#Longview Bridge

[justgetclosertome]

Rustic Landscape in New Orleans

[rabbitcruiser]

Newberry National Volcanic Monument, OR (No. 25)

The early history of Lava Butte is not known, but it is assumed that Native Americans observed the eruptions and later ascended the prominent new landmark. White settlers arriving in the 1800s also noted the landmark. In 1903, I.C. Russell was the first geologist to study the butte and speculated that it erupted as recently as 150 years ago. Dr. Howel Williams estimated it to be much older, but incorrectly at 1,000 years old. In September 1914, Lava Butte "erupted" when the Bend Chamber of Commerce simulated an eruption to surprise a visiting Portland group. In 1925, USGS geologist Harold Stearns studied the Newberry area and recognized the fissure system which extends from Lava Butte to East Lake within Newberry Caldera.

Sometime after 1901, the Great Northern Railway was extended south through the area. The construction crew built the rail line directly through the ʻAʻā lava flow of Lava Butte.

The cinder cone was also exploited to some extent for its economic value. In June 1926, a quarry was developed in the fault scarp east of Lava Butte as a source for paving material for the first The Dalles-California Highway (later U.S. Route 97). In November 1929, cinders from Lava Butte were shipped to Longview, Washington, to be used in construction of Longview Bridge across Columbia River.

Source: Wikipedia

[haveyoubeentothiscity]

Population: 37,818

The submitter commented, “There ARE two Longviews in the USA, there's one rooted in Texas as well. The one I submitted, the one in Washington, is known for being one of the first cities to create squirrel bridges! Also lumber but that's not as important.”

[maocin]

Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone?, 1997, Harvey Danger

Harvey Danger is not a hall-of-fame band. They are not special, they produced no classics, they left very little imprint on our larger culture musically. But with Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? they wrote a pretty much perfect album. Aside from two minutes of dead air at the end, this record rocks from start to finish. I want to talk about why this is one of my favorite albums of all time.

Starting Off Strong

Okay, so you've heard "Flagpole Sitta". Good song! A nice summer-y bop to get heads turning when it comes on over the radio. Something everybody can sing along to when the chorus hits. Maybe, if you knew who Harvey Danger were off the top of your head, you've heard "Carlotta Valdez", the frankly electrifying album opener that makes an equal case for most listenable on the album. This strong one-two will get you moving, get you hyped. Plenty of albums from genuinely talented artists go by without having even one song that you feel like really fucking screaming along to. And yet, from the first chorus of Carlotta to the very last four-count in Flagpole Sitta, if I'm not in public, I'm probably losing my voice. Maybe even if I am in public.

The guitars sound like what I want guitars to sound like, sometimes twinkly and bright with an undercurrent of grungy distorted rhythm, sometimes driving fully into the territory of punk with a warbling angry lead and a forceful drive on crunchy power chords. The drums keep things moving -- there's no laying into the groove here, no snapping on two and four. This is for moving your whole body to the inexorable pull of a fucking awesome downbeat. The vocals are distinct but still speak the language of late 90's pop-grunge with some typical growls, a sarcastic, cynical delivery, and the obligatory megaphone-sounding bridge every now and again.

Oh, and holy shit, that bass. Paul McCartney is crying tears of happiness somewhere.

These first two songs are perfect pop-punk anthems. When I finish "Carlotta Valdez" I want to scream YES! along with the guys in the studio. Flagpole Sitta makes me want to go drive a car too fast, strut around Main Street with the crew, unapologetically enjoy my world with awareness of the enlightened hipster perspective and rejection of its caustic holier-than-thou attitude. In short: Go, white boy, go.

2. Changing the Game

It's extremely important what happens between "Wooly Muffler", "Private Helicopter", and the three songs that follow. And now I want to talk about lyrics, because yeah, those matter too. Wooly Muffler opens with a strikingly evocative image given what you're used to hearing after the first two songs: Flagpole Sitta's "Only stupid people are breeding/The cretins cloning and feeding/And I don't even own a TV" seems like it comes from some Green Day song* but the vulnerability of "All I ever wanted to be was a wooly muffler on your naked neck" belongs on Pinkerton. Neither of these are necessarily good or bad -- they're just well-executed in equal measure, and the range should be acknowledged. Wooly Muffler is not the first hint that this album might be much more than another dumb pop-punk effort, but it is the most obvious. Unless you're a Hitchcock fan. For everyone else, when the guitars kick back in heavy on Wooly Muffler, we know for sure it's real. "If you've got greatness in you/Would you do us all a favor/And keep it to yourself" is one of my favorite lines in anything I've ever read, seen, or heard. These guys are the real deal, another Nirvana, capable of capturing the energy without succumbing to the bullshit. *(although it's actually quite delightfully ironic and clever and if we're being charitable "Longview" is too, and everyone everywhere should really give artists more credit because being authentic in ways that everyone agrees with is comically hard)

And then "Private Helicopter" comes on. You just can't help but recognize everything awful about the genre in the way Sean Nelson delivers "favorite ex-girlfriend." I almost turned the album off right here the first time I listened to it. There's no use lying; I totally did, and I had to go back later to finish the rest. I am here to promise you: it's not blink-182. You are not hearing the beginning of a boyish album about sex drugs and rock'n'roll. It's one miss for one verse, if it's that. Yes, it's scary to hear a record that sounds like it's headed in the right direction almost veer into the wrong one, but I solemnly swear that this song gets personal, it gets angry, it is not a bit piece. And that's why getting through the first half is so important, because it's not their fault that "What's My Age Again" and later Offspring albums are cringey to listen to now. This song suffers for sins that are not (!) its own. So you might be upset heading into the middle of the album. Fortunately --

3. Holy shit these next two songs are really fucking good I mean wow

"Here's a fact you cannot rise above/We'll have problems, yeah/Then we'll have bigger ones."

As a writer or listener for a vast amount of music all told, I am not uniquely qualified to say this but I am qualified enough. When Sean Nelson says he doesn't know what the line "From damage to damn control" means, he is not admitting defeat. The best writers in the world will tell you a good song is a gift and a good line is pure dumb luck. Sometimes, it's just stringing words together and singing them in a way that means something to someone. If you don't feel anything when you listen to "Problems and Bigger Ones", there's something fundamentally wrong with you as a human person.

Jack The Lion is deeply personal and deeply sad. I watched my father lose his father to Alzheimer's; I read the 23rd Psalm at Papu's funeral. I was too young to understand why Dad cried at "Cat's Cradle," call it self-centeredness. "When you coming home dad?/I don't know when" just didn't hit as hard at eight, because my father had been home for me. It's not nostalgia talking when I say I fucking love this band. It's "Jack The Lion." Watching my father deteriorate would break me. This song is really, really good.

4. Now that we're all sold on this being phenomenal, lets listen to some songs about love and hate and all that good stuff

I don't have much to say about "Old Hat." It's one of those love songs that you have to squint at to realize it's astoundingly true. There's not much conventional beauty in that. However, it works out to be exactly what it's meant to be. What a commendable thing to aspire to. To ape one of my favorite people on the internet, the brevity of Old Hat has a lot to teach about the craft of writing. I learned, of course, absolutely nothing.

"Old Hat" is about love. So is "Terminal Annex," but a different kind: the inverse, really. "Dreaming of the fistfight I never got into/Thinking of the mean shit I wish I'd said to you" is one of those lines that means a lot to those born into boyhood in America. I hope I've sold you on the idea that these fine gentlemen are self-aware; it's my firm belief that the song isn't actually about how much he hates this girl, rather it's about the ways that kind of hatred can influence a life. In any case, it means something, and that's another check mark.

5. Taking it home

The last two songs have to mean something too. We're this close to a more-or-less perfect album, just bring it home.

And oh brother, does "Wrecking Ball" almost fuck it up or what. Maybe you're into this sort of thing, but I was enjoying my album free of hackneyed metaphors, with its depth coming from reflection and self-awareness and trust in the artist. Creating a metaphorical house is... a little much for my taste. But it's got that profound sound, and just because it has the T.S. Eliot accent isn't enough reason to hate it.

Let's talk about "Radio Silence" now. Assume for a moment the last three minutes of the song don't exist. What a fucking song. In 1997, before Twitter collapsed all nuance, before Facebook bore our personal information into the gaping maw of every aggregating advertiser, before the hyper-modern fractionalization of every group of people, we have "Radio Silence". The lament of a man who just so desperately wants to be left alone. And by way of that lament, his caricature. And by way of that caricature, some form of commentary. Sure -- it winds up meaning what you want it to mean. Absolutely it's true that you could overanalyze this album to death, it has the accent of profundity and enough words to feed a freshman lit class for weeks, months if they can bring in other works to compare it all to. Obviously this much is true.

But in 2023 when you listen to this fucking song and you hear "All hail to another confession" how can it not make you feel at least something. Some people walk around living thinking a friend who asks for favors is no friend at all, some people believe their public profile is a great place to drop all the trauma of their childhood. Is it so much to ask to maintain a little radio silence? If you choose to read it as a plea for normalcy, it might look a little something like that. But it's all yours to interpret and that's the best any artist anywhere can offer.

All that said, here's my two cents. The ending refrain of the song sounds fucking beautiful. By that point I've already decided what I want to believe for the day -- a song's not going to change my mind about what should and shouldn't be acceptable in polite conversation with strangers. Whatever I'm feeling or thinking, when that refrain comes in, I get chills.

6. Go forth!

If you lived through the nineties you might remember Flagpole Sitta, or if you were on Vimeo in 2007 (google flagpole sitta lipsync), or if you listen to your local alt-rock radio station. But it's not even the best song on this album. I prefer Carlotta Valdez and Jack The Lion. Furthermore, Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? isn't even their best whole work -- that probably goes to King James Version, although Little By Little was also well recieved.

Harvey Danger is self-aware and self-important, deeply involved with the culture that birthed it and equally parts mocking of its origins. They are fine lyricists, fine musicians, they put the music first and produce songs that you can enjoy listening to. And most importantly, if your friend who likes good music asks you how the album is, you can play Flagpole Sitta -- but if you have a friend who thinks Nirvana were industry plants, well, you can just as easily play them Radio Silence, and get a less frigid reception than if you had confessed to liking Dave Matthews. They created an almost-perfect album. Had Sean Nelson taken a better tone at the beginning of "Private Helicopter" and the record label decided to lop off the last three minutes of nothingness with noise, this album would be impossible to find fault with. Not a 10 by any means -- it's no great work of art -- but something even rarer: a perfect seven.

7. Postscript

Reasons you might not like this album:

It's not very musical and the vocal performances range from 'nothing special' to 'straight-up grating if you don't like pop punk'.

Mired in mediocrity, it doesn't strive for or achieve anything beyond the grounds it covers. No innovative sound or meaningful lyrical accomplishment; it never captured a movement or spoke to a generation the way a classic album does.

The lyrics aren't much! If you're used to something like Springsteen's grit, or Penelope Scott's wittiness, or the complexity and sincerity of Kendrick Lamar, you're going to be disappointed. Hell, even if you're more of a Taylor Swift fan you might find "So casually cruel in the name of being honest" to be more pithy and striking than most of Harvey Danger's offerings. Although if you think "All Too Well" inarguably clears everything on this album, even after listening, then I'll be very sad.

By calling this a perfect album I don't mean to say that it's full of perfect songs, or to argue that it's a classic, or even to say that it's particularly good for your tastes. If you look for greatness in your music, you will not find it here. But what they try to achieve, they achieve, and they do so entirely without fault. This album left a sincere impression on me and I hope you didn't read this far because what the fuck are you doing you're wasting your time go listen to it!!!

[lostsemicolon]

There's rail work between Fort Worth and Longview, so the Texas Eagle is split into two trains bridged by a charter bus (which sucks tbh)

We were already delayed a bit from having to wait for freight trains. But now I'm just stuck in the Fort Worth amtrak/greyhound station because the other Texas Eagle is way late.

I'm going to cast curses on these freight rail companies that are fucking up my Amtrak travel.

[rrareearthh]

Sick shot of Mt. St. Helens my dad @portwes took in Rainier 42 years ago. 2 years later, everything changed when my brother @alekshrek520 was born in West Sussex, England. Oh, and I guess this mountain blew up too?? #geology #volcano #pnw #rainier #oregon #washington #mtsthelens #mountain #mountains #stratovolcano #rock #rocks #pacificnorthwest #longview #bridge #columbiariver #columbiacounty (at Saint Helens, Oregon) https://www.instagram.com/p/CAVnZfVndfs/?igshid=emgh2iyg1rx2

[architectureforsuicides]

Superman III (Richard Lester, 1983) AB-22 Highwood River Bridge Longview, Alberta (Canada) Bridge over the Highwood river Type: beam bridge.

[ellewritenow]

[literal-bot-account]

Fuck yeah for toponymy!!! op I hope you don't mind if I add some silly little place names of my own :)

Tenebrance (a planet):

Arpetia an island nation known for its delicious tropical fruits. The extreme biodiversity of the local flora (caused by divergent evolution on different islands) mean the various native plants are highly sought after for decoration and cultivation.

Chromatican Federal Republic a large and wealthy nation hosting the planet's main spaceport. It is generally looked to as the planet's "protector", fielding the world's largest Black Navy with multiple space stations and even a few extraplanetary colonies.

Kwemana (a planet):

Danban a fishing village whose name was a pun based on the Plaintalk words for "bridge" and "fishing bait". Past-tense is used because the village was recently obliterated by a group of vandals using a stolen Chromatican ship, the CFRBN Backstroke.

Tsaoun another fishing village and Danban's bitter rival, just west up the River Seran. It's name is an onomatopoeia for the twanging noise associated with a string being pulled taut, used in Plaintalk as an adjective for the abundance brought on by good hunting, good fishing, and good trade.

Port Lockton a town on the mouth of the River Ktong. Actually has a functional spacepad, one of the few designated spacecraft landing pads on all of Tenebrance. The Planetside™ Longview, a space ferry being used as a tourist vehicle, once had to make an emergency departure there when the Trecer Alliance attacked the city. One tourist was left behind and declared missing.

I love my silly little place names :) Here are some!

Montvolley (a county):

Farefort (the capital city and a huge trading centre of cultural importance. The people there are known for being educated, high-energy and high-end)

Brooksfield (the land which the royal family's holiday home resides in. It's huge)

Blumewald (a county)

Port Blume (the city most of the story takes place in. A coastal town created for keeping an eye on the poorest people of the county, which are watched over by the Count. Mostly natives and immigrants. Trade and craftsmanship is their main source of income here as they're not allowed to own farmland. This is the case with most towns)

Weideswil/Weideswile (a county):

Dovepool (a place where many nobles have their summer homes. Slow-paced society and beautiful scenery)

Markholm (a county)

Soudemouth (some coastal city that really isn't too relevant to the plot. Cannibalism happened there once, I dunno. There is also a river called Soude)

[nomanismyequal]

Never made anything as emotionally charged as FEEL SO DIFFERENT(THAN YOUR SERENITY PRAYER) it’s now on Apple Music and VAMPHYRII REVERIES has 3 songs now!! Not bad for less than a week worth of making artistic expression and now VAMPHYRII METAL HAS ITS FIRST EVER ALBUM UNDERWAY!!

Never made anything as emotionally charged as FEEL SO DIFFERENT(THAN YOUR SERENITY PRAYER) it’s now on Apple Music and VAMPHYRII REVERIES has 3 songs now!! Not bad for less than a week worth of making artistic expression and now VAMPHYRII METAL HAS ITS FIRST EVER ALBUM UNDERWAY!!

Never made anything as emotionally charged as FEEL SO DIFFERENT(THAN YOUR SERENITY PRAYER) it’s now on Apple Music and VAMPHYRII REVERIES has 3 songs now!! Not bad for less than a week worth of making artistic expression and now VAMPHYRII METAL HAS ITS FIRST EVER ALBUM…

[carolmunro]

Bridges over the Columbia

A few of the bridges over the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington. Clockwise from top left, Bridge of the Gods, Cascade Locks, Astoria – Megler Bridge, Astoria, view of the Bridge of the Gods from the Columbia, view of the Astoria – Megler Bridge, Lewis and Clark Bridge Rainier – Longview, a view of the Lewis and Clark Bridge from Rainier and the I5 Bridge Portland – Vancouver. Other…

[jonesie32]

The city of Longview, Washington decorated their squirrel bridges for the holidays. I love it!

[sroloc--elbisivni]

i desperately want to know more about mushroomverse chip 👀

so some stuff about the future of mushroomverse chip is spoilers for stuff I'm hoping to put in a spotlight fic on him I want to write later this year that's going to be how i'm adapting Roll For It and dealing with What The Fuck Soundwave's telepathy deal that never works aside from that is. Here are some Fun Facts about mushroomverse Chip, with the understanding that until it's on page it's just my intention

•He was homeschooled, both of his parents are professors and he had the misfortune of being in the batch of people in 1964 California who got polio when the attenuated version of the virus in the oral vaccine wasn't attenuated enough. this isn't anything that's ever really relevant but i like explaining what batshit depths of research I get up to behind the scenes. this is why he uses a wheelchair.

•I think his mom was one of the midcentury Computers--as in people who did calculations as a profession and got into early computing while it was all being done on big server banks at huge central locations. Chip tagged along with her.

•so between Studying Whatever He Wanted and Constant Exposure to Computers and being really interested in them, Chip was writing code by the time he was a teenager. He wrote a program for *spins wheel* a dam or other big government plant project associated with the CU system and put it on a floppy and mailed it to them. they wrote back going 'This is great! Would you be willing to come consult on the installation?' and Chip asked his mom if she could drive him and she said yes. And so Chip wrote back and said yes he could and became a consultant for the federal government at the ripe old age of 16 in 1979.

•When he was 17 a volcano blew up and there were aliens inside and it turns out even aliens need power plants! what Chip didn't find out for a long time is that initially he got hired for the same reason Sparkplug did which is the overwhelmed-by-Earth Autobots looked at his name and went 'oh finally someone normal. He's got a good record and he must know what he's doing, he's named for it, hire him.'

•So Chip moved up to Washington and actually lived at Sparkplug's place for a while (in Longview) because his parents were concerned about him living on his own (even though he basically lived at the Ark) and promptly got an enormous crush on Spike Witwicky that he sat on like a broody hen for the six months-year or so until Carly Simon (no relation to the singer), engineering student showed up from out of town to intern with the Autobots and they commiserated over a shared crush that turned to mutual respect and hooking up and the rest is history

•Chip is Daniel's other biological donor because Spike is trans. Spike is legally Daniel's guardian because he and Carly are the ones who got married and it makes the paperwork easier. In practice they both dad him a lot.

•Chip is the second youngest of four kids. he spent a lot of time indoors as a kid, and he likes tabletop games and video games and plays monopoly with no mercy. also poker. he's hesitant in a lot of social situations but he can play bridge and poker and cribbage like a ruthless card shark.

[gravelish]

San Francisco to Seattle

17 May - 5 June 2021

I thought it might be good to provide a summary of my recent 20-day ride from San Francisco to Seattle. Each day resulted in its own entry (linked below), but I wanted to provide a broader overview. (LINK: post about gear and bike setup).

My route covered 1187 miles over 20 days (I-5, by car, is 820 miles). I averaged 62 miles per day, not counting my rest day (daily miles ranged from 32 to 88). I chose to take an inland route, in part because the roads were less trafficked and in part because I have a fondness of the wide open spaces of the interior. If I had been riding north to south, I might have opted for the coast, but there was no way I was going to add persistent northerly headwinds to an already very hilly and heavily trafficked (but very scenic) route.

Here are the links to individual days:

Day 1. 5-17. San Francisco to Petaluma. Pacific Ocean. Golden Gate Bridge. Dinner with M.

Day 2. 5-18. Petaluma to Clearlake. Santa Rosa. Chalk Hills. Ida Clayton Road. Middletown.

Day 3. 5-19. Clearlake to Williams. Clear Lake. Bartlett Springs Road. Leesville Grade.

Day 4. 5-20. Williams to Browns Valley. Sacramento River. Sutter Buttes. Central Valley.

Day 5. 5-21. Browns Valley to La Porte. Uphill, all day. Log trucks and wet snow.

Day 6. 5-22. La Porte to Quincy. North Sierras.

Day 7. 5-23. Quincy to Bogard. Spanish Fork. Taylorsville. Moonlight Pass. Westwood.

Day 8. 5-24. Bogard to Fall River Mills. Old Station. Hat Creek. Cassell Road.

Day 9. 5-25. Fall River Mills to Lava Beds. Bieber. Lookout. Tionesta.

Day 10. 5-26. Lava Beds to Klamath Falls. Lava. Tule Lake. Oregon.

Day 11. 5-27. Klamath Falls to Mazama Village. Klamath Lake. Crater Lake NP.

Day 12. 5-28. Mazama Village to Davis Creek. Crater Lake. US97. Cascade Lakes.

Day 13. 5-29. Davis Creek to Bend. Sun River. Deschutes River Trail.

Day 14. 5-30. Bend to Santiam Pass. Sisters. Lost Lake.

Day 15. 5-31. Santiam Pass to Sublimity. Detroit.

Day 16. 6-1. Sublimity to Portland. Silverton. Oregon City. The Willamette River.

Day 17. 6-2. Portland. Rest day.

Day 18. 6-3. Portland to Kelso. US 30 along Columbia. Longview.

Day 19. 6-4. Kelso to Yelm. Castle Rock. Chehalis. Tenino.

Day 20. 6-5. Yelm to Seattle. Spanaway. Puyallup. Green and Duwamish Rivers. Downtown.

The following is a link to the entire route in RideWithGPS. Note that this is a close approximation of the route, but not necessarily exact. The day-by-day posts above link to the actual ride data, which show enough detail to capture wrong turns, side trips, and exactly where I stopped for food, camped, or pulled off for a view.

My steepest climbs were Ida Clayton Road in Sonoma County on the second day and Bartlett Springs Road east of Clear Lake on the third. My longest climb was on the western slope of the northern Sierras, which rose from near sea level to over 6500'. Day 5, from Browns Valley to La Porte, resulted in a total climb of almost 8800’, the most I’ve ever done in a day. Other notable, but easier climbs included Moonlight Pass north of Taylorsville (Day 7), the climb to Crater Lake (Day 11), and the ascent of Santiam Pass (Day 14). The highest point on the ride was 7600’ along the west rim of Crater Lake (Day 12). I crisscrossed the Pacific Crest Trail numerous times in CA and OR.

Geologically, this was a very volcanic route. Lots of lava. Lots of cones and craters and calderas. I saw Sutter Buttes, Lassen, Shasta, Medicine Lake (Lava Beds), McLaughlin, Mazama (Crater Lake), Thielsen, Diamond Peak, Newberry (Paulina Peak), Bachelor, The Sisters, Washington, Jefferson, Hood, Adams, St Helens, and Rainier. Some were closer than others, but they were all around me.

While there were some great (rough, difficult, but sometimes wonderful) gravel segments, a vast majority of the ride was on pavement. The most memorable gravel was on Bartlett Springs Road and on Moonlight Valley/Old Town Road between Taylorsville and Westwood. The Deschutes River Trail was a great dirt ride, mainly easy single track, but made me glad I was riding a gravel bike with a bike packing setup and not my touring bike with panniers. The Ida Clayton Road north of Santa Rosa and Hill Road east Lava Beds National Monument were paved, but badly, and should probably count as gravel!

I stayed in motels when I could and camped when I needed to. Motels are often generic and uninteresting (not always) and expensive, but they have running water and hot showers, outlets for charging, a place to wash out and dry clothing, and are much warmer when you get up in the morning. They are usually near stores and restaurants and usually have WiFi and cell service (not always). Camping is more rewarding and more immersive. Cold nights. Full moons. Misty lakes. Wildlife. Noisy birds. There were a couple of regular campgrounds and a bunch of wild camps or primitive sites that were nearly wild.

Highlights are always tough (and often the highlights of bike trip are moments not spent on the bike). The Golden Gate Bridge. Dinner with M on her birthday along the Petaluma River. Dropping down the Leesville Grade. Indian Valley and Young's Market in Taylorsville. The view of Lassen and Shasta over the Hat Creek Valley. The patio at the Fall River Hotel. Crater Lake. Riding into Bend along the Deschutes River Trail. The morning mist on Lost Lake west of Santiam Pass. Coffee at Dragonfly and breakfast at Besaw on my rest day in Portland.

And then there are the people and the conversations. The volunteers at the randoneuring check point in Quincy. Scott and Barb and Les in Fall River. Tom at Lava Beds. The guy in the coffee shop in Klamath Falls. The family at Crater Lake. Another family at the coffee shop in Sisters. Many others.

Ultimately, what impacts me the most is the notion of riding alone through a vast landscape. The surroundings change slowly because you are moving slowly. But they do change, and rarely do you go half a day without finding yourself in a very different kind of place. Over almost three weeks there are mountains and desert and lava and forest and city and ocean. The remoteness and the solitude is both a compelling attraction and a big source of stress. It’s wonderful, scary, and a little overwhelming, which is probably why it is so powerful emotionally. I enjoy the challenge, the anticipation, and doing something that's a little more difficult in a life that's otherwise remarkably easy. Of course, when I'm doing it, I often wish I was home, going out for the routine coffee, sitting in the back yard, and puttering around the house.

There are always what-ifs. I discovered and fixed a loose derailleur on the second day before something disastrous happened. I had no flats or other mechanical problems, other than constant issues with a drive chain desperately in need of a cleaning. If it had been colder AND wetter, things might have gotten unpleasant, but as it was, weather was pretty ideal most of the time. If my periodic toothache or my sore peroneal tendon had gotten worse, there might have been a reckoning. I was passed by thousands of cars and trucks, but if they were texting or on their fifth beer, I didn’t notice (but I did think about it). Hypothermia and dehydration should always be concerns, but I brought proper gear and planned my route carefully and flexibly, making those outcomes highly unlikely. Ultimately, I suspect the most dangerous aspect of this kind of ride is my own inattention. It’s hitting something, catching the edge of pavement, or sliding in loose gravel, and taking a bad spill.

COVID impacted the trip in the same way it affects our broader lives these days. Rules, attitudes, and adherence varied from place to place and not always in the patterns you might expect - but that's true about a lot of things when traveling. The biggest issue was that places I normally rely on weren't always available - from fast food dining rooms to bathrooms. It was harder to get out of the sun, refill water bottles, charge batteries, or find WiFi.

[mando-lore]

"A bird... or something...": The story of Mothman and other 'flying men'

Certainly Strange: A Podcast About The Unexplainable, episode 7

Listen on: YouTube  Spotify  Castbox

"It was a bird... or something."

It was the 15th of November, 1966, and Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette were joyriding through a maze of dirt roads that connected abandoned world war two bunkers, late at night in Point Pleasant West Virginia. They had just driven past an abandoned generator plant when they saw… something. A huge figure in the darkness, just off the side of the road. And it was watching them. With huge, blood red eyes.

"I'm a hard guy to scare" Scarberry later said to the local newspaper, "but last night I was getting out of there." He slammed the gas and tried to manoeuvre his car out of the dump area as quickly as possible, away from the strange creature that watched them. And as they fled, they all saw the creature, something that looked like the hybrid between a man and a bird, standing on a hill by the side of the road.

And then, it started following them. It hoovered above the car, chasing them. “We were driving one hundred miles per hour and that bird kept right up with us. It wasn’t even flapping its wings.” The women started crying. The creature followed them until the couples reached the National Guard Armory on Route 62. They thought they had finally lost the strange man-bird, but once they turned the car around, there it was again. It seemed to be waiting on them.

The creature was over six foot tall, grey, with a wingspan of 10 feet. "It was like a man with wings," Mallette said. "It wasn't like anything you'd see on TV or in a monster movie..."

The Scarberries and the Mallettes gave a statement to the police. "If I had seen it while by myself I wouldn't have said anything," Scarberry commented, "but there were four of us who saw it."

At first, the four witnesses were the laughingstock of the town. But soon, stories started to surface, old and new. They were definitely not the only ones who had witnessed the creature that is now known as the Mothman.

On that very same day, on November the 15th 1966, the Mothman had been spotted by a farmer about 90 miles away in Salem. Newell Partridge was watching television when at 10:30pm he heard his German shepherd named Bandit howling. The farmer went out to check on his dog with a flashlight, when he was met with two large red eyes, like red reflectors, staring at him.

Bandit took off towards the creature that threatened his master, into the night. Then, the farmer could hear his dog screech and whine. And he never saw him again.

The strange thing? In their eyewitness report, The Scarberries and the Mallettes told the police that, while they were being chased by the Mothman, they had seen something, lying on the side of the road. It had been a carcass. The carcass of a dead dog.

The very next day, the Mothman was spotted by one Mr and Mrs Wamsley and their friend Mrs Bennett, who were driving through the world war two bunker area on their way to visit a friend. They parked the car in a darkened area several feet from the residence, and knocked on their friend’s door. When they found him not at home, they headed back to the car. This is where they saw it. In the darkness, a shadowy figure lurked behind the automobile.

“It rose up slowly from the ground. A big, grey thing. Bigger than a man, with terrible, glowing red eyes.” Said Bennett. According to her own statement, when Bennett saw the creature, she was so horrified she fell on her baby whom she had been holding in her arms.

There were dozens of Mothman sightings during the next several weeks. One witness, Mrs. Roy Grose, saw the creature through her kitchen window, early in the morning when her barking dog had awakened her. She say a large multicoloured object hovering over the treetop in a field across the road. That same day a local teenager encountered a huge birdlike creature with his car, and claimed that it had followed him for more than a mile.

Tom Ury, a young shoe salesman, was driving down route 62 at 7:15 in the morning on his way to work, when he spotted a towering figure standing by the road in an adjacent field. Suddenly it had spread its wings and took off straight up. The figure then started circling his car like a bird, and kept flying over the car even at the speed of seventy-five miles per hour, much like as he had done to the Scarberries and the Mallettes. Tom was apparently so frightened by this encounter, he did not get into work that day.

In total, there were around 200 sightings of the Mothman in the year 1966 to 1967. But it was not the first time something like a bird-man was spotted near Point Pleasant.

In 1961, 5 years prior, a woman was driving down route 2 along the Ohio river with her father when she spotted a winged figure. She had just passed by a park when a tall figure suddenly appeared in the road ahead of her. It was a grey figure with folded wings across its back, like how one would describe an angel. Startled by the car, the creature unfolded its wings, which “practically filled the whole road”, and then the mysterious creature took off.

However, the woman and her father were not the first to ever witness the creature that would become known as “The Mothman”. In 1948, the Army officials at McChord Field in Washington state were approached by the 61-year-old Mrs Bernice Aikowski, who claimed that she had seen a man-bird in her backyard in nearby Chehalis.

“I know most people don’t believe me, but I have talked to some people in Chehalis that tell me they say the man, too. It was about 3 PM on January 6th, and there were a lot of small children coming home from school at the time. They saw the man, too, and asked me if they could go into my backyard so they could watch him longer as he flew towards the south end of the city.”

According to her, the flying man-bird seemed to be a man equipped with long silver wings fastened over his shoulders with a strap, like one of the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci.

On April 9th, 1948, two Longview Washington state residents named Viola Jonson (a laundry worker) and James Pittman (a janitor) told journalists that they had seen several men with flying suits and goggles, flying through the air, circling the city at a hight of 250 feet. Two similar flying men were sighted near Butte in Oregon, on September 16th that same year.

In 1971, at 2AM in Norton Massachusetts, police sergeant Thomas Downy was driving home along Winter Street in Mansfield. As he approached a place known, ironically, as Bird Hill in Easton, he was confronted by a huge winged creature that was over 6 feet tall with a wingspan of eight to twelve feet. As sergeant Downy drew to a stop at the intersection, the birdman flew straight up, disappearing over the dark trees into the swamp. Downy reported the sighting to the Easton police when he arrived home and a patrol car searched the area, but the man bird was never seen again.

These birdmen are not sighted exclusively in the United States, however. Plato and Homer already wrote about a race of winged men in Ancient Greece. On July 11th, 1908, the Russian explorer VK Arsenyev sighted a winged humanbeing near the mouth of the Gobilli river. Sightings have also been reported in Portugal, England, and Vietnam.

The many sightings of the Mothman came to an end on the 25th of December in 1967, when the Silver Bridge, connecting Point Pleasant with Gallipolis collapsed. 46 people died, and it is still known as the deadliest bridge collapse in the history of the United States. Next to the Mothman sightings, the Silver Bridge collapse was the second terrible and bizarre thing to put Point Pleasant on the map in one year’s time. So it was not hard for people to seek a connection between the two.

Some eyewitnesses claimed that they had seen the Mothman at the bridge that day it collapsed, blaming the creature for the disaster that killed so many. Of course, it is a way of mourning to seek an explanation, someone to blame, for this terrible loss of life.

People did indeed think that the Mothman was a bad omen, a demonic vision that foreshadows a great disaster. The Mothman does bear the resemblance of a demon, the embodiment of fear itself.

A more realistic based explanation for the Mothman comes from Dr. Robert L. Smith, an associate professor of wildlife biology at West Virginia University, who said that the description of the Mothman all fitted the sandhill crane, the second largest American crane, which stands almost as high as a man and has a wingspan of more than seven feet. He said the “red eyes” could be the large red circles around the crane’s eyes. The appearance of the bird could have been moulded into the image of a monstrous creature through mass hysteria.

So, is the Mothman an image of the mind, the demonic embodiment of fear? Is it simply a bird, mistaken for a monster through mass hysteria? Or… is the Mothman real? Whatever he was or whatever he may be now, still, he is certainly strange.

SOURCES

All That’s Interesting. (2017, May 17). The True Story Behind The Legendary Mothman Said To Terrorize West Virginia. Retrieved from https://allthatsinteresting.com/mothman

Coleman, L. (2001). Mothman and other curious encounters. Cosimo, Inc. https://books.google.nl/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KZlavRmNPtkC&oi=fnd&pg=PA8&dq=mothman&ots=KSz4GP-jP7&sig=-WwUOFtlxYvPePGyE-MwpPccj4s#v=onepage&q&f=false

Daly, J. (2020). Narrative Hijacking: Mothman and the Silver Bridge Collapse. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2279&context=researchweek

Gettysburg Times. (1966, December 1). Monster Bird With Red Eyes May Be Crane. p. 12. Retrieved from https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=LG0mAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Rf8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=620,2790721&dq=point+pleasant+roger+scarberry&hl=en

Point Pleasant Register. (1966, November 16). Couples See Man-Sized Bird...Creature...Something. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20071011230219/http://www.westva.net/mothman/1966-11-16.htm

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2014 Sabbatical

Day 6 - Centralia to Longview - This was a 50 mile ride and it seemed to never end. There wasn’t a lot to see, I took 2 photos, a blurry one of a blue jay in Centralia and one because the school was the same name as one in our home town. I got chased by a dog. We had an excellent Mexican meal for dinner.

Day 7 - Longview to Portland - We were ready for a rest but still had 50 miles to go to get to Portland. We were concerned about riding the bridge over the Columbia river, it’s 2.3 miles long and supposed to be pretty scary as a cyclist due to the traffic. An early start and the fact that it was a Sunday, meant it wasn’t that busy and we had second breakfast on the other side. It was a long ride down the i30 after that. We spent 2 days in Portland recovering and chilling out.