Not the storm of the century, but it made for a lively drive

The storm was born over the Bering Sea, the bastard child of wind and ice, and howled its way down to the mountain pass that separated Oregon from California.

Its fury embraced all of a storm’s elements, beginning with a spatter of rain somewhere south of Portland, turning to sleet below Medford, adding fog around Ashland and snow as it hit the Siskiyous.

On the pass itself, which goes up to 4,310 feet, it all came together in an unnerving display of mastery over men trying to make it through to where the sun was shining and surfers were playing in sun-drenched Southern California.

Only when we reached a Motel 6 in Yreka did I feel safe at last from the elemental collision of weather’s stormy components.

While the minuscule room and the minimum appointments are less than the accommodations I am accustomed to, I would have stayed in a Motel One to get out of the storm.

I realize now that I am home under blue skies on an afternoon as still as sleep that the ordeal over the Siskiyous was probably not the storm of the century, but it was nonetheless weather of considerable impact.

From a distance one can view its statistics with disdain, but when they’re knocking you around on a mountain pass, you take them seriously. Being there is everything.

Cinelli and I were visiting a daughter in Vancouver, Wash., where she and her family abide in a three-acre forest of their own, when weather reports began predicting snow down to 500 feet the next day, which was the day we were going to end a 2,000-mile driving trip through the Northwest.

It was time for us to go home again, and while I was perfectly willing to goof off another couple of days up there, Cinelli was of the position that we should press onward and downward to L.A.

In other times, she would have been the one standing at the bow of the Santa Maria urging Columbus to sail on in the teeth of a gale, or mushing Peary’s dogs to charge on through the bitter cold to plant a flag at the pole.

I am content to confine any personal confrontations with danger to the pages of adventure books or to Outside magazine, where someone is eternally dying on Everest or, at the very least, being mauled by a grizzly.

There was snow on the mountaintops, which is where snow belongs, as we headed out of Vancouver, but that’s not unusual in the Northwest. Wet air is a staple up there. We rolled along with the dog Sophie in the back seat humming a little tune, confident that Oregon’s weather gods would do nothing to harm tourists with money, however minimal.

Wait. That’s not what I meant.

For one thing, I had just seemed to say that the dog hummed, which she did not, nor for that matter does my wife. She hates humming. The closest she has come to smothering me with a pillow while I slept was at the end of a trip where I spent the whole drive humming. I hum when I’m nervous, and since I’m always nervous . . . well, you do the math.

We took turns driving, and it was Cinelli’s turn over the summit. I slept for a bit, dreaming of the Donner Party, and awoke in the encompassing blindness of the ice fog and thought I had died and gone to hell, which I had always pictured as being somehow warmer.

But like the good soldier she is, Cinelli got us through the corruption of snow and fog, and we ended up planting the flag, so to speak, in Yreka, one of California’s less picturesque towns. What happens in Yreka stays in Yreka, and I can pretty much assure you that nothing happens in Yreka.

I am back in Topanga now, where there is no snow in sight and where yellow mustard plants glisten on the hillsides and liberals romp in the open fields.

Thinking about our experience in the storm, I remember a typhoon that threatened to sink our troopship in the Sea of Japan a long time ago, totally involving us in its awesome calamity. The ship trembled in the heave and smash of the ocean.

I was standing watch on the main deck, tied to a railing so I would not become just another drift of flotsam in the dark and forbidding sea; I was one with the wind and the rain, stepson to the lightning that speared the black night and the thunder that drummed through the heavens.

One blends into a typhoon in such circumstances and becomes a part of it, just as it remains to this day a part of me. Its memory is exhilarating.

I will remember the Siskiyou storm too, because for a short time we were small players in a greater drama, an element of the Earth’s volatile nature that swept us into a different place and then released us to the familiar.

In a way I can’t even quantify, I will always be grateful for that, and for this day at home.

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