This week I took a trip of a kind I haven’t enjoyed in the last several years: a long solo drive. My husband had other engagements that kept him at home while I traveled from our home just above the California border north to our daughter’s home in Portland, a distance of some 270 miles. The route is all interstate miles, and the drive takes about four hours if traffic isn’t too heavy and the weather is good. True, the drive isn’t especially challenging, but the scenery is varied and pretty along the way, and I’ve always loved the solitude such a journey provides for a little uninterrupted contemplation . . . or the freedom to not think about much of anything at all.

I started out on a late midweek morning, especially lovely in its clear blue skies and warming, moderate temperatures compared with the heavy smoke and near-100-degree weather we’ve endured the last half of August. The first hour of the drive took me over a series of four mountain passes, each divided from the others by narrow, sparsely populated valleys dotted with pastures and small farms among the evergreen forests of pine and fir. The mountainsides showed some recently logged patches, young replanted swathes and mature stands of trees as well as areas where, over the past several summers, wildfires burned right down to the interstate’s shoulders. Either through the works of man or nature, the terrain is always in a state of flux.

For the next hour or so I traveled through lower hills alongside rivers shallow and rocky this late in the season, awaiting the flush of fall rains. Pastures where herds of cattle grazed were dried to straw except where irrigation kept them green. It’s really too early to see much fall foliage, but some trees sported yellowing, dry, drought-seared branches. A few large sawmills sprawled alongside the highway, surrounded by towering mountains of stripped logs stretching in all directions,

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the harvest of those clearcuts I’d observed farther south.

As I neared my midway point near Eugene, the hills retreated to the west and east and the Willamette Valley broadened and flattened out. Here table-flat fields stretched out for miles on either side of the road, many now bare and brown after harvesting and plowing in preparation for winter cover crops or spring grains. Others still boasted tall stands of corn or rows of tall blueberry bushes, while large orchards of hazelnut trees awaited harvest. As I neared Salem, extensive wine grape vineyards neatly etched the hillsides,

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the vines laden with nearly ripe fruit. Here, too, were rangy hop vines spiraling up their 10-foot-tall trellises,

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cane berries ranked in long rows, and sod farms and wholesale nurseries supplying landscapers with ready-made lawns and trees, shrubs

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and perennials. I never cease to be amazed by the variety and wealth of the crops that grow in my home state!

As I neared Portland, housing developments and apartment complexes, shopping malls and manufacturing plants sprouted up instead, but they couldn’t entirely crowd out the greenery for which this northwest part of the state is known. I arrived at my destination eager to greet my family, renewed by my solo journey and my scenic trek on that late summer day.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor