Steens Mountain

The rabbits must have had a death wish. They kept running in front of my car. I knew they saw me coming; I was the only thing for miles and miles out near Steens Mountain. No cars, no streetlights, no houses, not even fences, just a cattle guard now and then. I’m not quite sure why the rabbits kept sacrificing themselves on my bumper despite my best efforts to avoid them. It must be real harsh living for them with the mountain views, fresh air, and clear water.

Steens Mountain is far away from everything. So far that I hadn’t passed anybody on the road in three hours, so far that they don’t even pave the road running along the eastside of the mountain, so far, that if I died, no one would look or find me for a very long time.

You might wonder what might posses me to drive out there. For the last year I’d been having dreams: dreams that told me to climb this mountain, dreams that specifically told me to climb this side of the mountain. I realize the implications of this. The only people who climb mountains because of a dream or a voice are prophets- going all the way back to Moses- and the deranged. But I still couldn’t stop thinking about it and the dreams persisted. So, the Monday after finals, I decided to drive out east to conquer the mountain and to put the dreams to rest.

Anyone who has driven east of Bend knows what’s out there: a whole lot of nothing. But because there is nothing, you start to notice little things, like a stand of juniper out in the distance, a buzzard swooping across the road, or an ancient lava flow. Because humanity has left few marks out there, you are allowed to enjoy nature, which is sparse, beautiful, dry and majestic.

Like most people who find beauty in the desert, I realized that there is something strange in a having a strong affinity for what other people would consider the absence of everything. But there is something there, and it is something that sticks and remains even after the last whiff of sage leaves the nostrils.

Steens Mountain is both magnificent and odd. It appears to rise out of nothing, shooting craggy peaks out of a flat desert floor. It’s incongruous, it’s not like the Cascades which just seem like they should be there, Steens mountain doesn’t fit in with the surroundings, which gives it an ominous and unearthly appeal. Combine this look with its isolation, and it’s perhaps only natural that rabbits would leap in front of my car with eyes full of liebestod.

I parked my car and started along a snow covered jeep track, but lost it after only a half mile. I continued through brush and scrub and eventually found a dry creek bed and followed it for a while. Pretty soon, my car was nowhere in sight, and when I paused to take a drink of water, I heard a stream trickling a mile off and noticed all sorts of tracks going every which way through the snow. There were plenty of deer tracks but after a while I saw some cougar tracks and wondered if their lives were as hard as the rabbits.

The hike was difficult. Perhaps it’s because the mountain is crazy steep and I am a little out of shape, but I was huffing and puffing and sweating pretty hard despite the 30 degree weather. It was cold, windy and lonely up there and when my burning bush didn’t materialize, and darkness fell, I decided to take stock of my situation. It seemed to be less and less of a good idea to spend that night up on the mountain, with snow half way to my knees and nothing around to make a fire with. Feeling dejected and double crossed by the force that had sent me up there to begin with, I descended the mountain.

Perhaps the only real reason I had decided to climb the mountain to begin with was the desire to get out to the middle of nowhere and to be utterly alone. This could be construed as anti-social, but I just felt like I needed to do it, and it was something I had wanted to do for a while. I had left another desert in Iraq, and only found myself longing to return to another desert. It was illogical and perhaps not the best of timing, but I did it. On the way home I got a flat. The Burns Police Department laughed at me from their warm Chevy Tahoe as I changed the tire while snow began to fall. I then drove on a donut all the way from Burns to Bend in the snow in the middle of the night making the long drive at a steady 35 miles per hour. I just can’t seem to get the desert out of my head.

An Open Letter to the Oregonian Weather and Travel Gods

Alright, I know you are all powerful and have every right to be vengeful and angry, full of omnipotent wrath. And I know I’ve been tempting you a lot lately. But how come every time I go off on some zany trip of mine, you have to punish me? You know I’m not used to your whims, it’s been a while since I’ve been here. Can’t you just take it easy on me every once and a while? I mean, why do I have to get a flat 130 miles from civilization in the desert? Why do you try to kill me when I drive to church on Sunday morning before the plows have come out? Why do you try to careen my car off a cliff when driving through the pass? It makes me want to gnash my teeth.

Alright, I know I might be taking advantage of your mercy a little to often, and there have been many times when I have made it home safe. But if you could just see to it that I make over the moutains to the Willamette valley this weekend, I promise I’ll just stay in Bend the rest of the winter. I will tempt you no longer and will make sacrifices to your names. Just don’t try to kill me anymore.

Eugene

Everyone else was off doing something amazing with their life and I was stuck in Iraq; surrounded by barbed wire in a place where people wanted to kill me.

A dust storm had just lifted after clouding our post in Husaybah next to the Syrian border for the last week; I was able to get on the internet for the first time since the storm began. I went onto Facebook and wasted an entire hour looking at photographs of people I had known in high school who were now in college. They looked happy and excited, whether these pictures were of them belting out some karaoke or climbing a mountain. College was supposed to be the best four years of people’s lives and I was completely missing out on it. I couldn’t wait to go to college and spent hours daydreaming about sitting in the grass somewhere reading Nietzsche or playing ultimate Frisbee on a care-free afternoon.

But when I started college a month ago and felt that I really hadn’t missed out on much. College so far doesn’t seem too removed from the high school I graduated from 5 years ago. There are classes to attend, notes to be taken, papers to write, and for the most part I am extremely ambivalent it all. College in my idealized form seemed like nonstop fun and parties and so far it has been a lot of work. I’m not quite sure what all the fuss is about or what the big deal is anymore.

I thought maybe it was just because I moved back home to Bend, isolated from everything by three hours and a whole lot of mountains.  But when I visited Eugene on Halloween, I still felt disenchanted and felt no more connected to the world of college I had seen idealized.

My accomplice and fellow veteran, Mat, began wandering the streets of Eugene in search of trouble and the college life. Today was game day, and there were dude bros everywhere, decked out in Oregon t-shirts three sizes too small, aviator sunglasses worn oh so ironically, and a baseball cap cocked in just the right direction. We decided to duck into a bar and sit out the rest of the afternoon until evening struck.

By 10 o’clock, the bars were full of dude bros, sucking down Coor’s Light and shouting about the game that finished four hours ago. They were pushing and elbowing their way around the bar, talking about how drunk they were and how much they kicked the shit out of USC earlier that day. After hearing one dude order one Jaeger bomb too many, we left and started walking down the street.

The street was loud and boisterous; groups of students milled everywhere, laughing, and running into traffic. We followed one of these groups that approached a house that was packed to the brim. We walked up to the door guarded by a little 19-year-old woman who was trying to turn us away, saying we didn’t know anyone here. We agreed with her but walked in anyway, a woman half my size should never be a bouncer. There was nowhere to move to and we tried to part the sea of people as best we could. There seemed to be plenty of Keystone light going around and a thick cloud of an illegal substance hovered in the air. There was a girl stumbling around, barely able to stand up, who was going to be spending the night at the hospital for alcohol poisoning and a group of bro dudes who were more than willing to help her.

I was disgusted and wandered from room to room. They looked like they had just passed the flush of pubescence and hadn’t done much with their lives beside spend the parent’s money. Mat tried asking where the smell was coming from but only received evasive answers. Mat, fully bearded and wearing a flannel shirt, after asking 3 people and still not getting hooked up realized it wasn’t just because they were being selfish; everyone thought he looked like a narc. Who else but a narc would show up with a beard and be five years older than everyone else at the party?

We left that party and wandered around Eugene some more but realized that we had lost something those last 5 years we had been in the marine corps. The “best years of our life” were now gone and we had missed out on them. We were now the creepy old dudes at parties and the parties themselves seemed like a huge waste of time; 19 year olds having the first taste of an adulthood we’ve already had for a while. Being gone for five years disconnects you from society in an odd way and changes your paradigm. Some pop culture references escape me: I have never seen “High School Musical,” don’t have an I-Phone and dislike texting. I wish I could relate sometimes but then I realize that it doesn’t matter and all those cool parties and unforgettable nights that I used to think about missing weren’t that much to begin with.