The Oregon Trip
Mt. St. Helens had erupted, and I was obsessed.
I’d read about it in National Geographic in the school library — the lateral blast, the ash cloud, the forests flattened like matchsticks in radial lines from the crater. The photographs were extraordinary. A mountain that had been there forever, that looked permanent the way all mountains look permanent, and then one morning in May 1980 it wasn’t. The top was gone. The north face had slid into the valley. The sky over three states turned gray with ash. I read every article they published about it, pored over the maps and cross-section diagrams, kept coming back to those images the way I kept coming back to the Rankin/Bass Hobbit on the VCR — studying them, absorbing them, unable to let go. I understood, for the first time, that the ground itself could betray you. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Then we drove to Oregon.
The trip was to visit Aunt Florence — Grandma Dorothy’s sister — who lived near Eugene. Aunt Flo wasn’t around much. She’d come to Wisconsin to visit a few times over the years, but the distance between Eugene and the Bay of Green Bay is the kind of distance that turns family into people you know about rather than people you know. This trip was meant to close that gap.
The car held three generations: Great-Grandma Marie, Grandma Dorothy, my dad Keith, and three kids — me, Helen, and cousin Jimmy. Dad drove. He always drove. He always had a big thermos of coffee within reach, the kind with the glass liner that would break if you dropped it, and he’d pour himself a cup one-handed while the highway unrolled ahead. The thermos was as constant as the road.
The drive was long in the way that all family road trips are long when you’re eight — measured not in miles but in how many times your sister’s elbow crosses the invisible line dividing the back seat. Helen and I fought. All three of us kids got on each other’s nerves. Jimmy was along for the ride in the way cousins are always along for the ride, an extra body in an already-full car, everyone too close for too many hours. But the landscapes kept changing, and the landscapes were the thing.
I watched the country transform through the window. The flat Wisconsin farmland giving way to the prairies, the prairies giving way to something bigger and emptier, and then the mountains appearing — first as smudges on the horizon, then as actual walls of rock and snow rising out of the earth in a way that seemed personally addressed to a boy who’d spent his whole life on flat ground. Mt. Hood in the distance as we drove, white and volcanic and impossibly tall. The deep forests of the Pacific Northwest, Douglas firs so dense the light went green and the understory vanished into shadow. I was in amazement. I drew all of it in my notebooks during the drive — the mountains, the forests, the shapes of things I’d never seen, converting landscape into lines as fast as the car could carry me through it.
I spent a lot of time in a car with my great-grandma between this trip and the drive back from Arizona, and those long miles are the most I ever heard her talk. Her and Grandma Dorothy would talk about their shows, catching up on plot lines and characters the way other people catch up on family news. They seemed like good friends — not just mother and daughter but companions, two women who genuinely enjoyed each other’s company in the confined space of a moving vehicle. They’d bicker sometimes, the way people who love each other bicker on road trips, small disagreements about directions or where to stop or whether the last rest area was really the last one. But Great-Grandma was so quiet and sweet that even her arguments came out in whispers. She’d lower her voice to fight, as if raising it was a rudeness she couldn’t bring herself to commit, and Grandma Dorothy would match her volume out of habit or respect, and the two of them would have their little wars at a decibel level that barely registered over the engine noise.
We stopped several times to sleep and eat, roadside motels and diners, the kind of places that existed to serve the highway and nothing else. Seeing those two dynamics on the road — the women talking and crocheting in the back, Dad silent behind the wheel with his coffee, the kids squirming between boredom and wonder — was its own education. A family is a different thing at sixty miles an hour. The roles shift. The silences mean something different. The person who drives holds everyone’s life in their hands for twelve hours at a stretch, and nobody mentions it because mentioning it would make it real.
Aunt Flo had arranged to get us as close to Mt. St. Helens as we could. It was still smoldering. The eruption had been weeks or months earlier, depending on exactly when we arrived, and the restricted zone was still in place, but Flo had figured out how far in you could go and she took us there. The landscape was devastation — gray ash covering everything, the trees stripped and fallen, the air carrying a mineral smell that was nothing like Wisconsin. I was transfixed. This was the National Geographic article made real, the photographs turned into ground I could stand on. The scale of it was wrong — too big, too empty, too quiet for something that had been so violent. I learned about the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, though I wouldn’t remember that name without years of practice. I wondered if Sasquatch was real and if the eruption had driven him somewhere else.
Aunt Flo bought me volcanic ash in a jar. I kept it for a long time — a sealed glass container of gray powder that had once been the inside of a mountain. It sat on a shelf in my room back in Wisconsin, proof that I’d been somewhere extraordinary, that the earth could explode and you could take a piece of it home.
She took us to the ocean. She had to — she couldn’t let three kids from landlocked Wisconsin visit the Pacific Northwest without seeing the Pacific. We spent a day on the beach, and the ocean was nothing like the Bay. The Bay of Green Bay is contained, knowable, a body of water you can see across on a clear day. The Pacific didn’t end. It went to the horizon and past it and kept going, and the waves came in with a weight and a rhythm that the Bay’s small chop couldn’t touch. The sound of it was constant and enormous, not loud exactly but total, filling every gap in the air.
We collected rocks and walked the dunes. I had jars of ash, sand, and rocks coming home — the collector’s instinct running at full speed, converting every landscape into specimens. I seemed to be the only one interested in the ocean, the forest, and the volcano. Helen and Jimmy liked other things and got their own souvenirs. But I was filling jars. The same impulse that would later fill filing cabinets and hard drives and a markdown repository — the need to take a piece of every world I visited and bring it home, labeled, categorized, kept.
Mostly we spent time at Aunt Flo’s house and visiting. She and Grandma had a lot to catch up on — sisters separated by two thousand miles, the kind of distance that compresses years of living into a week of talking. They’d sit at the kitchen table and the conversation would run for hours, the coffee refilling itself, the kids cycling through the room on their way to somewhere else.
Aunt Flo really made it seem like she was interested in us. She wanted to know all the details of our lives — school, the farm, what we were drawing, what we were reading. She asked questions and listened to the answers, which is a thing adults don’t always do with children, especially children they see once every few years. She was making up for lost time, and she worked hard at it. A lot of hugs from her. The kind of attention that feels warm in the moment and warmer in memory, because you realize later how deliberate it was — she chose to care that much, knowing we’d be gone in a week and the distance would swallow the connection again.
We exchanged a few letters back and forth after we got home. I wrote about the volcano and the ocean. She wrote back. Then the letters faded, the way letters do when you’re eight and the world is moving too fast to sit still with a pen. The connection thinned. Time and miles did what they always do.
I think about Aunt Flo sometimes. The way she arranged the Mt. St. Helens visit because she knew a boy was obsessed. The way she drove us to the ocean because she understood that some things you have to see for yourself. The jar of ash she bought me — a small, cheap, tourist-shop gesture that she somehow knew would matter more than it cost. She was selling us on Oregon, and she nearly succeeded. The forests, the mountains, the volcano still smoking, the ocean that didn’t end — it was a different planet from Wisconsin, and she wanted us to love it the way she did.
I came home with notebooks full of drawings and jars full of the earth. The drawings I’ve lost. The ash I’ve lost. But the trip wrote itself into me the way all those early landscapes did — not as memory exactly, but as a coordinate, a point on the map of the world I was building inside my head. Oregon meant that the earth was bigger and stranger and more dangerous than the farm suggested, and that an aunt you barely knew could love you for a week and mean it completely, and that three generations of women in a car could bicker in whispers across two thousand miles and arrive still speaking.