Mosier, Oregon and Ms. Peachface

The next day at the Mosier farm, I was the designated driver for the day's afternoon deliveries. Carolyn needed someone to help with her restaurant deliveries and, even though the Internet connection at the farm was very slow, Celinda wanted to get the rest of her e-mails taken care of. Some of the farms we'd worked at hadn't sent the recommendations they said they would, and getting that taken care of was on Celinda's list of things to do. It was an interesting afternoon, with flowers and vegetables unloaded, and at one restaurant, steaming apple turnovers, topped with hot caramel and ice cream an unexpected delight.

Carolyn is a dog person. Her two dogs were perched on my shoulder, eagerly watching the road ahead for a cat or other critter. I love dogs, but dog breath, in the tightly packed van, wasn't my idea of a pleasant afternoon's drive.

On our way back to the farm, we stopped at a local swimming hole on the Hood River. The color of water can be an indicator of how cold it is. When there's runoff from snow, water has a milky look to it, and it did that day. When I was in Canada in 2005, we flew into a couple of places where the water looked like milk and it wasn't possible to see more than a couple of inches into it. I'm not sure how fish can see a fly under those conditions, but we caught some really big Dolly Vardens. I've been told that glacial runoff water is extremely healthful because it contains so many minerals, vitamins and other essential health promoting items. That makes sense, but I'd want to test it before drinking to make sure it didn't contain something I didn't want, like the parasite Giardia lamblia.

Friday was to be our last day at Mosier and, on Thursday evening, we were invited to go to a community funded kids project. Some of Carolyn's friends do a summer theater with the local kids, and it was fun. I took some video of the play, but it was less than what it could have been since I didn't have time to set up remote microphones. When I was close enough to get the sound, I couldn't get all the performers in the video. When I could get them all in, the audio was mostly nonexistent.

Our last day was hot and 98º in the shade before noon. We harvested tomatoes and I cut bundles of artemisia. Carolyn dries the artemisia and make wreaths. There was a bumper crop of yellow and red cherry tomatoes and quite a few small pear tomatoes. One greenhouse had been watered by mistake, and we had to place the tomatoes on racks to dry so they wouldn't split. To finish off my hours for the day, I picked a few weeds in the newly planted lettuce patch.

The day before I'd harvested peaches, and one of them had a growth that looked like a nose. After lunch I went out to the garden, got some flowers, decorated Ms. Peachface and took her picture.

The weather in and around the Columbia River Gorge is usually very windy and warm during the summer months. The onshore moisture, heavy maritime air, is cool compared to the hot, dry rising air that's the summer's norm a few miles east of The Dalles. In the summer, the air is sucked east and compressed where the gorge begins east of Portland. Windsurfers call them "Nuclear Force Wind." The wind can easily reach gale force, and sometimes the lower end of the hurricane scale.

Very seldom does it blow east to west. In the winter, Pacific storms roll through the gorge on their way to the plains and the midwest. The storms bring moisture, cold Arctic air and freezing temperatures. The gorge cliffs can be sheeted in ice for weeks, even months, and driving I-84 can be treacherous or impossible. Some of our relatives were stranded once at Multnomah Falls. The only way they had to keep warm was running the engine, and the heater, in their car. Fortunately, they'd gassed up in Portland because they, and a lot of others, were stranded for the better part of twelve hours, almost running out of fuel.

The next day we packed the car with our destination being Walla Walla, Washington. We planned a short visit with relatives and then go on to Halfway, Oregon via Wallowa and Joseph, Oregon. That changed and we left Walla Walla short on time. If we'd gone to Wallowa and Joseph, our journey would've taken us on the back road to Halfway, a really beautiful drive through the Wallowa Mountains. Instead, we opted for the quicker, more boring, freeway. If we'd gone through Joseph, we would've missed the adventures that awaited us in Baker City, Oregon.

While we were packing the car, unknown to us, Carolyn was packing us a box of fresh organic produce to take on the next leg of our trip.

I'll have a slide show about the Columbia River Gorge, windsurfing and the organic farm at Mosier posted on Associated Content in the next few days. Links to my slide shows on Associated Content can be accessed at www.newliferoadmap.com. The website is new and may not have been crawled yet by the search engines. If that's the case, you can go directly to the website by pasting 76.162.6.181 into your browser.