Wasco County

On a sunny Friday morning in June, a long drive to Northeastern Oregon I had planned was about to begin.  The trip itself had been in the balance because my son came down pneumonia and strep throat the prior week and it was lingering.  He had been getting better but earlier in the week he was backsliding and nearly missed the entire last week of school.  He did manage to make that last day of school and so we decided the trip was a go. 

We didn’t really have a route planned out, nor did we have a plan other than campsite reservations at Wallowa Lake State Park.  We packed up most of the van on Thursday evening and Friday only had to gas up and buy food for the trip before we could hit the road. We did not leave until almost 10 AM and I was getting restless.  We took Interstate 5 north to Interstate 84 to get gone as quick as possible.

A little history: My wife Marla’s grandparents moved from Detroit, MI to The Dalles in the 1940’s or so.  Her grandfather was a doctor who loved to fish and hunt and this was the perfect place for that.  They had one of the nicer houses in town.  Back when they lived there, there was no interstate and the main connection to the big city of Portland was the very scenic US 30, along the Columbia Gorge.  Her grandparents are gone and there is no longer any relatives living in The Dalles, so I had never seen the house where her mom grew up, or where she herself spent many a holiday or summer vacation growing up.  

I thought it would be a worthwhile stop on our trip to see this place that had a hand in shaping my wife and her family.  As we approached the freeway exit, Marla was becoming increasingly emotional at the thought of seeing the place she hasn’t seen for close to 20 years.  And of course her getting teary was affecting me.  We parked on a sidestreet.  I was expecting something a little more pastoral than what it was.  We were about a block from Fred Meyer shopping center.        

I learned that day that The Dalles has grown a lot since Marla played there as a girl.The house her grandparents owned once had lots of open space for kids to explore and run around.  Now there is an assisted living center and other developments where she used to frolic.  She had no desire to knock on the door and see the inside of the house.  The physical house held little appeal. The stop was good to do as sort of a cathartic experience, and I got to hear stories I hadn’t heard before and gave the kids an idea of how she grew up. 

We stopped at the local DQ for lunch and headed back out on the freeway to continue our trip. While driving through downtown I discovered that I had actually stopped in The Dalles the prior year to eat lunch at a Burgerville while passing through.