July 21st and 22nd. Lochsa, ID to Portland, OR. I woke up by the little fire early in the morning feeling hazy. The ashes were still warm and the morning air was cold. I wanted to get going. I slid out of my bag and took it over to my tarp tent and then I walked down to the stream and washed my face and drank some water. I know you're not supposed to drink stream water without filtering it, but if it's clear and fast running I always drink some. You could get giardia. You could crash your motorcycle, too. The water and the cool air woke me right up and I started to break down my camp. Estelle got up first. She crawled out of the tent looking groggy and walked into the woods to take a piss. When she came back, I had most of my stuff folded up in a pile, and I was starting to pack it all into my green backpack. She came over, said good morning, and started to help me pack up.

The road took me up through the Nez Perce Reservation. It's the nicest reservation in that part of the world. The Nez Perce lived in a land of plenty until the 1860s. They had the biggest horse herd on the West side of the Rockies and they got rich trading across the mountains, getting stuff from the Columbia River Indians and taking it across to the buffalo hunters. They ate salmon when it ran, and hunted mountain beasts and the Western buffalo herd when it didn't. Chief Joseph, their leader, was one of the tribal leaders who wanted to keep peace with the whites. He made treaty after treaty and after they had all been broken, his heart with them, he led his people away from the Reservation and fought one of the last Indian wars with the U.S. Cavalry. When he finally quit fighting he finished with a phrase that's been memorialized, "I will fight no more forever."  The land there is still a healthy grassland and it is good for horses.

WA 12 bent south towards Walla Walla. It's one of those names that you drive towards without knowing why. I rode straight into town and stopped at a Motel 6 just a few blocks away from the City Hall. I just went inside, pulled my boots off, and called Kate.

Back in my room with the blue glower of the TV on my face, and me waiting sleepily for the phone to ring. In seventh grade I use to wait for calls from a girl I stayed in love with for five years. I'd lie in bed, my heart racing, staring at the phone. Ever since then I've had the burning desire to be loved by someone who's love was hard to get at, totally outside my control. I hadn't been in a hotel room since Rapid City. I showered and got under the covers naked, felt the coolness of the sheets and I waited. All I knew of Kate was the bike and the hotel room. That was our world. On the bike we were two sets of eyes to watch the world whiz by. In the hotel room we were two bodies twisted in the sheets. I was nearly asleep when the phone rang.

I woke up earlier than usual the next morning and rode away with a sense of urgency. The town was still asleep and the streets empty as I wound my way through. Just on the outskirts of town I regained the highway and almost immediately the ghostly outline of the state penitentiary appeared out of the plain, a great gray skeleton of wire and concrete electrified and twinkling like a space ship crash landed out of a grim universal war. In Walla Walla the business is wheat, college, and prison. 

I remember the first time I saw Mt. Hood. The way it appeared on the horizon like an apparition. I had never seen a volcanic cone in my life, much less in my own country and my only reference for it was the pictures of Mt. Fuji I had seen, a symmetrical mountain, out of a picture book, with a clean white snow line marking its altitude. Lewis and Clark were in high spirits when they first saw the volcanoes in the far distance. They had come through the Rockies and were headed downriver in the sunlight, cruising towards their ultimate goal, the ocean. They had not found a northwest passage but they had found their way through.

From the eastern slope of Mt. Hood it's hard to believe the people exist, and then you come down the opposite side of the volcano into the far-flung suburbs of a major city. I got sucked into the interstate vortex and before I knew it I was crossing the Willamette, downtown Portland beneath me. The city is broken into quadrants. The river cuts the city longitudinally. Charlie and Cara lived in SE Portland, a gentle middle class neighborhood full of bungalow cottages built in the 1940s. The weather in Oregon is perfect during the drought from mid-July to early September. It rains the rest of the year. But for those ten weeks it is a manic world of summer spirit, the ideal location to be a hippie. The green things grow so fast you can feel them moving around you. The sun is warm and nourishing. The water clear, cold, and fast.