I Am the Fruit of the Applegate Trail

Southern Oregon has the Klamath River, the Rogue River, the Illinois, the Chetco and Coquille and spawns of the Umpqua which mainly travels through the center of the state, but breaks itself well into the south with hundreds of streams and capillaries that run like water off the back of your wet hand. There are other rivers too or they may just be forks of the same, but they most burst out of the Cascades to the east and rush to the Pacific in the west. Remote as the Oregon coast can be, towns were settled long ago at the mouths of these rivers. I found a campsite on the Rogue and spent a cloudless night in warm late summer air.

My Rogue

Southern Oregon is September country, gold and green and dusty. The sun is still lively and bright at this time of the year but pitched at an angle that favors the rocky little valleys and waterways. It encourages the yellowness of the earth, without blinding you to it like in July. Meadows don’t have much of a chance here, with the crowding of mountain ranges pushing up from California - the Siskiyou - and east from the Cascades - the Klamath. Instead, cedar and fir shoot up on every slope and cool the corners and bends of the rivers. Despite the state border, Northern California-Southern Oregon is one unified ecosystem. If geography were allowed to settle borders, this might be the State of Jefferson.

The campsite I chose, about ten miles west of the freeway, is the unfortunately named Indian Mary Campground. For a county park, it’s pretty deluxe, with flat grassy yards, showers, and river launch - not for nothing the “crown jewel of the Josephine County Parks system.” I made it in before nightfall and cooled off in the Rogue, just below my site. It was still brisk at this time of the year, moving with purpose. Not the kind to wade into, but the kind to stand in ankle deep on slippery shale and scoop water onto my chest and over my head and under my arms before warming up again, dripped dry under the sun.

To Olympia!

In September 2012, after what felt like a year of working one stressful project after another, all I wanted to do was leave town and see something different. I'm not entirely certain why I chose the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, but I don't think that really matters, the why. It's the journey, right?


Is it assumed that when traveling the first steps out the door are the hardest? Maybe not for business travel - there’s something at stake. And we have systems in place for business travel. Carry-on luggage, personal hygiene containers that fit just so inside the carry-on luggage, shirts that won’t wrinkle, and securing the right amount of Ambien.

But if the point of vacation is encouraging the nothingness and the stakeless, dawdling in the first hours is really just practice for letting go. It’s all in handling the dawdling and the dukha you create by dawdling.

This is the first camping trip of the year, even though it's coming late, in September. But the crowds should be thin. I know enough about myself that, even though I dream, dream wistfully with hand under chin and staring off to the right, that I will be on the road before 9am, I know such a dream is impossible without packing first. The night before.