Back from the Brink

All I can say is, "I love Portland." That is a positive spin on my last two weeks in Klamath Falls. Don't continue reading if you don't want to read a rant. I love living in Portland, Oregon; I don't have a desire to see Klamath Falls again. To whit:

1. All salad or lettuce was ice berg.

2. All salad dressing was creamy.

3. All food was carbohydrates or fried.

4. No wine lists.

5. Downtown was deserted at 5:00.

6. Nobody drank or swore, expect for the old married men who I hung out with at 10 every night.

Yup, that pretty much sums

up K Falls. Never go there. Ever. I just don't understand what a blemish like K Falls is doing in the beautiful land of the Pacific Northwest.

And then there is Crater Lake and Bend and Sisters and Redmond and Government Camp and Portland. Wow, so amazing. Now I would recommend going to these spots any time! The Native American stories are pretty fascinating.

The place was a "spirit quest" site, where the Klamath Indians would go to convene with supernatural beings. It was dangerous, and I read that the Indians denied its existence to outsiders for a long time. I certainly felt the other worldliness of it when I was there. I was dismayed, but not surprised, to see that the park service had a motor boat that would take tourists around the lake. This saddened me in a cynical way. America is awesome, but it seems so often that we take things down to a "egalitarian" level, which inevitably strips the magic from certain experiences in life.

This is the purest water on earth. The only water that enters this crater is from rain, snow, and ice melt. Why stick a polluting motorboat into it? What's the point? Riding around on a motor boat or a ski jet is fun, but doesn't it have its time and place? It's like someone talking on the cell phone in a library for me. Just inherently wrong.

I hiked down to the boat launch and the one place where you could go swimming. I knew I had to do that. There were families and children jumping from rocks and a sweet German couple canoodling. Lots of Asian tourists. I have to share my favorite observation: on the hike down and the hike up, I watched people swatting at the air, and almost every group of people I passed had the word "mosquitos" on the lips. Clouds of bug spray abounded. Old Japanese women frowned and swatted, frowned and swatted. Children cried that the spray leaked into their eyes; women lamented: "oh, the mosquitos are something awful! They're vicious!" I think I actually scoffed or snickered. I noticed one mosquito the whole time. Seriously, people. These are little sweet, cutsie puff balls to what we've got in the South. These are practically loners. They're frontier mosquitos, wandering lonely as a cloud. Or maybe my blood just didn't seem tempting.