Fifteen Years Ago…..

 

      Five of us, Caty, Clifford, his friend Emily, Belle the dog and I, are headed down the Columbia River toward Portland in a twenty-three-year-old VW bus. I hear nothing but every little tick and clatter of the engine, waiting for some bearing to seize or rod to knock or injector to puke. It is the same when I ride my motorcycle. There are way too many spinning parts in an internal combustion engine for things not to go south eventually, someway, somehow.  

      I am the genetic product of a hundred generations of worrywarts. Five thousand years ago, when a research and development team gathered along the Euphrates River to address the need for the invention of a wheel, my ancestor, Itllneverwork Smith, was not invited to participate in the think cave because of his previous opposition to the pointed stick and hot flaming substance as being too complex and potentially dangerous to be of any possible use to society.  Fifty years ago, when I was ready to board a ship to study in Italy, the cheapest way to go back then, my paternal grandmother wrote and told me not to go, that she had dreamed that the boat was going to sink. A year later she wrote and told me not to come home, that she had dreamed that the boat was going to sink. 

     We are on our merry way to the circus, not just the hometown housecats-through-a-hoop version, but Cirque du Soleil, the snazzy, tres international, no-elephants human-powered roadshow, one version of which we attended in Portland a couple of years ago. It’s only been about six months since we last navigated this chunk of freeway, and in that relatively short time several hundred massive white wind-powered generators have been planted along the ridges above the river on the Washington side of the Columbia.

     There’s been a lot of media grousing about the wind towers, mostly from scenery huggers who keep second homes in the smaller hamlets on the Oregon side and figure that if God wanted wind towers on the horizon they would’ve grown miraculously. Couple those folks with the salmon recovery people and you’ve got a sticky wicket and quirky quorum environmentalist pillow fight. The way I see things, even if all the juice from these expensive devices is being siphoned off to run the slot machines in Vegas, I still support their existence as alternative sources of power, as long as I don’t have to worry about keeping them spinning. 

     Portland is the bumper sticker capital of the universe. I think it has something to do with the constant rain and a basic human need to defeat dreariness with decoration.  On the five block walk from where we found a parking place to the yellow and blue truckers’ tarp circus tents, here are a few of the slogans added to this year’s collection.

     

     Beer, now cheaper than gasoline.

     What would Scooby Do?

     Life is Short. Break some rules.

     Where the hell is Easy Street?

     Too much Pluribus, not enough Unum.

     Why should I have to press “1” for English?

     Monica Lewinsky’s ex-boyfriend’s wife for President.

 

      It was a bit difficult to grasp the overall theme of the circus performance. The show was called “Corteo,” and, according to the ten-dollar program, had something vaguely to do with events surrounding an Italian funeral. I didn’t spend much time trying to hook my mind around the finer philosophical ramifications because the whole affair kicked off with six buff women in Victoria’s Secret attire hanging from chandeliers and doing doublejointed, precarious spinning and hanging moves that your average person is not going to be capable of doing, clothed or not.

         The rest of the two-hours were similarly packed with feats of human athleticism. Four muscled folks cruised around the stage while standing inside stainless hula-hoop thingamabobs, the ultimate human-powered round spinning commuter vehicle. A woman in a sequin suit perched on her back atop a ball and operated thirty real plastic hula-hoops simultaneously with hands, feet, legs, neck and fingers. Springboarders somersaulted over each other way up into the catwalks. A tiny forty-year-old woman in a basket floated across the scenery with the help of six perfectly filled helium balloons and was boinged over the crowd like a beach ball at rock concert. Trapeze artists flung each other across the tent. A highwire woman walked up a 45-degree cable. The ringmaster whistled an entire Bach cantata. No horses, no camels, no lions, just professional athletes who conditioned their bodies to do unusual things, all to the accompaniment of a real live six-piece band. Well worth the $85.00 ticket price. 

     On the way home the next day, Charlie Manson’s “Paranoia is Truth,” maxim came home to roost when, at a refuel station in The Dalles, I smelled antifreeze and looked under our Wasserboxer VW engine to discover that we were leaking fluid at much more than a make-it-home rate. We worrywarts who drive old cars always carry tools, though, so I spent the next three hours on my back next to the gas station bathrooms, bathed in coolant, while Clifford and Emily ate lunch twice at a restaurant where the waitresses called everyone “Cuz,” and Caty ran gofer to a car parts store six blocks away. 

     My friend Wendell Berry once said, “The art of going is getting home before dark.” The bus is presently sitting out in front of our trapper’s cabin, waiting for me to find the factory version of the cobbled and haywired system of hoses that were employed to make it back to base just as the sun completed its circle over the wheatlands and we called it a day.