My unusual taciturnity this weekend is easily explained; I was at my parents’ house in Bend, Oregon, where they subsist on dial-up. Maybe I should have been a better webling and provided for your amusement anyway. I apologize.

We drove through Warm Springs Reservation, which is a longer way to go to Bend (the proverbial “low road” to the Sisters “high road”), for the sake of our safety and my mother’s health. You see, the Sisters Rodeo was this weekend, which is a haven for cowboys trying to drink away the knowledge that their way of life is fading from the earth. Driving in that part of the world is…exciting…at this time of year. Like a driving game with really erratic AI. At any rate, the possibility that A) we might be &#233cras&#233s (French for “run into” as applied to cars, and much more descriptive) by a small man with a large hat, a large truck, and a disintegrating liver, and B) that my mother would have a heart attack worrying about A, were enough to convince us to take the longer road.

The road starts normally enough. You drive up to Portland on 26, jump through several hoops and perform a sort of automotive ritual dance, in order to get back on 26, which is a surly road, not easily tamed. You end up going east on 26, right up to the flanks of Mt. Hood. Huge slopes of dark trees surround you, and give way only to allow Hood to glare down at you imperiously. It’s beautiful. Then Hood starts to dwindle in your rear view, and the trees begin to thin and scrubble* down into High Desert.

But then you get to Warm Springs, and the road falls out from under you, down into a canyon between basalt-capped bluffs. I really wasn’t sure you could get that kind of landscape without sedimentary rocks—but they manage it over there. Big round hills sloping out from under the flat , hard cap-rock. Layers of color (though not as bright and splendid as sedimentary colors), oddly twisted basaltic columns. Then, just as you think you’re out of this beautiful area that looks like no Oregon you’ve ever seen, you cross the Crooked River Canyon, and if you have the luck not to be driving, for a moment you’re confronted with a labyrinthine vision, a sort of mini-Grand Canyon done all in dusty gray and black. Eery and beautiful.

We also went up to Tumalo Falls, in Bend, with my parents and walked up to the top observation area. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to look down on a waterfall in quite that way, before. The water was so clear it looked like a sheet of lace bubbles being waved over the rock, with only the occasional sunlit glint to remind you it was really there. The rock was washed to a copper-red clean, and was starkly angular through the jelly rush of the creek. It was lovely and mesmerizing.

And on the way back from Bend, we stopped at the Rhododendron Dairy Queen. Because you HAVE to.

*scrubble: to become scrubby. Coined by Felicity. Live with it!