Amongst The Willamette Archipelago

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The highway along the Cascade Piedmont, Hwy 213, sometimes has a surreal aesthetic to it. I mean, the highway winds along side the hills and looks out over the farmland of the eastern Willamette Valley and the feeling is nothing so much as being in a speedboat on a peculiar sea, dotted with islands.

There'll be large stretches of flat tilled land with a massif in the distance that's really an island of trees rising from the generations-tilled flatland.

There's a vague feeling of otherworldliness to the landscape there.

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.

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.

Silverton, Mac's Place, January 2008

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Third and last old pic for the night, and old is appropriate here, is this photo of downtown landmark Mac's Place. This tavern has existed in downtown Silverton since before then, no, even before that, recently revealed research suggests that it was founded either in the late Corduroy or the early Cretinous period (Ramblin' Rod, 1972), though a recent monograph published by Keeko the Clown in 1969 and found in a bootlegged edition of MAD magazine from August 1976 has garnered support for the founding actually being in the mid-Cantankerous period, after the impact of the great shaving cream bolide but before the first Republicans arrived in Oregon.

At any rate, enjoy.

Camera was, again, the ViviCam 3705.

Silverton Back Street, January 2008

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While Silverton isn't a large place, it does have back streets of its own that have a roguish charm.

This is North 3rd Street at Park Street, one block north of Oak. North 3rd is unpaved north of Oak and seems more an alley than a street from here on north the short remaining distance until it ends at B Street. 

The camera, as before, is the ViviCam 3705.

Downtown Silverton, January 2008

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Had the urge to post, but not much valuable or useful to say, so here's one of three old photos I have that caught my eye. The camera used in this one was a ViviCam 3705, not much by today's standards but when I got it it was more than $100 of income and 3.5 Mpx and digital zoom and boy was it liberating at the time ... a camera that just shot the picture in whatever light level I had? I've always had my misgivings about our headlong rush into the future but digital photography was certainly not one.

This is downtown Silverton, Oregon, the town of my birth, looking north on North Water Street from between East Main and Oak, taken during the afternoon of 1 January 2008.