Memorial Day

Yesterday we took a long drive - our Memorial weekend splurge - on the North Cascades Highway. It was a very long drive, through impossibly steep valleys, around immense rock peaks, past a million waterfalls dropping into a hundred rivers dammed into a dozen lakes. In spite of the dismal weather predictions, this weekend has been beautiful and warm and sunny, and the drive into the mountains was very much worth the high cost of gas to get there. But...

The Cascade mountains are spectacular - huge and craggy and steep. Everything about them is a superlative. Much of the mountain tops are so far above the tree line that they are just bare rock jutting out to the sky. There is snow on them, of course, but only where it can maintain a hold on the steep rock face, and below that the huge trees almost shine in technicolor in the late spring sun. I just can't seem to take a photo that records all that splendor. It is too big, too disparate in its lights and darks, too amazing to allow a focus on a single point. Even though the road has 'scenic pull-off' spots to tease the photographer into stopping, over and over, in order to train a lens on 'all that,' it didn't really offer a place to get a picture that does any of it justice.

With the disappointment of not getting the 'right' picture, today I'm remembering the little stuff - the oddities, funny and otherwise, of everyday observation: the brand name on the chemical toilets in one of the rest stops - Wizards of Ooze; the signs in the 'old west' town of Winthrop, at the end of the mountain pass, attesting to, for example, "Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound for Prolapsus Uteri and Other Female Weaknesses"; the old guy who walked through the restaurant with his shirt tucked into his underwear (yes, whitey-tighties) which was, in turn, sticking out about 3 inches above his pants; the motorcyclists - a surprising number of whom are actually still alive to do this - who zoom around corners of winding mountain roads with their wheels planted right on top of the double yellow line and their heads (on top of their 4-feet-worth of 'sitting' body, leaning at a sharp angle into the turn) on a collision course with my front bumper... (Do we need to draw it out for them, so they can see the peril? Are their eyes closed that they can't see how far into my lane their heads actually are when their wheels are on the line?)

All this 'small' speculation following all this 'huge' spectacular scenery was brought about when Mark tried to find something to watch on TV on this Memorial Day afternoon. Besides the usual fare of crappy daytime TV (how could Jerry Springer STILL be doing the same show, and why hasn't his head exploded by now?) we are offered 'marathon' reruns of the worst of the Star Trek franchises, ad nauseum renditions of Hitler getting his ass kicked in old WWII documentaries, and women with fake nails and bizarre manicures measuring over-the-top glass baubles with wooden rulers and warning us that THESE won't last long. Or Poker - the ultimate spectator sport.

Yep. An American holiday.

(To our credit, we tried to go berry picking today but the berries aren't ripe yet.)