Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 33 (June 18) – On the road again

Yes – June 18 – not July (Charlotte kindly reminded me that Bastille Day isn’t for another month!) – and we started off with breakfast in an unbeatable eatery, the Elephants Delicatessen in Portland. What a city this is: it’s up there in my estimation with Berlin as a city of comfort & delights. What alas it shares with the rest of America is hopeless road signs; it could be that this is the result of absent-mindedness in town planning offices, but it seems more likely that good old Amurrican xenophobia is shining through the casualness about sustaining road-sign directions. If you don’t already know your way, you’re a stranger; what are you doing here, stranger? Who are you, exactly? An alien, a terrorist, a vagrant? Go back to where you know where you are. Escaping Portland on 84 requires turning down a side-street where there are no lights and no sign to alert you. In the end we did it and were launched on a wonderful ride through the Columbia River Gorge, its waterfalls and forested mountains. The river compares – briefly, for 60 miles or so – with any of the great rivers, more majestic than the Hudson I love so much, and of a grandeur that somehow evokes the ‘metre Columbian’ favored by Longfellow. Abruptly, 70 miles inland, the landscape turns parched and barren, and yields to desert – a kind of moorland, uniformly yellow. After a little over 200 miles, in Washington State now, we found our KOA kampsite, a wilderness of RVs. A far cry from our redwood glade campsite. We sit, mourning the loss of, and feeling utterly spoilt by, our wonderful Portland hosts.

The long straight roads permitted me to dream a little about my monumental novel-project, Where Every Stranger (Is a Ghost). Yesterday’s contemplation of the Ulysses first edition in Powell’s bookstore put me in mind of the celebrated scene in the bar with Stephen, Cranly and others, where Stephen punningly anatomizes the Bard by reference to the plays (triple-punningly maintaining that Will ‘drew Shylock out of his own long pocket’). One of the 5 novels in Where Every Stranger dramatizes a first-ever visit to London by Ann Shakespeare – Joyce compared the effect of Elizabethan London on a provincial to that of ‘corrupt’ Paris (perhaps pre-revolutionary Paris? Or subsequent ones too?) on a later generation of innocent visitors – bearing a dark mission. She is searching for her husband; but her husband is going through a dark period of his own and is not to be found, at least not under his own name. She has come to bring him the news of the death of his only son. Joyce speaks of this, describing the death of Hamnet Shakespeare as seeding the immortality his father summons up for Hamnet’s all-but-namesake. (There’s also the input of the death of Will’s father, but for reasons of his own Joyce’s Stephen is more interested in the effect of the Oedipal trio of Ann, Will, and Hamnet on what was to be the most celebrated play ever penned.)