Posts Tagged ‘oregon’

Everyone knows that there is weird scummy stuff on the beach. Sometimes it gets opalescent and piles up in a way that looks like it might make a good desktop background for one’s computer.

While driving through the Santiam Pass today along highway 22, it occurred to me that I don’t have a favorite. Favorite thing to look at in Oregon, that is. I asked David what he thought the most scenic thing in Oregon was and he was befuddled and had no answers really, either.

Here are a few obvious choices for scenery destinations in Oregon, along with a few personal faves. What are yours?

There are many, many ways to get dead here. The most obvious are gravity-assisted: sudden pits, false floors, collapsing beams. But there are also many serrated edges, rusty pointed pipes that reek of lockjaw and gangrene; ragged glass and naked edges of sheet metal. It is no wonder Baker County has stenciled DANGER PELIGRO on [...]

Satellite views like this one are what make conspiracy folks and lovers of the mysterious have “squee” moments.
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In Oregon’s remote Christmas Valley, coming upon this military installation of debated purpose is certainly eerie. The Internetty consensus is that the establishment has something to do with Over-the-Horizon radar or some such–at least according to [...]

Mr. Pencil and I are making a point of strengthening our library of local and regional history books. We have the biggest collection of Raymond Hatton books (mostly about Central Oregon) on all of LibraryThing. Recently we tried to buy a first edition (from 1928) of Lewis McArthur’s Oregon Geographic Names, which is now in [...]

I have told you about the desert in two ways: how Millican Valley tried to kill me, and how a glen of meaninglessness in the desert led to the most important thing I’ve known.
Now I’ll tell you about how they start to connect end-to-end in the ring that is my story and then I’ll be [...]

Ten or twelve long miles south of Bend, Ore., on US 97 is a resort community called Sunriver, which most of you know already because you have been there with me, at times. Sunriver is one of those places that lacks its own meaning and is instead a pastiche of things that happen between people [...]

The tubes are giving me a walloping so I do not have the stamina to correct all of the photographs I shot this weekend, traveling in (frigid) Central Oregon. But here is a sneak preview:
p.s. This is a two-shot composite: first shot exposed for sky, second for foreground. Digital imitation of graduated neutral density filter.

“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
– Walt Whitman (from my journal, April 19, 2008)
I am married to a saint. This is a blessing [...]

It was my idea, after the kitten rescue and the leaving again, to show David Foster Flat Road, a gravel road leading west from the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, almost chiefly because of its monotony. Get over the ridge, see, I urged, and you can see forever and forever of the same.
I had driven several [...]