Now I laughed. There's a proposition I don't get every day, I thought. "Probably not here in the airport parking lot," I responded. "Let's just head to the coast. Can we stop and get some lunch somewhere. I'm hungry."
"Oh for sure. We have to stop in Dundee. I need to pick up a couple of cases of wine I ordered from one of the wineries near there. You drive. I've already got a little over 400 miles under my belt today. No tickets though. When we get to Dundee wake me. Here, let me plug the destination into the computer. Just drive where the truck tells you to go and remember you have to swing a little wider around corners with this beast."
Lisa was asleep before we got out of the airport. Once I managed to steer the big truck around the twists and turns of the parking structure it drove smoothly. Lisa was right. All I had to do was to follow the driving instructions that were on the screen. Traffic on the freeway was a bit hectic, but sitting up high in this giant truck it was easy to keep track of the rest of the vehicles. An hour later I pulled into the parking lot of a winery a mile or so out of Dundee; or perhaps I should say the truck pulled in. My effort was minimal.
Lisa was there to pick up two cases of Chardonay and a case of Pinot Noir she had ordered. As I lugged the wine out to the truck I asked, "How much were you planning we would be drinking on this visit?"
"Oh that's all going back to Boise with me. I have to keep some wine around. The rest of that red-neck family of mine can't get their tastes beyond the nearest case of Bud but I like to have a bit of Chardonay or Pinot around for a before bedtime sip or two. Don't worry. You won't have to drink all of it this week. Now let's go back in and get some lunch. They have a great restaurant."
We sat at a table looking out over the vineyards dropping away from the hilltop location and at the rise of the Coast Range beyond. The mountains rose in a foreboding mass beyond the vineyards, their slopes covered by a solid coating of dark second growth Douglas Fir. If you looked hard you could see the straight lines delineating the clear cuts of decades earlier but much of it was now thirty to fifty years old with the demarcation between prior harvests fading as the timber reached maturity. Not 'old growth' but nearly indistinguishable unless you knew what you were looking for. At some point the difference between an old growth forest and a maturing second growth forest becomes more of a state of mind than an obvious distinction. The clouds of the oncoming storm obscured the tops of the range.
We sat on a porch outside the winery's tasting room. There was still enough sun on us and the vineyards immediately down the hill from us to be pleasant. The vines were bare and a bit gnarly looking with their fall leaves long gone. There was just the lightest fuzz of green shoots poking above the bare ground between the vines; a promise of things to come but a long way off. It was warm enough to sit outside in the sun, but the clouds building on the ridge tops warned of coming rain and cold. Lunch was delicious, dungeness crab cakes and a tasty green salad along with a glass of the winery's smooth Chardonay. Ignoring the oncoming storm, Lisa chattered on about how pleasant the sun felt compared to the cold weather she had left behind in Boise.
"Do you ever think about going to Palm Springs or Arizona for the winter?" I asked.
"Hah. There's no chance of getting my no-count husband to do something like that. He thrives on winter. 'Has to go over the ranches in Oregon and feed the cattle,' he says. God only knows why anyone would want to go out early on a cold winter morning and break down bales to feed cattle when there are already folks there that are being paid to do that work. He's really at his happiest when it's ten degrees below freezing with a nasty wind and a few snowflakes drifting about. Ugh no thanks. Worse than that, all the rest of my family seems to think the same way.
"The problem is they all grew up on that god forsaken cattle ranch we own out there in the Owyhee Mountains. It's so remote that we don't even use it for raising cows anymore. Too long a haul to get cows in and out and too cold in the winter to leave them there. It's too cold even for my family. We don't plow the road in the winter anymore. That's why we bought the big ranch down near Vale; so we would have someplace to take the beeves in the winter instead of having to sell them to a feed lot operator before they were big enough to get good money for.
"I like that old ranch in the summer though. There's nobody up there so we've declared the place to be 'clothing optional.' I like to go up to the old ranch by myself and ride a few miles up to a place we call the headwaters pond. Nice place to get naked and have a beer or two." She looked sideways to make sure no one was listening to us and then whispered, "and maybe do some serious open air masturbating," following her disclosure with a lewd chuckle. "That's one of the reasons Luke bought me the new pick-up so I could haul a horse or two up to the old ranch in a trailer. The road in there gets a little gnarly sometimes."
"Every once in a while we have the Rev and his friends up there for one of their orgy parties."
The Rev was a minister who ran a small church in Boise and did sex counseling for couples. Very hands on counseling as my wife Sharon and I had learned when we spent an evening with the Rev and his wife.
"You know the Rev don't you?" she asked.
"Yeah I sold him a software system just before I retired." I paused for a moment. "And Sharon and I went to a training session with him and that horny wife of his."
"Oh yeah, I bet that was an eye opener for you two wasn't it."
I laughed. "Eye opener is an understatement."
"Yeah," Lisa cackled. "Sharon told me how much she enjoyed her first ever gang bang that night."
I shook my head and asked, "Does the rest of your family attend these parties of the Rev's?"
"Oh hell yes," she said with a laugh. "There's nothing they like better. It's like Christmas and the Fourth of July all rolled together. It's one of the few things they can get more excited about than a good snow storm." She shook her head. "I gotta admit those parties are fun. There's so much improper conduct going on it's just about impossible to tell who is screwing who, but one thing is clear. No one much cares who is screwing who. Just one big happy horny group. We pretty much declare a holiday on family incest rules for those parties. Keeping that close a track of whose doing you or who you are doing is too complicated." She was smiling broadly now. Shaking her head, she said, "What a family I've got."
I was hardly in a position to be critical. I figured that my wife Sharon was likely doing more or less the same thing with her sister and brother in law and their friends in Paris right now. That's how her visits to help Christine get over her blow ups with Herve usually ended; an orgy with them and a few of their close friends.
By this time we were finished with lunch and the sun was giving way to the incoming storm so we paid the tab and climbed back in the truck. Lisa was driving now. She was excited about getting over to the coast before it got too dark to watch the big storm rollers crashing onto the beach and against the headlands. The nav system was unnecessary now. Lisa had driven the road over the Coast Range so often she could probably do it blindfolded. But she used the system any way; like a kid with a new toy.
We had barely left Dundee before it started to drizzle, a typical Western Oregon winter weather pattern. We drove southwest past several small Willamette Valley towns, Dayton, McMinnville, Sheridan, Willamina, all former logging towns now surviving on Oregon's thriving wine industry and the tourism it brought. It kept the towns alive but the wine business didn't pay the wages the unionized sawmills paid. Beyond Willamina we began our climb into the mountains, the grass fields and vineyards replaced by steep hills covered with fir trees and vine maple growing along the creek side, its colorful fall foliage long gone. The route twisted and turned as we climbed, tires hissing on the rain soaked road, following the ever shrinking creek as we approached the low summit of the Coast Range. The nearer we got to the summit the heavier the rain became. By the time we started down the other side, the automatically adjusting wipers were swinging back forth at their max but not fully clearing the water on each swipe.
The rain was of no consequence to Lisa as she pushed the truck around the curves and talked a blue streak about how big the surf was going to be on the coast. I had no doubt she was correct in her prediction. The wind was pushing the brush and trees on either side of the road from side to side. As we dropped we followed a different creek, this one leading to the coast and growing larger as we dropped. The tops of the ridges to either side of us disappeared into the rushing clouds.
Our progress halted when we came to a large fir tree fallen across the road by the wind. Fortunately we were in Western Oregon where people still carry long bar chainsaws in the back of their pick-ups; tools of their trade. A group of men emptied out of trucks on either side of the obstruction and made quick work of the limbs on the tree and cut the remaining log into lengths which could be dragged out of the road by the front mounted winches a couple of the trucks carried. As we sat waiting we watched the ridge lines above us fade in an out of sight as the heavy weather rushed past us headed towards the valley where we had sat in the sun in during lunch. Lisa tapped on the steering wheel in impatience at the delay. "You'd think those bubbas would know how to use a chain saw and truck winch to clear a road faster," she said.
