Transit Modality Decision Overload - Picture of the Day

A plethora of transit options at the South Waterfront campus of Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. (Photo by Bill Lascher).

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No Exit - How Low Car Life Will Save Portland When The Big One Strikes

The eastside approaches to Portland's Fremont Bridge are among the many pieces of transportation infrastructure vulnerable to a major earthquake.

This story originally appeared as the cover story for the December, 2012 edition of Portland Afoot, Portland's 10-minute news magazine about buses, bikes & low-car life.

Very, very slowly, about 29 miles beneath you, 50 quadrillion tons of bedrock are bending toward the day when low-car life in Portland ceases to be optional.

Someday, maybe tomorrow, a 700-mile stretch of Northwest coast known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone will rupture with a quake equal in strength or stronger than the one that struck Japan last year. Such a temblor, or even a more moderate one centered on one of three faults under the city, will likely shatter Portland’s brittle infrastructure.

Even the bridges and overpasses that aren’t immediately damaged by swinging counterweights or sliding soils (which are likely to hit every major bridge except the Burnside and Marquam) will be shut down for inspections, shutting off food and fuel deliveries to much of the city for at least two days. And the blockages may last a long time if inspectors can’t reach the structures, or if aftershocks start the whole process over again.

That would be bad.

Interstate 84, Interstate 5 and the Willamette and Columbia rivers may all be impassable, city documents report. But those damages would only deepen the problem that is likely to follow even a moderate earthquake near the city: a crippling shortage of motor fuel.

Broken lines

Superstorm Sandy forced New Yorkers to wait in line. A Northwest quake could shut off Oregon’s energy and fuel supply almost completely.

Oregon is one of 16 states that processes no oil of its own. Ninety percent of its refined petroleum arrives by either an insecure pipeline or a tanker from Puget Sound. A quake could fracture the pipe, a tsunami could block the shipping channel and shaking could destroy the vulnerable storage facilities that serve the entire state.

All fuel that makes it to Portland arrives in a six-mile zone of tank farms and terminals built along the wet soils of the Willamette River, between Sauvie Island and the Fremont Bridge. This critical energy infrustructure hub also houses electric transmission stations and natural gas terminals, and the entire area is at risk of damage from even a moderate quake, let alone a cataclysm.

Pipelines, piers and fuel tanks there – storing, on average, 3 to 5 days of fuel – were all built in a liquefaction zone, before codes accounted for the area’s seismic dangers. Only three storage tanks have been prepared for liquefaction.

“Western Oregon will likely face an electrical blackout, extended natural gas service outages, liquid fuel shortage, as well as damage and losses in the tens of billions of dollars in a future major Cascadia earthquake,” a report from the state Department of Geology and Mineral Industries warned in August.

MAX trains will go offline, their overhead electrical wires useless. Highways are likely to be blocked. TriMet buses will run on new, improvised routes until their garages run out of diesel. City officials will ask Portlanders to stay put for at least five days in their broken city.

And that’s when we’re likely to discover that Portland will be better off in an apolocalypse than it looks.

Biking to resilience

It turns out Portland has been preparing for disaster for a generation. We just didn’t know it.

“Portland’s thriving alternative transportation and food networks, including cargo bikes and food carts, will be recruited to assist with the delivery of food, fuel, water, medical supplies, etc., to each of these neighborhood hubs,” says an April 2012 appendix to the city’s emergency operations plan.

Nobody’s told the cart owners yet. But since carts can become rolling mess halls and their pods are well-known gathering spaces, Portland Bureau of Emergency Management spokesman Randy Neves says it makes “perfect sense” for carts to help if they’re able.

Another tool in Portland’s disaster arsenal has drawn more attention: its robust bike culture.

Indeed, the earthquake appendix says bicycles may be the “most practical” way for anyone to get around if a quake damages pipelines.

Ethan Jewett, a leader in the official neighborhood emergency team (NET) for the Woodlawn area, noted that bike sales skyrocketed in Japan after its 2011 quake.

“Many of the functions in a response, of going to get supplies, of carrying communication equipment, of doing the NET mission, of residents doing supply runs – they all can be facilitated by bikes,” Jewett says.

With maybe 5% of pedal trips in the city already happening on bikes that can haul cargo – that’s the rough estimate from Clever Cycles‘ Eva Frazier – Portland is unusually ready for action.

It’s a good reason to own a wrench, a patch kit, and more tubes than you think you need, says Jewett.

After all, your neighbors might need a tuneup, too.

Source: Portland Afoot (www.portlandafoot.org)

Chipping in

But Jewett also admits that not everyone can ride a bike, and that Portlanders are far less prepared for a quake than the Japanese were.

He said it’s also important to get to know your neighbors, their needs, and who’s been trained in emergency response. The city’s official plan estimates that its NETs will triple in size after a disaster as uninjured survivors look for ways to help.

And that’s the final way Portland’s low-car culture will be useful in a disaster: It’s helped us build a city whose citizens interact. And as prepared as people like Jewett may be, many of us struggle to put food on the table, let alone in a disaster kit.

“There are a lot of people over here in this neighborhood for whom tonight’s meal is an emergency,” said Jewett. “They’re not going to be buying extra batteries. They probably don’t have a flashlight, so these are our neighbors and I think that we’re going to be taking them in.”

Find this story and other coverage of all things related to low car life at portlandafoot.org. More tips on how to prepare your home and family for a quake are available at pdx.be/Resilience.

Along for the Ride: Island Time Aboard the 85

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Welcome to the second week of Along for the Ride, my series of weekly chronicles of Portland, OR-area transit lines. If you haven't already, check out the first edition and if you like the series, please spread the word, or even cover my bus fare.

This week, I woke early Wednesday morning intending to ride Line 85 commuters travelling to work in the warehouses and distribution centers of Swan Island. Transformed into a peninsula in the 1920s after a multi-year dredging effort, the island once housed Portland's airport and was an important shipbuilding center during World War II. It's now a major industrial area.

I visited a touch too late in my morning (boarding my first bus a little after 8 a.m.) to experience the daily commute. That just means I'll eagerly anticipate a future "Along for the Ride" entry about the Swan Island Transportation Management Association's free evening shuttle. For now, though, it's time to come along for the ride:

Moments in Transit

8:12 a.m.: Arrive at the Rose Quarter Transit Center. Watch a couple fight. Wait with a man clad head to toe in red clothing and a woman in a green dress chatting energetically on a cell phone. Get disappointed when they all board a different bus. Finally board with six other passengers seven minutes later.

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8:21: Realize I violated a central tenet of multimedia journalism. My audio recorder battery dies just as the ride starts. Silver lining: Next week I'll have a better, easier to use recorder and, more importantly, more familiarity with the ABC - Always Be Charging - rule.

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8:30: The bus gets lonely as three passengers leave. [shashin type="photo" id="185" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

8:36: Disembark at Fathom and Basin while watching UPS Drivers start their morning dance. [shashin type="photo" id="187" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

8:37: Begin wandering aimlessly. [shashin type="photo" id="192" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

8:59: Take obligatory cliché photographs of abandoned rail line.

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9:09: Make a gruesome discovery.

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9:12: Heed warnings at a boat launch.[shashin type="photo" id="195" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

9:13: Wait, maybe the warnings were unnecessary.

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9:14: See, they're fishing. [shashin type="photo" id="198" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

9:17: Lust for a life at sea. [shashin type="photo" id="197" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

9:28: Wait for the next bus along Basin Blvd. Wait ten more minutes. Finally decide to actually, you know, look at schedule. Start walking again. Wish I'd taken Daimler's suggestion earlier. [shashin type="photo" id="199" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

9:50: Hit the beach! [shashin type="photo" id="200" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

10:01: Return to the real world. [shashin type="photo" id="201" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="center"]

Along for the Ride: Going Live on the 75

[shashin type="photo" id="202" size="320" columns="max" order="user" position="left"] Today marks the public launch of "Along for the ride,"* a new series of mass transit adventure chronicles on Lascher at Large.

Watch an Audio Slideshow | Explore the Map | See the Photo Gallery

The concept: explore Portland as seen from the metropolitan region's transit lines. Each week, through a highly scientific selection process (in other words a combination of my mood, any errands I may have to run, suggestions from the peanut gallery and other such extremely formal criteria), I'll be riding the full length -- each direction -- of one of Tri-Met's bus or rail lines (and perhaps those of surrounding transportation authorities, like Clark County's C-Tran). Who knows what I'll experience along the way or what I'll observe, or even what form my storytelling will take? Learn more about the project, how to support it, or how to come along for the ride at the end of this post.

For this inaugural week, I rode Line 75, a megaroute running from St. Johns through much of North, Northeast and Southeast Portland, all the way to Milwaukie (for the non-Oregonians among you, that's a city immediately south of Portland, not the alternately-spelled lakeside Wisconsin metropolis). For a taste of the route, check out the following audio slideshow. The speaker was a slightly counter-culture, late middle-aged man who identified himself as Robert. Reflecting on Portland's public transit system and his regular commute to and from St. Johns, this afternoon, Robert, who refused to give his last name, accompanied family on a trip from Portland's Woodstock neighborhood North to Burnside Blvd.

Before you read the rest of the story, listen to what Robert has to say about riding the 75, check out some images I snapped along the route, and even enjoy a moment of riparian pleasure, all brought to you by the 75:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4zCJR3l6OE

A tale of two Wunderlands

You ride, And ride, And ride, Only at the end do you know the purpose of your trip.

One of twelve current "Frequent Service" Tri-Met bus routes -- those designed to run every quarter-hour -- the 75 averages intervals of about 17 minutes, according to the Portland Afoot Wiki.

I didn't time the 75 when I rode it this week. I happened to arrive at its door just before it left Pier Park in St. Johns. Such details will have to be saved for Portland Afoot, or perhaps for future installments of this series. Anyhow, though I originally envisioned "Along for the Ride" as a series of journalistic accounts of individual transit lines, this first trip devolved into more of a solitary journey, albeit one in which my commitment to my profession was redeemed by the discoveries I made along the route.

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My ride along the 75 started quietly. I barely made it on board. I don't live by either end of the line, and my path to Pier Park, the route's northern terminus, will remain a closely-guarded secret. What I can reveal: It involved an unidentified second transit line and a pedestrian meander to throw off would-be followers. I can, however, say I saw the biggest dog I've ever seen in my life along the way.

Anyhow, when I arrived the bus was empty aside from the older woman grilling the driver for details about how to make her connection. Despite the driver's insistence that there would be plenty of warning before the woman's required stop, she didn't seem convinced, and the full-speed run I made to board the bus started to seem unnecessary. But I made it.

Before long we were on Lombard. A bunch of teenagers boarded at the first stop. One sat in the seats across the way from me. He was easily too cool for school. Every few seconds he'd erupt with smirking mirth. That wasn't minimized by my donning of gigantic headphones as I slowly moved a cheap, underwhelming Radio Shack microphone around to pick up ambient sound (read, cacophonous static roughly reminiscent of rattling windows and engine noises). Already too shy for a journalist, I decided that wasn't the time for an interview, and packed everything but my camera away.

This was the first instance of a dilemma that persisted throughout the day. People rarely want to be spoken with on buses, even less so than on the street, or so I led myself to believe. They don earbuds, they stick their noses into books, they sigh after a long day at work, they text friends, they flirt and gossip and stare intently out the window. Perhaps, at least for this first trip, the best way to experience transit in Portland was to do just that: experience it, fully.

So I took in the city as it passed. St. Johns' mid-century downtown brimmed with summertime pedestrians. Friends met for coffee. Photographers ducked into a camera shop. Moms and dads pushed strollers. I saw one of two fencing halls I'd see along the 75.

It was the first of many pairs. The camera shop -- Blue Moon Camera and Machine -- also boasts typewriter repairs, and only a few blocks southeast, we'd also pass Ace Typewriter, possibly one of the only full-service typewriter maintenance businesses left in the entire country. Eventually, the bus passed two Trader Joe's locations and two bowling alleys and not one, but two Wunderlands.

As it turns out, the two places I decided to get off the bus -- in Portland's Belmont neighborhood and Downtown Milwaukie -- brought me a short stroll from two Wunderland Arcades. Sadly I lacked in nickels and competitors for air hockey, skee-ball, and scads of ticket-spewing games. Beyond the Wunderlands, which also feature second-run movie theaters, Line 75 passed, or stopped within a few blocks' walk of, multiple cinemas, including the Baghdad, the Hollywood Theatre, and both of St. John's movie houses.

Even more plentiful than movie theaters were parks. Big parks, little parks, dog parks, boring parks, fun parks, ugly parks, pretty parks, the 75 stopped near them all (actually, I don't recall any particularly ugly or boring ones. They're parks, after all). Parks too constrained for you? Why not take the 75 to the Springwater Corridor trailhead at Johnson Creek? Or head out on the water? Though I didn't realize it at the time, my trip on the 75 was taking me to the river.

Summertime, and the Living is Easy

Upon arriving at the route's terminus in Milwaukie, I headed out for a stroll. The day was far too beautiful not to do so. Of all the ways I'm nerdy, I'm not a comic-book reader. Were I so, I might have been thrilled to pass the headquarters of Dark Horse Comics (though the Darth Vader posters on the window were enough to excite the Star Wars nerd within). But my nerd-dom lies elsewhere, so I continued on toward a glistening shoreline I spied from Milwaukie's Main Street.

I soon forgot about it all -- the storefronts, the bus, my frustration with not interviewing anyone -- when I reached the shores of the Willamette. There, dogs played, boaters launched, office workers strolled in khakis and button-ups and old men surveyed the landscape from recumbent bicycles flying hot pink banners. Summer surrounded.

It only continued. On my way to the water I'd passed the Main St. Collectors Mall and Soda Fountain, and I stopped in before re-boarding the bus home. Like any antique mall, its shelves were stuffed with pan-decade nostalgia -- Star Wars Toys, World War II memorabilia, old record collections -- but it featured an extra treat: the counter of a former Rexall Department Store -- also known as Perry's Pharmacy -- where a family laughed over phosphates and hot dogs and an elderly mother treated her adult daughter to an ice cream cone. It was as if no one had ever moved. My only regret: not shooting the scene when I first glimpsed it through one of the store's aisles. I did, however, enjoy my lunch and my dessert of chocolate peanut butter ice cream in a sugar cone.

This was no longer a bus ride. This was a journey. With a $4.75 day pass, I'd wandered across a metropolis, stopped for snacks and a stroll in a hip neighborhood (I'd grabbed a bite on Belmont Ave.), run an errand for a friend, and found myself on a quiet shoreline, where water lapped at my feet, dogs played fetch, kids laughed from inner tubes pulled behind motorboats and the world slowed down, if only for a moment.

More Transiting Portland Each Week

What's "Along for the Ride?" It's my evolving series of Portland-area mass transit chronicles. For the next, well, for the next long while I'll be riding a new Tri-Met operated transit line. By new, I mean new to me. I'm beginning with lines I've never ridden, then I'll move on to riding other lines I have taken, until I've ridden every bus, railway and shuttle operated by Tri-Met (and possibly routes on other public transit systems near and far, should the situation arise). Expect stories along the way. What kind of stories? I can't quite be certain. Some newsy. Some reflective. Some only possible in the moment. Expect guest stars too. Perhaps expect to even come along yourself.

I expect Along for the Ride to also be a laboratory for new (to me) storytelling practices and a chance for me to hone audio recording, photography, videography, interviewing, mapping, writing, editing and other skills. Don't be surprised if different forms are used to tell stories from week to week, though it's conceivable the series will find its own rhythm, just as transit has its own pace.

You can help set that rhythm, however. You can start by getting involved. Tell me about your reflections of transit or via a tweet to @billlascher. If you use public transit, what do you use it for? What transit lines do you ride and why? If you don't use public transit, explain why not. What might change your opinion about using transit, whether you currently use it or not? I want to know about transit in any city -- after all, my love affair with transit writing started in LA, where transportation policy became the focus of my graduate studies -- so why not reflect on your town's best or worst routes?

For those of you familiar with particular Tri-Met lines, why not suggest in the comments what lines I should try next? Do you know of great stops along the way? If so, enter them on the map. Do you have a favorite transit story? Why not share some here, though I don't want to step on the toes of Michael Andersen, and the great stories in each edition of his incomparable Portland Afoot (By the way, if you need something to read on the bus, or anywhere else you happen to be, I bet your $5 subscription or other support will be well worth it).

*By the way, special thanks to writer Christina Cooke for devising this series' title, "Along for the Ride." Check out Christina's work at christinacooke.com.

Click on any image to enlarge:

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New rankings beg question: what makes Portland sustainable?

Portland-based Sustainable Business Oregon reported yesterday that Stumptown once again won silver in Site Selection Magazine's Rankings of the nation's most sustainable metropolitan communities.

Once again coming in second to the Bay Area (Site Selection's lede about San Francisco's ban on unsolicited Yellow Pages was cornily fantastic), Portland ranked high alongside Oregon, which came in third on the list of "Top Sustainable States." Congratulations!

But is praise premature? Subjectively, we're probably not going out on a limb to gauge Portland and its neighbors among the nation's most sustainable communities. There exists here an unquantifiable, do-it-yourself, simple approach I like to call Portland's "Pot-luck" culture, where many groups bring their diverse skills and resources to the table. We're all now quite well aware of the bike culture and transportation alternatives and ecoroofs and every other bright green badge of pride we wear. Meanwhile, as I detailed in the May, 2011 issue of Biocycle (Subscription Required) Portland has many more concrete sustainable projects in food scraps composting, urban gardening and new, private efforts like the upcoming June Key Delta Community Center (which was featured in a sidebar with the Biocycle story).

Nevertheless, are we measuring sustainability properly here, or anywhere? To rank the top metro areas, Site Selection used the number and per capita rate of LEED Certified green building projects, the extent of green incentives and amount of manufacturing and other facilities involved in renewables and green industry. Can our ability to live healthily, prosperously and durably over multiple generations (my rough definition of sustainability) be gauged by simply totaling up new construction and how many gizmos it features, dollars spent, and the new kilowatt-hour reducing technology we build? Or should our analysis be a little more complex? Should we explore our actual behaviors, i.e., the actual effectiveness of the programs we incent, the way our buildings - LEED or not - get used and the type of demands we place on our power grid? Wouldn't that be the real measure of sustainability?

My un-scientific, un-journalistic assumption is that Portland would probably end up pretty far ahead on that sort of scale as well, but we -- everyone, but particularly journalists reporting on the environment -- might be well served by asking these sort of questions.

What do you think? Are we measuring sustainability properly? Is Portland "Green?" What do you think is the most sustainable community?

Let me know in the comments

Heart of the Monster: Journey to SEJ 2010, Part 3

[stextbox id="custom" color="000000" bcolor="000000" bgcolor="ffffff" image="null"]As I prepare for a new journey, I'm thinking about past travels, so here is the third installment of my tales from last fall's trip to the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. See Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Talk about slow journalism.[/stextbox] [shashin type="photo" id="422" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="right"]Imagining my own murder came easily. Shadows sapped what last fall warmth might have lingered from the forests around the confluence of the Lochsa, Clearwater and Selway rivers. Choosing a river-rafting resort for its off-season rate, I was the only guest on this, the day of the year's first frost. I envisioned my role as the victim in a backwoods-set horror film. Having battled a cold all day, a fever crept through my brain in sharp contrast to the plummeting mercury outside. My thoughts ran wild.

In truth, they had all day, just as this text, as all text seems to escape my control.

Before succumbing, I ate across the highway at Ryan's Wilderness Inn. I sat at the counter and watched a courtroom reality show through the static on a small T.V. What could have been my last meal was a French dip with over-salted, but tasty, au jus. It was served on a place mat depicting a map of the solar system (I think one of my best friends growing up had the same set). The mid-October day unraveled as I ate. Listening to crackle of the snowy TV screen and the waitress chit-chatting with the cook, I marveled at the vastness of the universe from this roadside eatery, just a speck in Idaho's forests.

I'd left Oregon that morning before swinging across a remote corner of Washington. Along the way, I inched ever closer to my professional line in the sand. I wouldn't arrive in Missoula, though, without facing the Heart of The Monster.

As I've previously recounted, my day began with deer at dawn in a campground on the shore of Wallowa Lake. After a breakfast in Joseph of polish sausage and eggs  drove North through Enterprise (disappointed not to have realized the night before that the Terminal Gravity brewery was there). I left Enterprise along Oregon Route 3, following the road up a slowly-rising plateau until I traveled above the western rim of Joseph Canyon. I entered Washington where the Lewiston Highway becomes state route 129, then decends into -- and rises again out of – the Grande Ronde River Valley on a tangle of twists and turns protected only by guardrails resembling white picket fences.

"Discovering" the land

[shashin type="photo" id="394" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="left"]Long before I descended again – this time approaching the Snake River at Asotin, just south of the twin cities of Clarkston and Lewiston – I learned these lands were not by any means as wild, as remote or as isolated as my first impression led me to believe. After Joseph, as “empty” as the land seemed, I started to learn something else that perhaps many of us don't realize when we approach the “wild.” This land is -- and has long been -- home to many generations of people, even if perhaps the relationships those people had with these surroundings were so different, so much more subtly integrated than our current society's.

That realization started to emerge about ten miles south of the Washington border, when I “discovered” Joseph Canyon. Having never seen the Grand Canyon and having reluctantly skipped Hell's Canyon, I was easily impressed by Joseph. Beyond the natural beauty and beyond the fascination I felt for its geology, though, another thought circulated: what was this vast and dramatic and beautiful place like when there wasn't a road above it, when tourists weren't stopping at overlooks to peer down into the valleys that used to be the winter home of an entire nation?

Such questions rattle through my head wherever I travel. Here in my own nation, on a landscape so many of us so readily dub "ours," they take on different meaning. It's easy for Americans to still perceive spaces like these that contrast so sharply with our cities and towns and farms as “wild” or “untamed” or “unspoiled” lands untouched by civilization. What came before is often unacknowledged, if not out of sight.

In college, I was a history major whose focus – if inadvertently so – was on the articulation and formation of national identities. Even so, I must admit to having little knowledge about the nations and communities that exist and existed within the land we describe as the United States of America. This is true even though I grew up in the heart of the Chumash world and no matter how many times in elementary school we were assigned to read The Island of the Blue Dolphins. Nevertheless, the Channel Islands I gazed at my whole life were the same ones so important to the Chumash. I've strolled countless times past the Albinger Archeological Museum and, of course, Mission San Buenaventura, both reminders of one sort or another of what came before, what we've wrought upon one another, and what's been buried by the passing decades. In many ways, though, the Chumash -- and even the Spanish who subdued them -- were abstract concepts in late Twentieth Century Southern California. The only time they really began to seem less so was after college, when I paid attention to longer and broader historic narratives, or when I worked on stories like this one I did for the about the impact of contemporary development projects on ancient Chumash sites.

Vague Knowledge

Of course, I've always known the vague superficial history of American exploitation, subjugation, extermination and marginalization of native communities, but I'd learned few details about specific histories and incidents. More straightforwardly put: I know little about Native Americans and their history aside from the cursory overview given in traditional California public school educations, and whatever knowledge I've occasionally picked up through other pursuits since.

Then, a year ago, when I moved from L.A. to Portland, I found myself fascinated by the history of the Modoc depicted at Lava Beds National Monument, a history I hadn't known, even though it occurred in my home state of California (albeit a corner of the state quite distant from where I was raised). It's likely I wouldn't have learned of it had I not been drawn to the monument purely by its geologic appeal.

It may seem naïve to carry a sense of wonder in my discovery of these topics when so much of this history is so problematic. So be it. I can't do anything to change that history, but I can welcome my broadened perspective upon it. I've been fascinated by what I have been able to learn, and by how my knowledge of tribal history has slowly grown as I've settled in the Northwest. Such lessons allow me to much more vividly understand the extent to which urbanization and settlement has extensively shifted our world.

Checking Eden off the List

[shashin type="photo" id="420" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="right"]My realization there above Joseph Canyon about the many thousands of people that must have crossed this landscape, a landscape I perceived as so untouched and so isolated, only served to make me feel more alone, especially as illness descended further upon me. My loneliness increased as the hours and miles stretched, and as I approached the Heart of the Monster, the site that represents the source of all creation to the Nez Perce.

Just ponder that for a second. The source of all creation. Many, many people trace all of humanity to this spot just south of U.S. Highway 12, a nation's sacred source tucked away in Eastern Idaho and now managed by the park service of another nation. The last remnant of a monster that, months later, would be dwarfed by enormous shipments of equipment meant to squeeze from the ground more of the substance that our nation now prizes so reverently.

I stopped. I looked. I listened to a recording of the tale of the coyote who tricked a monster in order to save all the other living things the monster had devoured. I learned how all the people and animals sprung forth from the defeated monster to populate the land.

Then the recording ended. I watched a mom take her daughter on a stroll, and I saw a car load of retirees stretch their legs in the nearby parking lot, and I took photos, and I enjoyed the sun on the skin of my aching body, and I returned to my own car.

I checked Eden off the list without saying a word.

On this trip, I traveled with the precise goal of connecting with others, joining potential colleagues, establishing professional connections and honing my reportorial skills. The closer I came to Missoula and the more I discovered along the way, though, the further I felt from anywhere. “Isolated” with my thoughts as the landscape unfolded beneath my feet, the more my mind wandered into these sorts of reflections and recollections.

Meanderings of thought

[shashin type="photo" id="421" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="left"]I admit that the story – and this entire series, delayed as it may be – has meandered from its path. Nevertheless, I'm also wrestling with how to respond honestly to my experiences, with what happened in my brain on the journey and whether it's self-indulgent to serve this soup of thought (it's a little too stagnant to call it a stream) to you, instead of a straightforward report of the who and the what I saw where and when. Which approach provides the real, honest reporting?

You'll notice in reading these recollections that I am extensively self-referential and that my thoughts are increasingly digressive. This isn't an accident, exactly. On this trip, especially at this point, passing through these locations, I barely encountered anyone else. There were few sources to develop. The encounters I did have were simply inappropriate to develop into deep connections, if at all. To do so may have been to force a story that wasn't there. This might be a reality of a solo road trip. You're so encased in your car and then, over time, in your head. As you're recollecting it hours or days or months later, doesn't it follow that your words will be uniquely shaped?

I'm confident in my abilities and experience as a writer, but I'm trying to do much more reporting, more actual reporting, and I'd like to have done so on this trip. It's pretty easy to write and to meander without a guaranteed paycheck. What I need to figure out is how to report without one, because I need to keep my journalistic skills as fresh as my writing, even when I'm not sustaining myself. Then I must figure out how to turn that writing, that reporting, that observation and reflection and analysis and curation into something that does sustain me.

I've long since encountered that professional line in the sand. Each day that passes, I wonder a bit more whether I ever really crossed it. Have I even properly acknowledged it? Did I skirt it? Did I place it further down the road?

Now, as my resume lingers on potential employers' desks or in their inboxes, as reporting piles high like scaffolding around as-yet-unfinished stories, as pitches bounce about the ether, and as I prepare for another, shorter journey (this time with a clear reporting objective in mind), do I need to address what I've learned about myself and my career on the other side of that line? Do I need to stop asking myself questions, and start asking them of others (my suspicion is a loud, resounding "yes")?

Do I understand whether I've encountered the monster, whether at 30 years old, after college and grad school and years as a reporter and editor and everything else I've built up, I've found the monster's heart, whether I've found a way inside, to confront it and to spring forth again from within?

Day two, part 1: Deer at dawn

[shashin type="photo" id="388" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="left"]See the initial story in this series

Before the second day of my trip from Portland to Missoula for the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference I'd hoped to visit Hell's Canyon. That morning - if I could really call it that - I realized I didn't want to make the solo trip down a gravel road from Imnaha after a freeze, not the way I felt. Lonesomeness had crept in a little, too, and I didn't want to experience the gorge alone, knowing then that there was a traveling companion not there with whom I'd want to share the marvel. Anyhow, I didn't know exactly yet how much time I had to linger.

Still, this was my time on the road, my time made uniquely possible by a few key people. I didn't want to miss this world, knowing how remote this landscape was for me, and how rare my opportunities to visit might be. Though fatigued, it was important to me to let my spirit move me, even if it moved me slowly, even if it moved me differently than I'd expected or hoped.

First, the dawn. I can't remember a morning I've welcomed as much as that one. I watched the world take shape, connected by fog between the trees on the hill behind my camp site.  Though exhausted, I needed to stretch my legs, to soak in as much of the emerging daylight as I could, and summoned the energy to enter the space taking shape around me. I needed to draw some value, some strength, anything from that space.[pullquote]Tweets from the road: Good morning from joseph OR. Woke today at wallowa lake state park to rutting deer. Will write post when i get internet access. - Oct. 12[/pullquote]

It was little more than a typical state campground, albeit a heavily wooded one at the edge of a mountain valley.  Two campsites to my left, a couple stirred from their tent, pulling sweaters and oatmeal and orange juice from their Subaru. College kids giggled inside a big tent at another site. A bald man pulled a bike from the back of his RV across the way. Though not crowded, the campground was far more occupied than it felt the previous night, when I barely slept. Instead, I pulled all the layers I'd surrounded myself with to the passenger seat of my Mazda, where I sat with the seat warmer on for half an hour. Wearied by fire and ice fighting their way through my body, I had stopped caring about energy-savings or frugality or any rational concern. In the dark of night I ate string cheese and freshly-baked chocolate chip and ginger cookies that had been given to me at the outset of my trip, and I drew solace from their nourishment, especially after skipping dinner the night before while I looked for a place to stay and collapsed into my campsite.

To calm my mind, to distract myself, to think of anything but there, I'd wandered through 100 pages or so of Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. (a bit “burdened by device” myself, but enjoyably so, happy for the escape from my nocturnal malaise). I took pleasure in noticing that the book began not far from where I was headed, and where I might end up after the SEJ conference. As I read of young T.S.'s fascination with the Berkeley Pit, near Butte, I lamented not having selected a conference tour of the Superfund site (though I remained excited for my own tour to Glacier National Park).

Before I headed out for a walk I picked up my journal, the one I'd written in the night before, still in the tent, still before giving up on the night, before succumbing to the cold. To this day, the pages beyond the entry are blank. Their potential having vanished as the breathing room around my brain filled and as my lungs clouded

Morning did return, though. With it came my breath, and at least a little enthusiasm. So I set out on my walk, planning first to stop at the bathroom. On my way I discovered a buck grazing on the frozen grass between me and the campground restroom. A few more deer grazed at other parts of the campground. I quickly realized whose land I was visiting.

[shashin type="photo" id="387,369,373,385" size="small" columns="2" order="user" position="left"]Continuing to the still quiet of Wallowa Lake I was welcomed by a sharp clatter rattling from the frost-covered shore. Four more, younger deer stood there, playing and locking their antlers together. Other noises also filled the silence: quacking ducks lining up to waddle into the water, a creek somewhere I couldn't see and the crunch of pebbles under the deer's feet as they pranced toward the parking lot from which I'd watched them.

I watched the deer investigate trash cans outside a shuttered boathouse for while, then returned to my site, packed up and drove back into town, pleased I'd come here, that even as the rest of the campground woke in a rustle of orange juice cartons and sewage hookups and GPS devices, I experienced, seemingly all to myself, this brief sliver of nature waking up to itself.

Roads traveled, stories unraveled

For the next week or so, each day I'll recount some element of my October trip to and from the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. I'll combine my recollection of what I saw, experienced or learned, tweets I made at the time, photographs and links to some of the cool things I learned. Check back each day for new reflections, tales and reports. At the end of my updates I'll post a link to read the story as one narrative (and post a complete photo album as well). Be prepared. This series will include a mix of storytelling styles -- don't expect straight journalism, or complete creativity. In fact, don't expect anything but a journey.

"The only way out is through," I thought, pulling my scarf tightly around my neck as I burrowed into my sleeping bag. Admittedly, I didn't realize when I mumbled this that I was (not quite precisely) quoting Robert Frost. For a week or so, for a variety of reasons, a dear friend and I had been throwing this phrase around. Never was it more true to me than this moment.

Likely resembling little more than a lump of a polypropylene undershirt, two sweaters, a down vest, a pair of long underwear, waterproof gloves, fleece socks and a knit hat, I burrowed deeper into my bag as temperatures outside my tent dropped below freezing. I'd already felt the tickles of a cold coming on before I arrived after dark to Wallowa Lake State Park. Did I really want to push getting sick before the SEJ conference after working so hard to get there?

I'd already paid $16 for the site, after all, a whopping $16. The closest motel was 5 miles back in Joseph and another $70. If I wanted to actually see the lake, I'd have to return once more the next morning.

No, I could do it. Adventurers did this and far, far more everyday, right ? Besides, I had a car with a heater, seat warmers and a reclining seat. I wasn't exactly isolated (really, it's pretty ridiculous I even thought the word "adventurer").

It's now a few days before Christmas and I'm packing for a holiday trip to my mother's house. I grab a dop kit and find some cold medicine inside. The discovery reminds me how long I've been taking to tell this story. Holding the medicine in my hand, I remember my trip's first day.

Sixty miles east of Portland, after a brief stop in Hood River for coffee and a bagel, I felt the first hint of a scratch in my throat. Ten miles later, my throat burned. As I progressed further eastward, my eyes watered. My face burned. Each mile closer to Missoula seemed to bring new aches. Pain coursed behind my eyes, but, no, I wasn't going to succumb. I would battle through. I was far too excited about the conference, about the people I'd meet and the places I'd go and the ideas I'd generate. As the week progressed and after I arrived at the conference, each day I did what I could to set the cold aside as late into the night as possible. Back where I was staying for the event, at the Hutchins Hostel, I'd return to the bottom of a bunk bed in a room I shared with other conference-goers and try, desperately – and unsuccessfully -- to muffle hacks and coughs, stringing sleepless night upon sleepless night throughout the length of an event that I'd been looking forward to for months.

Tweeting the road: Bagels, coffee, homemade cookies, i am well stocked for the road. Ps it is a glorious day in Hood River. - Oct. 11

Still holding the cold medicine as I walk to my suitcase to finish packing for my holiday trip, I see dark lines stretching across the United States. Rather, I notice lines across a map of the country tacked to a wall in my apartment.

Each line traces a route I've driven at some point in my life. The record tells a story as comprehensive and accurate as I can attempt. Much of my memory stretches across this map. In the nine years I've been tracking my journeys in this way, I've had to buy at least one new map, and I've done my best to stretch my recollection as far back into my youth and my memory as I can accurately recall.

The map only documents roads I've driven, or ridden along, and it's at such a scale that the nuances of my trips get lost. I've had to guess at routes taken during a few trips because they took place on stretches not charted by this map, or so long ago that I can't recall their exact path. Nevertheless, each time I return from a journey I look forward to tracing my trips on the map. Doing so is the only reason I keep pencils around my house.

More than two months after I've returned from one journey, though, I've yet to trace its path. I still haven't traced my trip from Portland to Missoula and back, and I can't quite express why not. Perhaps I don't feel like the trip's over, like I've truly returned. Perhaps I can't record it until I've described it, until I've wrapped the journey in words and pictures and recollections that I realize are fading with each day.

Some of you might not be interested in such ponderings.

“Get to the point,” you'll say. “Tell me about the conference. Tell me what you learned, what you saw along the way, what the latest news is. I only have so much time. Don't you know attention spans are ever so slight? Haven't you ever heard of an editor?"

Indeed I do, and I have. As I've noted elsewhere, as so many have noted before, though, to truly travel you can't simply move from Point A to Point B. You can't experience this world's multiplicity of dimensions through a straight line.

The truth is, of course, I did wait to write this down. I let the story fester. I let it fall away and apart. Like anyone might, I've been making excuses for months now for not chronicling my trip. My terrible cold on the road. Assignments due just upon my return. Job applications. Novel Writing. Story development. Other conferences to attend as a reporter. Holidays. I could think of any number of reasons why you're reading this now, today, this very second, and only now, but this is the moment, this is when these words take shape.

I've also, I'm coming to realize and admit, been utterly incapacitated for months by writer's block - really the worst I've known - despite having felt so inspired, so driven by the conference (and, despite having completed the rough draft of my first serious stab at fiction during NaNoWriMo, which, it should be said, was the only thing to really begin to loosen this writer's block).

But somewhere in the middle of the first sleepless night of my journey, in that jury rigged tent, as the cold descended -- both in the form of my illness and the weather -- I wrote clumsily, with gloved hands, in an irregularly kept journal, beginning with the following fragment: 10/11/2010

Sometimes I ponder the choices I make, or my difficulty making them. I end up here, in what promises to be a beautiful setting, but aching. I ache with the impact of pride, of love, of adventure.

The first day never quite goes right. Surprises for both the better and worse arise and you're left not quite certain how to process them.

I'm fighting a cold I refuse to catch, but hearing creeks splash from what seems like all sides. My tent is jury-rigged together – I'm missing a stake so I put a rock in the corner to hold one side down – but outside the stars pepper the sky in such a way that clichés actually serve them well.

Nobody knows where I am (how near or how far). Were I not ill, I'm not sure whether I'd really want them to.

Sneak preview! expect to learn more about grizzly bear behavior through absolutely adorable videos from a study in Glacier National Park)

A few thousand words on the road

I've been driving and fighting off a cold while traveling to the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists Conference. Now I'm here and diving right into the event. For now here are a few thousand words -- in the form of a few dozen photos -- describing what I saw. Be sure to click past the jump for more.

[shashin type="photo" id="608,609,610,611,612,613" size="medium" columns="2" order="user" position="center"]

[shashin type="photo" id="614,615,616,617,618,619,620,621,622,623,624,625,626,627,628,629,631,632,633,634,635,636,637,638,639,640,641,642,643,644,645,646" size="medium" columns="2" order="user" position="center"]

Sights seen while not writing

As I noted last week, I don't just write: [shashin type="photo" id="279,867,863,865,976,963,941,848" size="medium" columns="2" order="user" position="center"]