if we do,” I insist. I don’t use the word “lost” lightly. I’m a mother; in the years after the divorce when my sons and I would cycle around the city we’d moved to, we often found ourselves in unfamiliar territory. “We’re not lost,” I’d laugh, to ease their minds and my own. “We just don’t know exactly where we are.”
“If we get lost, we’ll call somebody,” Wayne says, tapping the cellphone.
It was the cellphone that located the Kims in the end. Most of the area they were travelling through was out of range of a communications tower, but when a cellphone that’s turned on goes in and out of a service area, it “pings,” leaving an automatic signature at the tower. By combing the records of the towers the Kims might have passed, two dogged engineers found a ping, and by determining the roads within line of sight of that tower, the search was narrowed to Bear Camp Road, where Kati and the girls were found.
Our cellphone is never on. No one has the number. We use it only to call out, so why drain the charge by keeping it powered? We’ve told our family and friends we’re taking the long way home. We’ll be back when we’re back. We could be stranded on some snowbound road for a month, maybe more, before anyone would think of looking for us.
“Let’s stay on the coast road,” I say to Wayne, closing the map. “We can loop up to the Willamette and back, then carry on to California. I want to see Gold Beach.”
“Great,” says Wayne. “And I’d like to see some wine.”
WINDING for just over a hundred miles on either side of the picturesque Willamette River (pronounced “Will-ah-met” locally), the Willamette Valley is a relatively new region for Oregon wines. As the main destination for the 500,000 settlers who travelled the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, the valley, with its lush vegetation and fertile soil, was taught to say beans and carrots long before it was allowed to say grapes. Now, like the longer-established Umpqua Valley farther south, it is best known for its Pinot Noirs. The soil is, apparently, Pinot-friendly. I’m a Merlot man, myself, but am not averse to stepping up to a good Pinot if I have to.
Our idea is to cut east on Route 47, do a short raid through the Yamhill Valley (an offshoot of the Willamette), pull into a few local vineyards for some late-season dégustation, and then cut back west to the coast with a trunk full of vintage red that will see us into California. Alas, what we drive through looks more like pork and onion country than the state’s premier wine region. We pass a few fields of vines and the occasional sign for a winery—Elk Cove, Kramer Vineyards, Domaine Serene—but mostly it is dry-looking fields, tumbling barns, rusting tractors and riotous fencerows. It looks a lot like eastern Ontario.
Since the 1960s, the number of wineries in the Willamette region has risen from nine to more than a hundred, but they all seem either elsewhere or closed and boarded up for the winter, the growers probably in California or Chile, depleting the competition’s stock. We do stop at a wine market near McMinnville, a well-appointed establishment called Bellevue, with racks and racks of wines, a tasting bar, and a friendly, talkative manager named Patrick, who guides me through a tasting of six very nice local bottles, none of the names of which I write down.
The wines I like come from the places I’ve been. The small house we rented in the Côtes-du-Rhône, with its peeling wooden shutters that rattled throughout the mistral and nearly drove Merilyn crazy; the ten days we spent driving around Tuscany in a small silver convertible; a month camped in a desert in northwestern Argentina, drinking local Malbec around the fire at night. I can recall the night I first tasted wine from Oregon: it was in Boston, in a small restaurant across the Common from Cheers. Now, every time I taste it, I think of that trip and the friends we were with. Wine, for me, is more than immediate pleasure: it evokes layers of past experience, just as travel does.
“We don’t get many Oregon wines in eastern Canada,” I tell him.
“One or two,” he says. “From the bigger producers. There are some very nice local wines that no one outside the valley ever hears about.”
When he has guided me down a row of six selections, he asks me which I preferred.
“I think the one from Amity Vineyards,” I say, selecting a bottle at random.
Patrick nods owlishly. “One of the bigger producers,” he says.
He goes on to complain of a visit he had earlier in the day from a man who was getting married and wanted to hold his reception at the Bellevue, so that his guests could “sample” a wide variety of Oregon wines for free. Patrick pours me a Merlot. “Oregonians still have a hard-liquor mentality,” he says.
“All North America does,” I say, sympathizing. “You don’t see John Wayne or Frank Sinatra bellying up to the bar and ordering a glass of Chardonnay.”
“‘In a dirty glass,’” Patrick laughs.
Portland was settled mainly by Scandinavians who worked in the timber and fishing trades, and for whom a good night out meant drinking vast quantities of schnapps before going to midnight mass. McMinnville was one of those towns that William Least Heat-Moon says were placed on the map to fill a blank space, until the surge in interest in Willamette Valley wines in the 1980s made it quite prosperous. Nevertheless, there were still objections when local vintners on the town council wanted to put a cluster of grapes on the municipal emblem.
Patrick rails at length against the tyranny of Pinot Noir and presses more glasses of Merlot upon me. I have the impression that sales of Merlot have dropped since the movie Sideways. I buy an armful of Merlots and a few Zinfandels, mostly because they are inexpensive and I like the labels. Merilyn buys a packet of smoked hazelnuts, and Patrick throws in a chipped tasting glass with “Amity Vineyards” printed on it. “When they’re chipped,” he says, “I can’t use them.”
When we leave, Merilyn has to drive.
“You’ll have to navigate,” Merilyn says resignedly as I climb into the passenger side after stowing the wine in the trunk. She loves driving and is always eager to do her share of it, the only impediment being my hopelessness as a navigator. Unlike me, she likes to know where she’s going before she gets there. The general rule is, if my instinct tells me to go one way, we should probably turn in the opposite direction. This makes for some awkward moments at intersections. Merilyn, in contrast, has developed the art of navigation into a virtual science. She is always saying things like: “Three minutes from now you’ll see a large water tower with ‘Forest City’ painted on it, and a sign saying Denning 38; turn east there.” To which I reply: “Would that be left or right?”
From the plethora of maps and brochures tucked away under the seat, in the glove box, and in the little compartment in the door panel designed especially to hold used Kleenex tissues, chocolate bar wrappers, and little plastic bottles of body lotion pilfered from hotel bathrooms, I select a map at random and study it carefully.
“When you get to the Pacific Ocean,” I say, “turn left.”
MONTHS before the trip, I had a thought: Must get some brochures, check out the Internet, make a plan. I like to know what’s ahead, even if it morphs into something else. At home, I’m the one with the tidy desk, pens in a row, books squared, something I spend an inordinate amount of time justifying. Sometimes, I insist, a messy desk is not a sign of a creative mind; it’s just a disgusting, messy desk.
