A long drive for someone with nothing to think about

My trip to Oregon was nice. I got out of the heat for a while, got a couple of samples that I needed for my research (not enough, but it'll have to do) and got to see some nice scenery along the way. I spent a lot of time in the car though, about 3700 miles in 7 days. That's a lot of driving (I'm glad I had a rental), but I took enough CDs along so that I didn't repeat the same one until I was an hour and a half outside of Vegas on the return trip.

I spent the first night just outside of Bend, and it was cold. I knew it would be, but it was still a drastic change between 106 degree heat (in Phoenix) to below freezing at night. The next day I drove over to the coast and sampled my first location. Until that point I had been thinking how nice it was to go by myself because I didn't have to worry about things like stopping when I didn't want to or listening to anyone else's music, but then it took me 6 hours to get the fish I needed, when it would have only taken about 30 minutes if I had someone else to help pull a seine, and I started to reconsider. Not that there was anything I could do about it at that point anyway, but when the scenery looks like this I guess I shouldn't complain:

I guess another benefit of that was that I was able to drive along the coast at sunset. It was beautiful. I wanted to stop and camp at this campground, but would only have been allowed to stay for about two minutes (think about it).

Instead, I kept driving until I got into Washington. One thing I'll say is that the mouth of the Columbia River is huge. I think it was something like 4 or 5 miles across and probably the biggest river I've ever seen (at least while I've been on the ground). I pulled off when I got too tired and spent the night along some logging road. The next day logging trucks woke me up quite early, so I got up and continued on. I was able to sample some fish from that part of the state, but unfortunately they weren't the species I was after. I know a guy who studies those, and he'll probably be a lot more happy about that than I was. After that I had to head back toward Portland. I got there rather late, and had a slight incident with Johnny Law (see my previous blog entry on that). I sampled all over Portland, to no avail, and eventually had to continue on to try and hit some other rivers.

I eventually ended up in eastern Washington, trying to resample a river that I had already gotten fish from a few years ago but their DNA had degraded. Last time I was there we got what we needed in about 20 minutes, so when I asked the people for access to their property I told them it would only be for about an hour (famous last words it turns out). I didn't get anything that night, and ended up having to spend the night there. They were some of the nicest people in the world. They invited me in for dinner (I declined) and offered to let me sleep in their house in the room next to their 17 year old daughter. I opted for setting my cot up out on their lawn as I figured that would help the mom feel a little more at ease, but talk about trusting. I did go inside and play Crazy Eights and Go Fish with their two boys (7 and 5) until it was time for them to go to bed. I think they really enjoyed that. The next morning I got up to check the traps around 5:30, and still no fish. As I was coming back from the river the guy saw me and invited me in for breakfast. I told him I still hadn't caught anything, and he told me that he had called in sick to work and that he could go down and help me get them with the seine. I waited until he had finished breakfast, and eventually had to take a piece of toast with jam on it just to get him to quit offering me food. I really wasn't declining just to be nice either, I just don't normally eat breakfast.

After they finished eating we took the boys down to the river to go see about seining some fish. As we waded out into the river I realized that I still had car keys in my pocket, and I didn't want to ruin the electronic lock by getting it wet. I decided to put them underneath my hat to keep them dry, which turned out to be a really bad move as they then fell out of my hat and into the river. It was too muddy to see the bottom and so we just started feeling around on the rocks to see if we could find them. I thought it was a lost cause, and was rather pissed at myself for being so stupid, but he ended up finding them after about 5 minutes. Talk about a life saver. We made one haul with the seine and got what I needed, but he and the boys were excited about what they saw, so wanted to keep going. So we went again, and again, and again. Each time the boys wanted to handle the fish, so I let them but figured since they would die after that anyway that I should take them along with me. I ended up with about ten times as many fish as I needed, but I can still put them to good use in future research projects. When you have people helping you out for free, it's hard to justify doing something to dampen their spirits, in this case that would have been to stop seining. At any rate I think it's something the young boys will probably always remember, so that's pretty cool.

I slowly made my way back down south, sampling rivers that I'd cross, but still not getting anything. Once I got into Idaho I just drove to my sister's house since I didn't need any samples from that state. I hung out with her and my other sister for a day, then drove to Salt Lake City to spend a day with my kids. My son turned 10, so I picked up a new baseball bat and batting gloves for his present, then we went to the park and played catch for a while and followed that up with dinner at a Chinese buffet (his choice, not mine). I left right after that, and got to Vegas around midnight and have been playing catch up ever since. It turns out that maybe it's not such a good idea to leave town for two weeks right before one has to begin teaching because it's hard to get settled into a semester when everything's being done at the last second.