Our biggest concern before starting last week’s road trip was the heat: specifically, keeping Her Furry Majesty out of it as much as possible. We went with the three-pronged solution: reflective sheets in both the front and rear windows, a battery-operated fan blowing right into her face (which she just loved, lemme tell you), and blue ice wrapped in towels and placed on the floor of the crate. With the necessary behavior mods, this worked pretty well.
After saying hi to Mom and Rachel in Portland — they were just beginning an intergenerational Elderhostel — our first destination was Diamond Lake in southern Oregon. Like many alpine lakes, Diamond Lake has an established resort that looks like your great-grandfather went there. Indeed, Karyn stayed on its shores with her aunt and uncle as a child, and gained a love of fishing there. She became quite nostalgic as we approached.
Yet as pretty as Diamond Lake is, it’ll always be an appetizer to the entrée a few miles south. Crater Lake is what words like majestic, grandiose and panoramic are made for. It’s a wet version of the Grand Canyon. The car-traveler’s view is primarily from the rim, so the angle you look at it from is often godlike; being there in the aether with the summer snow and the hushed whispers of European tourists only enhances the churchiness of it all.
South of the park, the drive became quiet. It was siesta time (at 70MPH), but it was also time to consider our next stop: Tulelake, California, and what’s left of the internment camp there. We stopped in Klamath Falls for gas and groceries, where the guy at the lunch counter seemed to like that we asked for directions to the monument, and spoke to us in Japanese thereafter.
The town of Tulelake is like so many others of its size, and certainly not defined by the fact that 18,000 prisoners set up an incarcerated metropolis nearby for four years. They’re not trying to cover it up, but the tiny monument and the lack of care, the way reparations moved at such a snail’s pace, suggest that honoring and preserving the memory of that time aren’t so high a priority. What remains is a barbed wire gate from ’42 and the stockades in view from the road. We arrived in the late afternoon, high clouds and moderate heat, and let Chauncey sniff around in the emptiness.
Karyn’s mother, whom I never met, was sent here when she was fourteen years old, along with her brother and her parents. I tried to imagine such a thing happening to my family, and tried to picture how far into the desert a place like that would stretch. The population of Prairie Village was around 18,000 when I was coming up there, so I used that for scale. But the number of people is just part of the story. What’s truly sobering to me is how easily mass internment can enter the dialogue: Roosevelt issued the order to round up all Japanese-Americans not four months into America’s entry into WWII.
That night, we had an ideal camping situation at Burney Falls State Park: our tent’s footprint was not crowded by RVs, no bugs, a robust fire to cook over. The kids across the way — all twenty-eight of them — eventually stopped screaming, and we slept well under a full moon. It’s a facile observation, but the key difference here is that our camp was made voluntarily.
A few pictures here. More descriptions, including San Jose’s Bon Odori and a summer’s drive up the Oregon coast, to come.
Tags: Crater Lake · Oregon · road trip · Tulelake2 Comments
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I feel the need, as a responsible pet owner, to point out that the three-pronged approach for Chauncey and the heat worked mostly because she was in the car only for *very short* periods of time, and *never* in high temps.
That’s the behavior mods I was referring to: modifying our own behavior with her in mind.