On to PDX 15 August 2014

After an energetic hike down and back up through the South Slough biome, we're back on the road, through Reedsport and inland up the Umpqua. On a broad river bar at Dean Creek, a National Elk Refuge treats us to a view of a young herd of Roosevelt Elk happily grazing in the meadow. Just a mile farther east, we see a huddle of cud-chewing Senior Bulls holding a convention far from the public viewing area.

The Umpqua winds its way through the Coast Range, and then we join the stultifyingly boring flow of Interstate 5, the West Coast's major north-south connection. Three-trailer trucks boom along at 70 miles an hour through a haze of SUVs and single-occupancy vehicles: a National Disgrace.

But it's a fast way to Portland.

We meet up with Damiana at the Nines, the wedding hotel where we and the rest of the wedding party will be celebrating the younger Elkan daughter Vanessa's marriage to her Atlanta-based swain.

After the nature, and the rapacious clearcutting that makes Oregon wealthy (at the expense of its natural infrastructure, making it a National Sacrifice Zone), Portland, or PDX as it is known to its fast-moving residents, is an urban shock: a tangle of one-way streets, traffic calming measures, and high-rise ostentation. Still, as one of the planet's greenest, and most sustainably conscious, cities, it offers up a lesson in how too many people can occupy too little space graciously.

At upper right, the Urban Farmer is a strange little bit of Cleveland transported to the Pacific Northwest. Strange bedfellows...

Life Goes On

Friday evening the Elkan clan gather around the Maple tree planted in commemoration of the family's beloved senior member, the lately departed Michael Elkan. Gathering by long pre-arrangement for Vanessa's wedding, we all are mindful that vivid, athletic, charismatic Michael left this sphere only three weeks ago after a precipitous decline due to lung cancer. Our work for the weekend: experiencing the joy of Vanessa's union while privately mourning the loss of the family's leader.

 The rocks around the trunk of the tree were brought from afar by family members.