Eastward Bound, Across a Storied Landscape Richard Tillinghast (bio) Leaving Portland, with its microbreweries, Pacific Rim restaurants, lumberjack chic, and drive-through coffee stations, I drove east along the Columbia River Gorge on the first leg of a four-thousand-mile trip that would take me to northern Michigan and then down to South Carolina and Tennessee. The Gorge’s mist-wreathed granite cliffs, rising above the onrush of the Columbia River, look as though they could have been painted by a Chinese landscape artist from the Tang Dynasty. In late-afternoon light the stone takes on a purple glow. Taoist hermits might be meditating in caves up in those hills. Above White Salmon, Washington, where I spent my first night, pioneer days had not, it seemed, entirely ended. As I drove up precipitous roads that reached up from the Columbia River to my nephew’s house, where I would spend the night, some of the hillsides had that desolate, shredded look that follows clear-cutting. One little house partway up, a shack really, was flanked on one side by a pile of rough-cut logs, each about the length of an American car from the fifties. It looked as though the householder had wrangled them there for sizing into smaller chunks as fuel was needed during the long winter. The month was May, but a cutting wind sliced across the steep hills. My nephew and I took his son, six years old, to his baseball game down in the town of White Salmon. The diamond, with its boys’ and girls’ coach-pitch three-inning game, and the pure Americanness of the scene, were thrown into perspective by the massive, timeless hills, verdant with the spring rains, towering above it. The following morning I woke at five in the rough-hewn guest house my nephew had built behind his vegetable garden. No one in the household was stirring; the rooster crowed as I pulled out. Once I had descended the hill back to White Salmon, with a cup of tea from Starbucks in the cup-holder between the seats of my Honda and morning news from National Public Radio as a soundtrack, I drove along the Columbia River on Interstate 84, then veered south on US-97. The road was free of traffic, except for the occasional truck, and was surrounded by vast acreage, big ranches with sparse cattle grazing the big rounded hills. Somewhere along the way I became aware that the needle on my gas gauge was dropping low. The day was cold, rain whipped across the highway. I turned hopefully into what looked like a kind of filling station beside the road where a yellow school bus was fueling. [End Page 171] The bus left just as I pulled in beside a truck with “Explosives. Drilling Equipment” painted on the driver’s door. The driver, a weather-beaten man of about fifty with a broad gray moustache, was talking on his phone. “Naw,” he was saying loudly to the person on the other end of the conversation, “you have to yank out right smart on the throttle as soon as you start her.” As he stepped out of the cab to talk to me, I couldn’t help but notice the large box of Trojans on the seat beside him, and I considered their relevance to the business the truck advertised. This man cheerfully informed me that the gas pumps were accessible only if you had a certain kind of card. How far was the nearest gas station? In Madras, he said, pronouncing the name with flat American vowels, emphasizing the first syllable in a way purely innocent of the city in India. How far is that? I pursued. Forty miles south. Oh hell, I said confidently, I can go forty miles, and got back into my car, leaving him to his explosives and his Trojans. It was not reassuring to see a sign less than a mile farther along that said “Madras, 56 miles.” The needle touched the empty mark. I began to worry, and then for brief periods managed to convince myself of the beauty of living in the moment. And...