Off the off the beaten track

"Mom, I can't get over this barbed wire!" Blake called.

I gave my water bottle to Sasha, told her to stand still, and walked back through the cheatgrass to where Blake stood, stuck between bitterbrush, lava rock and, apparently, barbed wire. Sasha and I, following a deer trail through the brush, hadn't crossed any barbed wire; but Blake, he doesn't walk where others walk. I lifted him over the wire and sternly reminded him what it means to follow someone.

My husband had pulled some strings to get my car's oil changed today (don't ask), but we didn't know how long it would take the mechanics to get to it; we didn't know if we three would be sitting on their sidewalk for half an hour or four hours. "Walk to Sawyer Park," my husband suggested. "It's only a mile." I considered it.

The service garage is in a light industrial area of windowless buildings with lots full of RVs and boats and trucks. Security gates enclose everything. Parkway traffic roars by. No one walks around there. That's what I thought at first, anyway. Then I stood with one hand on my hip and another shading my eyes, and I squinted, and considered, and I saw there is, in fact, an interesting way to walk. We could take a jagged line through abandoned lands of hardy, prickly Central Oregon shrubs and invasive weeds. Lizards live in that liminal place. Grasshoppers, too. Grasshoppers clack-clacked, leaping, as we pushed by.

We had water and gorp but it was so hot and prickly that I knew after just 1/4 mile that the kids would never make it to the park. I thought we might find a closer path to the river, though. It was really hot. The kids kept collapsing in bits of shade. When we crossed from that industrial space to a residential street, I hoped for a sprinkler — vainly; even the temporary owners of foreclosed properties know not to run their sprinklers at 3pm.

"Look," I said, pointing to a lot that was once, I suspect, a working ranch. Mature ponderosas grew there. "The river's on the other side of that land. You can make it!" I urged them on.

But at that old ranch we found something better than the Deschutes, at least as far as young, drownable children are concerned: a busted irrigation pipe. Water just poured from that pipe. It made a creek along the side of the road. My kids shouted and leapt. Blake, he climbed a split-rail fence and jumped into the creek's deepest part. With knees bent he was in water up to his neck. Sasha found a snake skin, a drowned lizard and tadpoles. I kid you not: tadpoles. That pipe must've been broken a long time.

Thus refreshed, we walked back to the service garage.


This is the Central Oregon version of Sweet Juniper's experiences in Detroit. You could say I'm making a meme of his post about pathways of desire.