The stretch of vitality

OK, things are about to wrap up here in Bend.  We had unseasonably hot weather in the upper nineties this weekend.  Saturday I walked around the park and bit and played some sax.  Sunday I rented a kayak and cruised around the Deschutes river a bit.  Lots of folks were out in kayaks, tubes, air mattresses, inflatable turtles, etc.  It was also the day of the kids pole, pedal, paddle race, so there were rafting boats full of kids being dumped into the river at regular intervals.  Just one more week here in then and then travel craziness begins.  I’ll be in at least four states in June.  Craigslist Flagstaff is pretty quiet, so I might not be able to get housing there. Wish me luck.

Yesterday I drove 20 miles north from Bend to Smith Rock, the birthplace of modern American sport climbing.  The rock formations and views are stunning.  I saw some cool rock climbing going on as well.  I’ll post a few pictures here.  Lots more (I filled up my camera) on my web site.

Allow me to pose a question. What could be better than roller derby?  That’s right! MORE roller derby.  I happened across an ad for another contest this Saturday between another local team called the Lava City Roller Dolls versus the visiting Slaughter County Roller Vixens.  Oh such great delight.  This event was different from the previous one.  This was much more official: held in a real roller rink as opposed to a music venue, involving far more referees who seemed more concerned with accurate score tally, and having distinct rules and a penalty system.  So the rules part kind of stinks, but absent the flagrant tripping and throwing, the general body checking and frequent pile-ups were all there.

Today I walked up the nearby Pilot Butte and got a nice look across the town.

Well, Mt Bachelor was getting a few inches of snow every day this weekend, and the weather in town was generally leaning more toward Winter than Spring.  Bernard decided to postpone his trip out to Bend as it was too cold to climb outdoors.  So instead on Saturday I took the shuttle bus up to Mt Bachelor and did some skiing.  It was alternately sunny and snowy, and conditions were generally pretty good on the groomed trails.  There was a race happening, and there was some sort of costume theme going on as I saw racers in their form-fitting racing suit with inflatable ducks around their waste, superhero capes, Princess dresses, etc. Unfortunately, I looked at the pre-Spring shuttle bus schedule and apparently missed the last bus back, but they had an employee bus that was running to the same place and the driver agreed to take me back, thankfully.  Of course I went climbing indoors in the afternoon.

The highlight of the weekend was the roller derby match. Folks, I don’t have the creative powers to come up with the ultimate sporting experience.  My mind is just not that powerful.  However, I know it when I see it, and I have now seen it. The ultimate sporting experience is all female no holds barred roller derby! Held in a venue sporting an exterior perimeter of windows boarded over with plywood, last night was a match put on by the Bend Oregon based Renegade Rollergirls.  Oh my God, it was so fantastic. All these hard core women strap on old school roller skates, knee and elbow pads, and helmets.  Then they skate around a small rink and beat the crap out of each other under the auspices of a loosely defined scoring system.  It’s hysterical!  They all wear costumes that blend punk rock, biker gang, and death metal.  Fishnet stockings dominate, as do either pink denim or black leather miniskirts, ripped tank tops or what I guess one might call a "sport corset".

Sidebar – I want to note that I’m upping my blog game by blogging in real time from a cafe in downtown Bend – and a guy just crossed in front of the store on a very weird bicycle/scooter thing.  I had basically a scooter style stand with bicycle size tires, but attached to either side of the rear was an inverted U-shaped frame extending perpendicular to the frame, and inside each of these frames was harnessed a large dog.  Some kind of weird home-built scooter/sledcycle thing.  Pretty cool.

OK, back to rollergirls!  Some of them have a little face paint on.  Most of them have large tattoos.  The skater "Rainbow" has a big green mohawk on her helmet.  The are a wide variety of body types from short and husky (including the one name "Needa Reduction", and she did), to a skinny girl with ankles so skinny I thought for sure they would snap, to tall and built like a model. The task of "rabble rousing" and getting the crowd riled up is left to two other ladies on wheels. One of them is wearing basically a cat woman type black vinyl top (with a triangle cut away for cleavage), and a matching miniskirt.  She keeps hanging around right in front of me because her husband and three small blonde-haired sons are sitting directly in front of me.

So, during the three 15-minute periods, the action is called over the loudspeaker by a local radio personality.  Basically there is one girl from each team that starts at the back, and these two "jammers" have to lap the pack.  After the first lap, every time a jammer passes a player from the oposing team, they score a point.  But basically, what it ends up being is a pack of about eight players bunch up in "the pack" and skate around slowly (their pace set by the "pivot"), and they engage in an ebb and flow of brawling with each other.  Then the two jammers, catch up and try to skate past the pack.  This is when it gets violent.  Trips, shoves, body checks, slide tackles, intentional crashing in front of someone, it’s all legal.  I even saw the girl with the skinny ankles grab a jammer in a straight up schoolyard head lock and rain blows upon her helmet with her wrist guard.  That is, until the "Brawl Breaker" skates in and splits them up.  Oh, and to complement the awesome punk aesthetic of the whole thing, they play loud music that included Tool, Queen, and Kool and the Gang!  Fantastic.  Best $10 I have spent in a long time.

I headed out Saturday morning for Oregon. My landlord made me some banana bread (non-NYC people are just nicer). It was a gorgeous day and there was lots of new things to see along the way. The farmland in eastern Oregon is quite different from others I have seen in Ohio or the Midwest. There were lots of tractors and stacks of hay bales and so forth. A few cool looking run down barns and houses, but I didn’t notice them in time to stop.

When I stopped for gas in Burns, Oregon, I chatted with a man who said he moved every week for seven years! He recommended Flagstaff, AZ, as did the ski ticket saleswoman I met today who is from there. Mom says there is nothing there, but I have at least three other testimonials for its merits. I think I will have to go check it out. Burns, Oregon is a really interesting and weird town, so I walked around a bit and ate lunch a diner that has been converted into a Chinese food restaurant. The Central Hotel building was particularly eye-catching.

Not far from there I saw from the road a playground slide that was so awesome I had to pull over and try it. Sadly, slides just don’t work that well for grown-ups. Our friction co-efficient must be off or something, so I wasn’t able to get all the way down just on gravity. But both the slide and the dual ladders leading up to it were very cool. Across the street from the park was a building with a fire breathing dragon crest, the significance of which I was unable to determine.

When I arrived in Bend I met my landlord Bob at the house. Bob is a friendly guy – a shirtless hippie, muscular, with very chapped lips and braces. He was still packing up some stuff and the cleaning lady was finishing up, so I took the green machine to a fund raiser car wash. The group doing the car wash is planning a trip to Mexico to "work with orphans". Then I explored the downtown area (thank you to the local government official who championed the big sign with arrows pointing to "Downtown" for us visitors). Drake Park is really nice. It is along the banks of the Deschutes River. I saw a funny mix of young punk rock kids, hippies in their twenties sporting dreadlocks, and lots of young families with two or three children, and everyone has a dog. The dogs were enjoying the weather, periodically venturing into the river to cool or and/or harass the geese and ducks. One large group of hippies was engaged in hacky sack, hula hoop, stilt walking, and some of them were apparently setting up a tight rope between two large tree trunks. Overall, the downtown is really nice. Lots of shops and restaurants, enough parking, lots of people strolling around, and a certain eery harmony between the various distinct social groups (the punk rock people really do look strange. I guess to them wearing the same thing you would wear to Ozzfest to a picnic in the park on a sunny Saturday afternoon seems obvious).

This morning I left early to catch the shuttle bus to the nearby Mt Bachelor ski resort. I missed the 8:15 bus by a minute or so, so I decided to risk another mountain driving in a city car debacle and just drive there. But Mt Bachelor is actually extremely accessible. No snow, never really that steep, and no sharp curves. So I bought a $99 pass for the rest of the season and went skiing. I had never done Spring skiing before. So now that I’ve skied on snow that is rapidly changing from ice to slush throughout the day, I think the only condition I have yet to ski in is really deep powder (Deep deep pow pow in official jargon. I have really only experienced pow pow with a singled deep). The views from Mt Bachelor are great and before long I abonded my hat and gloves altogether. I skied a pretty full day, but by around two in the afternoon the snow is so sticky that as you change speeds you run serious risk of your skis just suddenly stopping dead in their tracks while the top half of your body careens forward. So I headed out.

On my way out of the parking lot a guy with a snowboard was thumbing for a ride. Now, after my experience both not picking up and picking up hitchhikers in Hawaii, I am generally of the opinion that hitchhikers in the continental US are to be ignored. However, wanting to meet locals and figuring taking someone from a ski resort back to town has got to be a pretty safe bet, I picked him up. And as I would have bet, he was actually not a psychopath axe murderer. He told me we could probably expect at least four more powder days this season, which was great news. He also explained some of the mountain to me for next time.

Not content to stuff my feet into just a single type of awkward and uncomfortable footwear all day, when I got home I headed to the local climbing gym, got my month pass, and climbed a bit. It’s mostly bouldering and the non-climbing gym equipment is a bit lacking, but it’ll do nicely.

The rest of the photos are here