Little Things
July 10, 2025… I’m thinking about little things. I think it’s little things that hold up our days, keep them from collapsing under the weight of our expectations of winning and of blinding success. Little things blink in and out of existence so fast but they throw tiny particles of light so you can see all the big things. Little things don’t mind not being seen. But they appreciate a side glance every once in awhile.
Susu and I left The Dalles 20 miles ago, then dove south off the freeway into a small, winding canyon that looks like it shrugged off vehicular traffic thirty years ago. We roll and weave through a handful of 35 mph curves before emerging a few hundred feet above the Columbia River in a sea of wheat. Wheat for days, for eons, it seems. The world up here is nothing but gold and blue, wheat and sky, with a narrow ribbon of blacktop nosing through the waving wheatstalks. I pull over, lean the motorcycle on its kickstand, pull off my helmet. There is no sound anywhere. No cars, no birds, no insects. We’re miles from anything at all. It’s almost like there has never been sound, like sound has not yet been invented. Except one: the whisper of wheat brushing against wheat in the winsome wind. It’s such a shy little sound. I’ve never heard it before, at least not this loud. But it’s not that it’s loud, it’s just that no other sounds exist. Susu and I listen to that softest scratch for awhile, a couple complicated creatures standing in the middle of a simple world made of two colors and one sound. It’s enough.
Two colors.
The Journey Through Time Scenic Byway is pretty melodramatically named. Look, we just want to drive on a slab of asphalt, not dart in and out of multiverses. But the Journey Through Time Scenic Byway lives up to its name. We picked it up in Fossil, Oregon, population 451. It’s not a bad little town at all. I gassed up on an analogue fuel pump that a nice, wiry older man helped me with. When he finished, he sat on a stool and just watched the afternoon do what afternoons do. I saw him over there, being totally human, and I put my phone away, ashamed.
South of Fossil, the highway begins a 100 mile dance with the John Day, the United States’ second-longest undammed river. The river’s namesake was an explorer who was waylaid by Indians while traveling along the Columbia River, stripped naked, and left for dead near the place where the Mah-Hah River flows into the Columbia. John Day didn’t die. In fact, he made it to Astoria on the Pacific coast and helped establish a fur trading outpost. For whatever reason though, white traders and pioneers took to calling the Mah-Hah the John Day River.
Parking spot.
During its sweet and slow sashay with Highway 19, the John Day alternately tumbles over smooth river rocks and rests in deep, pretty pools. As the day contentedly settles into itself the way long mid-summer days do, Susu taps me on the shoulder. She says she’s been watching the river ease by and she wants to swim. So I find a pullout tucked beneath constellations of cottonwoods. The John Day River bumps its way over some shallows a couple hundred feet upstream. It babbles little things that gel with the bowing trees and the warm canyon walls and the blue swimming hole, until the little things the river babbles turn beautiful. Susu pulls herself gently through the shady water, the water pulls itself easily through the rock and soil, the rock and soil pulls itself wistfully through time. We’re just along for the ride.
Swimming hole.
