Wednesday, May 03, 2006
We started the day with a maneuver almost identical to yesterday’s, except this time we both ran the first two miles together, starting beside the Santiam River. We reached the second car at the two-mile point about 18 minutes after we started running. We drove that car back to the beginning, picked up the first car, drove both 9 miles to the end point for the day, where we parked one of them. Then we drove the other one back 7 miles to the end of our run, and we started walking.
After mile or so we entered the town of Sweet Home. This town is one of the main reasons why we selected this route out of all the possible routes starting from the West Coast. This is where Joe was born. It is another sleepy little town, seemingly frozen in the 1960s with an economy based on logging. We turned off the main drag for a block, looking for a building that once was the Trailways Depot. Joe’s grandmother ran that depot herself, selling bus tickets and cooking meals for travelers. We stopped in at a barber shop because barbers often are people who have lived in town for a long time. Joe asked about the bus depot, and the barber directed us down a block and left. We found the building, now a completely different and uninteresting building; but Joe recognized the place. He also recognized the old theater (still operating) and could remember the first movie he saw there back in the 1950s (“The Creature from the Black Lagoon”). We started talking about how this project might be as much about reminiscing as it is about walking, and about all the small-town Americana places we would probably see on this journey.
In another couple of miles we began walking beside Foster Reservoir, a lake formed by damming the Santiam River. Now we could clearly see the Cascades ahead with a few spots of snow visible on the higher peaks. We were starting to climb slightly, and the views and forests indicated we were entering a mountain zone.
The car was parked at a closed weigh station. We drove back into Sweet Home and had another couple of Big Macs before picking up the first car and heading back to Albany.
