June 15 - Mickey Slater (Brad's friend) was kind enough to give me a ride from Portland to Astoria, where I checked in and then rode 10 miles (and back) to the Pacific Ocean for the official wheel dip to start.
June 16 - Group photo in Astoria, then headed out for 70 miles to St. Helens, OR - mostly following the Columbia River. Cool and cloudy to start, but grew to be pleasant, and a nice ride with many lovely views and pastoral scenes. Finished before lunch.
One cannot escape the logging industry in western Oregon, especially when giant log trucks are passing you on the highway, 4 feet away. Can be a bit unnerving. But equally unnerving is seeing the endless mountainsides with clear cuts, and in various stages of regrowth. It looks somehow wrong. Then you see the trucks and trains carrying endless quantities of logs, and mills, spewing steam, converting the logs to lumber, pulp and sawdust (for further processing into furniture, houses, paper, and fuel). You (or at least I) can not help thinking this is a premier example of human destroying the environment.
But then, it is also a matter of perspective: we do not think miles and miles of corn fields in Iowa or Illinois look wrong, but those corn fields displaced the native prairie and forests as much as the tree farms of Oregon displace the native forests. In both cases, we, the public, get useful products from the land, and in both cases what has been created is a monoculture farm, rather than a healthy ecosystem (despite what Weyerhauser would have us think - a healthy ecosystem has multitudes of species in balance, both plant and animal, and needs no fertilizer from humans, both of which are not true for the tree farms.) The only difference is that we have become used to farms of the corn variety, even viewing them as lovely pastoral scenes. Perhaps it is the time cycles involved - the corn farms go green every year, while the tree farms take decades to look good again after harvest. Or perhaps it is the obvious evidence of violence that we see in a clear cut, with stumps and splintered logs everywhere - though harvesting corn or wheat is no less violent to the plants involved. Interesting that the lumber companies (oh, "forest products companies") know the violent scenes can be upsetting, so are careful to leave a several hundred foot strip of healthy trees along any major road, so the public sees mostly a pleasing forest scene and not the clear cuts - "idiot strips" Mickey called them.
Anyway, I saw a lot of "tree farms", a lot of "harvested" lumber, a lot of logs being shipped and processed these last few days. Got me thinking about our impact on the land.
More riding tomorrow - through Portland, and then over the Cascades, past Mt. Hood.
