another. There's one that I find many people haven't heard of perhaps: it's the Farmers' Cooperative Creamery, based in McMinnville, Wine Country's capital city.

Their brand, which one can find in the dairy case as WinCo, is Rose Valley Butter. Here is how it, until recently, was packaged:

… and, as of about 2 weeks ago, here's how we started seeing it:

Quite a change. Let's give it a little look-see…

Old package, left: New Package, right.

The original illustration is the real star of the old package. The color yellow is perhaps expected but really makes it a cheerful, sunshiny thing. The choice of illustration does play a little havoc with the choices the typographer had to make and therefore affects the hierarchy a bit: you see the word BUTTER big and proud but the brand name, ROSE VALLEY, kind of takes a supporting role. Not ideal, but understandable.

I love that illustration, seriously. It's charming and a little corny, but well-executed for all that. It fits the image of a country creamery. The arranging of the letters inside the scroll ORIGINAL almost give it a hand-layed-out feeling.

On the back panel of the package you'd find this charming bit of history:

This brand is the most Oregon thing you'll look at today, seriously. Hits all the positive notes, family, local, purity … it doesn't say sustainable, but it doesn't have to. Passionate? You bet. The Wife™'s world would be complete if only they marketed an unsalted version.

Please do this, FCC. Make my The Wife™a happy woman. She'd buy that stuff so hard, man.

The new package is rather subdued, though. Here's a close up look.

The new design is a more dialled-back, quiet presentation. The sunny yellow is gone, replaced with a rustic buff tone; the charming farmscape banished in favor of a simple illustration of a generic rose; the omission of rBGH (as well as a note which I understand is Federally mandated about boasting about omitting rBGH) are both much more prominent. All four panels of the box now look like this.

The hierarchical problem is well-solved here, however, the solution of putting the brand name in Chancery script does not satisfy. Each majuscule letter of ROSE VALLEY here is fine as a drop cap or some similar application on their own. With each individual glyph having such a broad-shouldered personality, though, they all want to be the star. The ultimate visual effect is uncomfortable, optically discordant. Not only is a proper kerning between the initial V and the A in VALLEY impossible, the swash on the top of the A suggests that it's foolish to try (and an apt demonstration as to why headline type in this style is pretty much a bad idea).

The big improvement is the FCC logo there. I enjoy it. It's a cool, simple logo, type with a graphic fillip, that is a bit rustic and proud of it. Letting the logo flag fly is definitely a positive development.

I'm reluctant to bag on a brand I genuinely like. But I've come to the definite conclusion that the new-look Rose Valley Butter package is kind of a step back. If the brand needed to be refreshed (and I'd debate that), I think they should have tried a few more ideas.

But we're not going to quit you over this, FCC. Far from it. You have fans in this household.

But get on that unsalted butter, okay. We're so there for that.