Descriptive Essay On Highway 30

Highway 30, a slow, twisted piece of hand-made, two-lane miracle engineering that finessed its way through the impossible Columbia River Gorge, was being relocated. The contractors building a new four-lane freeway, Interstate 84, took advantage of a half a century of improvements in construction technology and would either drill through mountains, go around them on winding concrete trestles that clung tenaciously to the mountainside or, where a tunnel or a trestle wasn't possible, they simply removed the whole mountain. The thousands of pieces of construction machinery necessary for this job would often clog what was left of Highway 30. Hundreds of miles of the crowded two-lane, four-hundred sixty-four mile long, main east/west artery that crossed Oregon had been reduced to dusty gravel tracks. Auto air conditioning was a luxury known to few and for most the only relief from the heat was provided by rolling the car windows down. The hot

breeze desiccated skin, parched lips and covered everything with a gritty fine white talc. When machinery blocked the roadway or a mountain was being reduced by the explosive power of TNT, progress was sometimes measured in hours per mile rather than miles per hour.

I was curious about and more than a little frightened by the large white signs with red letters that shouted, BLASTING! NO RADIO TRANSMITTING ALLOWED! To myself I wondered, "Who has a radio transmitter in their car?" In my mind, I could see some nutcase from a Smilin' Jack comic strip bent on suicide, transmitting on a radio that I couldn't imagine, but could picture blowing us all to bits. For me, the journey was less of a trip and more a combination of exciting new sights, potential combat and heat exhaustion.

West of the town of Umatilla we drove by a different white sign, one with letters scrawled in red by an unsteady hand, ICE COLD WATERMELON FIVE MILES AHEAD. My frugal father surprised me when he said, "Let's stop."

Good plan. After hours of having been buffeted by the hot wind that blew through our 1959 Volkswagen, I was ready to stop for watermelon that I could already taste. The melon vendor had strategically parked his rusted-out old pickup at the big end of a narrow access road to a gravel parking lot used for construction machinery. He had stapled to a stick on the side of the roadway a paper sign with a big red arrow that pointed toward his rust-stained pickup truck. Crude letters painted on the side of the truck spelled out the simple business of watermelon selling in the desert, "1/4 MELON FIFTY CENTS." Uh, oh. Even I knew a quarter of a melon wasn't worth the price of two packs of Camel cigarettes or two gallons of gas.

The narrow roadway made it impossible to turn around and I could see we would have to circle the truck to escape the money trap.

As we drove up to him, the melon man was holding one-quarter of a bright red watermelon in one hand and his other was extended palm-up for payment. My father's face, already red from the heat, turned a deeper shade of crimson while his mouth opened and closed in wordless rage at the flagrant price gouging. A former fourteen-year-old merchant marine cabin boy apprenticed to masters in the art of profanity, he possessed an eloquent four-letter vocabulary that, when provoked, he could wield with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. In 1961, I'd never heard of 'Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.' No one had. My father was only sixteen years removed from an unimaginably stressful life as a child spy who had delivered pastry to the headquarters of the German High Command in Berlin. The unsuspecting melon man was standing in the crosshairs of a verbal flamethrower that could incinerate its victim in four

languages.

A nanosecond before he pulled the trigger, I saw Dad glance my way. Apparently, to avoid collateral damage, he decided to forgo the flamethrower and just cut the man down to size with his patented silent glare. When we drove past, he leaned out the window and said to the man, "You should be ashamed of yourself!" To make his point, he mashed his foot to the floor, spun the wheel and gunned the Volkswagen as well as it was possible to gun a twenty-four horsepower engine. The Volkswagen echoed his irritation when its exhaust spat out a blat, blat, blat, blat. It spun around the truck in a vortex of flying gravel and threw up a gray cloud of dust as we sped back the way we had come. Dad mumbled something unintelligible as he continued to glare at the melon man in the rearview mirror. It sounded like, "Ducking highway robbery!" Whatever that meant.

We left the river and tuned southeast at Pendleton where the highway climbed snakelike over the Blue Mountains. We stopped at the top to read a marker that told about the pioneers and their ox-wagons traveling west over these mountains. Though not the highest range on the route to the Pacific, they were the most difficult to cross because they lacked a natural pass. Dead Man’s Pass over the top was appropriately named for several teamsters supposedly ambushed by Indians, but Indians could be the least of a pioneer’s problems. The pioneers didn't think about crossing after October because winter in this part of Oregon is serious business. The weather over the top after fall is still a threat to traffic on the modern Interstate.

After the city of La Grande, we climbed through Ladd Canyon, the last pass before North Powder, and then magic happened. The road wound along past the impossibly tall, snowcapped Elk Horn Mountains where desert gave way to soft green meadows and tree-lined streams. Ancient locust trees that grew on both sides of the road met in the middle and created a yellow-green time tunnel into the nineteenth century.

Homes and barns obviously built before the Great War had buckboard wagons and an occasional sleigh with leather seats sitting in the driveway beside a pickup truck or car. Livestock grazed peacefully in picture perfect pastures where loose hay was stacked inside circular slat fences until it looked like a giant mushroom.

Speechless, I rolled the window down to get a better view while we drove along the highway that wound its way through Eden. We came to a white sign that suggested we reduce our speed to 35mph, followed by a green one that proclaimed the name and population of that piece of Heaven, our previously unnamed destination.

"Haines, Population 204."

Oh my God! David and Diane's kid Heaven, a place so perfect it can split the atom of family.