The next morning, Jones woke up at 4:30 a.m. and walked along the river until the light came. He couldn’t remember feeling this excited to see anyone in his life.

He met Michael at the school parking lot. It was foggy near the ground and three shades of stacked gray in the sky when she showed up in a black t-shirt, baggy tan cords, and a 70s-styled tan trench coat. She wore a red baseball cap adorned with a yellow rooster and a black leather backpack cinched up tight. The sight of her instantly brought to mind someone Harrison had written about but Jones had never met: “A master spy for an uncreated government.” Michael also clutched a small cooler with her left hand and a dented red thermos that looked 50 years old.

Jones spread out a map on the hood of his Subaru wagon and outlined his plan. Overhead, gulls cackled in the gray. Their first stop would be Fort Clatsop and then Fort Stevens, where in the early days of WW II, a Japanese submarine’s puny deck guns lobbed a few shells in what constituted the only attack on the American mainland during the war. Michael said that was all fine and suggested after visiting those “pale face” places they climb Mount Neahkahnie, known as Fire Mountain to the Native Americans. From what she had heard, the panorama from the summit might provide tremendous vistas for her students to draw and photograph. Jones was all for it.

From the high school they took old Highway 101 out of Astoria. It occurred to Jones that he’d never visited Fort Clatsop before, or for that matter Timberline Lodge, Bend, Burns, Bandon, Newport, the Pendleton Round-Up, the Snake River, Rogue River, Crater Lake, Bonneville Dam, the Oregon Caves National Monument, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, or the Wallowa Mountains.

Jones had driven past Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge about a dozen times in his life but never bothered to stop at the state’s number one tourist destination. He wasn’t even sure the state flower, the Oregon grape, wasn’t some sort of exotic fruit used to make an illicit wine. To think he hailed from Oregon City, once lived overlooking the Willamette River, one of the great salmon rivers in the world, and knew nothing of the life cycle of the salmon, was truly indicative of how disconnected he was from his place, his home.

He was a tourist in Oregon who taught history and never traveled anywhere. Did he really know where he lived? Years ago, he’d read a line in an essay by either Wendell Berry or Gary Snyder that went, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” He hadn’t been anywhere in Oregon and all he’d done as an adult was drink, read, and teach, a dubious fusion of accomplishments that was as corporeal as a photograph stored in a phone.

Do people need to know where they live? Does this knowledge imbue a person to perform more meaningful work?

Jones caught a quick glance of Saddle Mountain looming to the south. He’d never climbed it and thought maybe it was part of a state park. Would he explore the peak now that he could see it out his classroom window? Was he going to educate himself? He felt he should since his internal contradiction of teaching but not learning had to end. It begs the ultimate questions for adults: 1) When do you stop learning? ; 2) Why did you stop learning? ; 3) How do you start learning again?

Perhaps this field trip with Michael was the beginning of his education or maybe he just wanted to sleep with her. He didn’t know at this point. He didn’t know anything about her and was intuiting nothing.

They curved around some forlorn apartments and approached the old Youngs Bay Bridge.

“Slow down,” Michael said. “What are those?” She pointed to the two green and gray obelisks that flanked the north entrance of the bridge. Atop each obelisk was a smallish green and white metal lantern.

“I don’t know,” said Jones, “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“When we get across, pull over and let’s walk back over the bridge. I want to check these things out.”

“Okay.”

Jones had never walked across a bridge in his life. He’d also never collaborated in an artistic venture with anyone. In fact, Jones had never collaborated with anyone in his life.

Two more obelisks marked the south entrance to the bridge and Michael rolled down the window and stuck her head outside for a better look.

“These are so wonderfully weird,” she said. “Who does anything like this anymore?”

Jones eased the Subaru into the shoulder and turned off the engine. Michael retrieved a Polaroid camera from her backpack and led the way to the bridge. She saw no traffic coming from either direction, ran into the middle of the road, shot a couple of photographs of the obelisks, and then jogged over to the shoulder to inspect them. Jones joined her.

The gray was concrete and beveled; the green was treated wood bolted to the deck of the bridge. In combination they formed perhaps the most bizarre example of Art Deco architecture in the world. The camera swung from Michael’s neck like a pendulum as she placed her hands on the concrete and traced the bevels. Next, she felt the wood and then jumped up on one of the obelisk’s edges and stared at the lanterns.

Jones thought she was going to climb to the top.

“This is totally insane,” said Michael. “There is an aesthetic at work with the landscape here that I’ve never seen or read about it. Who designed this thing? How old is it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, you’re the history teacher so you better find out.”

“I will.”

“I’m not sure why, but this bridge is flat out sexy. The kids are definitely going to sketch it.”

“Let’s walk,” said Jones.

Michael hopped down to the sidewalk and headed across the bridge, where she stopped every 20 feet and shot a photograph until she ran out of film.

Thirty minutes later, Jones turned into the parking lot of Fort Clatsop and found it completely jammed with tour buses and RVs. Hundreds of tourists milled about.

“Let’s blow this off,” Michael said, “and come back in the winter when no one is here.”

“I was going to suggest the same thing.”

As they left the Fort’s parking lot, Michael said, “You know, it probably would have been better for everyone if Lewis and Clark had died on their journey and no one heard from them again. They’re so overrated anyway. Didn’t Lewis commit suicide in some awful way?”

“He was drunk and shot himself multiple times, including the head. Then he repeatedly stabbed himself,” said Jones. “After he was dead and buried, hogs dug up the body and stripped him to the bone.”

“Jesus! Like I said, better for everyone. He should have gone out when he peaked, like when he saw the Pacific and knew he’d made it.”

“Why do you think that was his peak?” said Jones.

“What else was there to do? He had to return to civilization and he probably Jonesd the primitive life.”

Jones thought about Meriwether Lewis and his journals, the misspelled and illustrated journals that the Lewis and Clark priesthood naively thought contained the whole story, not understanding the obvious tenet that no one keeping a journal ever tells the whole story, or even bothers telling the truth all the time. Jones knew this better than anyone.

“You know, he pretty much stopped writing after he reached the Oregon Coast,” said Jones. “It might be the most famous case of writer’s block in American history.”

Michael didn’t seem to hear him.

After Fort Clatsop, Jones headed toward Fort Stevens and got stuck behind an endless motorcade of mammoth recreational vehicles towing six-cylinder pickup trucks. Michael loathed the RVs but loved calling out the various absurd names for the vehicles, such as X-TREME Adventurer and Vortex Wanderer.

At some point she pulled a fraying journal bound in twine and dashed off little sketches of each vehicle’s garish logo and typography. They conversed about the ocean, birds, teaching, always teaching amongst teachers, and clearcuts, all the endless elevated massacres in the Coast Range that marred and scarred the landscape from practically every scenic vantage point and gave off the appearance of an invading army’s scorched earth policy. Clearcuts particularly incensed Michael, she couldn’t believe they were actually legal. She couldn’t believe that’s all she could see from her classroom window, but she sketched them, too, and as her hand moved back and forth across the pages, Jones caught glimpses of her work, but didn’t remark. Once at stoplight, Michael shot him a little smile and he thought about a line from a short story he’d come across recently, written by James Cain: “A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back.”

That summer Jones updated his placement file, finagled some letters of recommendation from administrators who had no idea who he really was, boasted he could coach three sports, wrote a banal cover letter that actually used the phrase “the tonic of rural life,” and applied for a dozen teaching jobs from Astoria to Brookings. He scored five interviews and got offered three positions, one of them at .8 FTE teaching US History, American Government and two sections of Senior English at Astoria High School in the Clatsop County School District. Perfect. He didn’t want to teach full time and didn’t need the money.

He’d heard about the district and its totalitarian reputation on the matter of mandatory drug testing for all students who wanted to play sports. If you didn’t consent, you didn’t play. A few years ago, he’d read how some zealot doctor had dragooned students into an elaborate five-year testing protocol as part of his larger medical study on the efficacy of testing in lowering the rates of illegal drug use among all students, not just the athletes. The whole affair had blown up in the district’s face over the appalling ethics of coercing humans, in this case mostly impoverished teenagers on the Oregon Coast, to participate in a medical study, when all they wanted to do was play sports.

Interesting information, Jones thought. He could easily integrate these diabolical machinations into his curriculum units on 1984 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his two favorite novels to teach along with Siddhartha. He used them to inculcate his secret cultural and political agendas. It was about the only reason teaching sometimes gave him joy.

But his choice really came down to the school’s mascot. He could have been a Knappa Logger, a Tillamook Cheesemaker, or an Astoria Fighting Fishermen. To Jones, the metaphors of logging and cheese-making offered little restorative appeal. Besides, Knappa didn’t have a decent tavern and Tillamook smelled like cow manure.

It was a wild and debauched summer before moving to the Oregon Coast. He moved himself and towed his Subaru behind the U-Haul truck.

In the first week of September at an orientation for the four new teachers in the district, Jones met the new high school art and photography teacher with the curious first name of Michael. She also taught a couple of sections of English because no school in rural Oregon could afford to have a full time art teacher although they could afford three teachers who taught nothing but weightlifting or dodge ball.

During a break, Jones watched Michael glide over to the terrible drip coffee and pour herself a full portion into a wrinkled paper cup she pulled from the pocket of her black cashmere coat. She resembled in look and age and style (but not drug abuse) the Kelly Lynch character in Drugstore Cowboy. He overheard her reveal to the district superintendent her brief personal story about how she came to live at the Oregon Coast. She was remarkably candid and the superintendent nodded his approval. Jones, too, had an opportunity to share part of his recent biography with another administrator, but left out the booze and dissipation episodes. He talked a lot about fewer distractions and living in the “real” Oregon although at this point he wasn’t sure what that meant.

Like Jones, Michael also hailed from Portland but her motives for relocation starkly contrasted with his. She was recently divorced from a failed musician and wanted to start over, away from her ex-husband’s friends and family. She also wanted to paint and take photographs again, two pursuits she had abandoned after marriage and becoming the teachers’ union representative for her large suburban district. Fighting budget cuts and tyrannical administrators had almost driven her out of the profession but she felt confident that a new job in a new landscape would recondition her atrophied skills for many forgotten passions. Living near the ocean could do that for people, or so the novels, poems, slick tourism ads, and television movies promised.

Since the only other new hires in the room both exhibited the burned-out appearance of teachers fried to a crisp during reentry, Jones and Michael gravitated toward each other as easily as playing three-chord rock and roll. After the orientation and the two-hour online safety training, they agreed to go out for coffee the next afternoon. Jones had asked.

At a cafe overlooking the Columbia River, Michael arrived ten minutes early to Jones’s 30 minutes early. She wore a green Forest Service uniform shirt, faded Levi’s, and red cowboy boots. Her hair was arranged in lengthy pigtails and Jones noticed that she apparently had used plastic twist ties from bread wrappers to do the job.

They found a booth, commented on the odd green glowing of the river, joked about being “country fucks,” and their new passion for Merle Haggard. Jones asked her about the provenance of her name and she said it was her father’s middle name, not her “real” given first name. In high school, she insisted people start calling her “Michael” to honor his service to the country. The name stuck, but she never legally changed it. Jones wanted to know more but refrained from asking.

They talked until a pregnant waitress suggested they order. This was all new for Jones, but he asked Michael if she wanted to accompany him on a road trip around the area the next day to reconnoiter historic sites for possible field trips. She agreed but with the stipulation that they also investigate places suitable for her art and photography classes to visit. It was the ideal model for a casual date between teachers and Jones didn’t even feel the need to bring a flask, a tactic he often used to great success when hanging out with women.

That he was dead as a high school English and social studies teacher in a nondescript suburb of Portland was known to him. He was pretty much dead at the age of 25 when he started his career. But he’d hung on, like so many other of his similarly dead colleagues, held on for eight years

It was Mother’s Day, and Jones called his mother, a former award-winning elementary teacher who had never missed a day in 34 years of teaching to say he couldn’t attend a brunch because of the “flu.” He bailed on this family gathering, like so many others. The one time he didn’t bail, his mother’s retirement celebration, was attended by some 300 former colleagues, administrators, students, and parents of students. Jones lurked in the back of the auditorium, greeting people here and there, sipping mediocre white wine, and wondered how anyone could have taught so well for so long. Of course he knew the answer—his mother was born to teach. As was his father.

Jones spent most of morning dry heaving and rationalizing what he already knew was true about him: he was stuck and had no idea how to get unstuck.

He was so debilitated by the Mother’s Day hangover and malaise that he couldn’t peruse a magazine and pretend he could write better movie reviews than the ones that appeared in the publication. He just splayed on the couch in his rented loft in the Pearl District, stared out the windows to the rain falling on the Interstate Highway. There was nothing to do except wait until the alcohol metabolized so he could start planning innovative lessons about teaching writing when he never wrote himself. Occasionally he drifted off to sleep but always opened his eyes again when he heard shopping carts clinking below as homeless men rolled their rusted carriages over the last cobblestoned street in Portland.

How he would rise in the morning and drive to work he didn’t know although he did care about what happened in the classroom. It began to rain harder and the clinking noise sounded almost melodic. He stood up from the couch, walked to the window, and stared at the brick rag factory across the street. There must have been a million rags crammed inside there. At least they came in different colors, unlike the typical Portland sky, which Jones had watched turn gray and darken the streets within a matter of seconds.

Right there, he decided to escape Portland and clean up his act. There was no future here although everyone moving to the Rose City from all over the country surely felt otherwise. It was the progressive city of their creative and livability dreams.

What had died for Jones were his aspirations to become an Oregonian of merit. He didn’t even know what an Oregonian of merit was, but he knew it wasn’t him and never would be if he remained teaching without a larger purpose, drinking a lot, and believing that attending independent rock shows mattered.

Jones didn’t declaim anything aloud. It was that simple. He had to decamp, reinvent himself. Epic hangovers had been known to compel this in young men with aspirations. He would resign his teaching job at the suburban high school when the school year concluded and find a new one in the Oregon hinterlands, near the ocean, where he wanted something to happen, anything. Why the ocean? He had no idea. He only visited the Oregon Coast once a year and the trip always had the same itinerary: drive to Seaside with a woman, get drunk in bars, lose at video poker, end up in a cheap motel room, maybe have sex, never see the ocean, let alone walk on the beach, go home, write a few hazy lines in the journal about the episode for no one’s posterity.

Don’t many distressed people move to the ocean to find themselves? It was a cliche in Oregon, especially when it involved confused young adults driving west in desperation from a crisis somewhere in the Willamette Valley to gaze upon the ocean for an hour before driving right back to the problem. What about the people who relocated to blow glass, paint watercolors, raise goats, drink or teach something—massage therapy perhaps? Hadn’t Jones read in a newspaper that Clatsop County had the highest percentage of single mothers of any county in the Pacific Northwest and that most of them emigrated from urban areas? In the article, there was quote after quote from beleaguered women: “We just wanted to live near the ocean and start over again.”

Jones was going for a full year. He was going to live the complete Oregon cliche and see what transpired. He could always return to Portland if it didn’t work out. This wasn’t really a risk.

He wandered over to a bookcase and found the Jim Harrison novel he’d just finished reading. Harrison wrote about all sorts of eccentric and semi-damaged characters who had abandoned urban life for something different in rural America, in Harrison’s case, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Jones had always wanted to meet these people because they sounded much more interesting than the colleagues he worked with or the 20-somethings he met in Portland’s bars. For one thing, Harrison’s characters all Jonesd the study of history and knew the special history of their locales. This knowledge set them apart, gave them some kind of advantage.

Harrison had written a line that Jones underlined three times long before he’d made the decision to go to sea: “I sat on numerous beaches and stared at the ocean until it was an ocean inside my head. The experience was a world away from the American idea of God as someone who drove around in a dump truck full of figurative candy to toss to deserving people if you beckoned him properly. The ocean was a god unknown, galactic…”