After a unnerving evening at a state park south of Portland we decide to push East. Scherzo was out of sorts among the fat slow moving motor homes and RVs. We slept in the van for the first time, woken up by her barking at the aimless dogs roaming the campground. With a quick reorganization of the van and after unloading a couple boxes into the dumpster we hit the highway, letting our new GPS do its best to get us into the mountains.

The sun is shining, the state highways are open, but Sarah and I are still dazed from the rush to get the fuck out of Portland over the last few days. The Big Ugly, our 1991 GMC vandura, bounces up and down over all the bumps in the highway, adding to the feeling of flying you get from sitting so high up.

As we drive south east toward Sisters there’s no campsites open along the highway. We check five or six different camp grounds to no avail. We climb into the cascades and come on a giant reservoir, sitting thirty or forty feet low.

Sarah and Scherzo are sleeping, but the lake makes me feel uneasy. There’s a long even row where the fur trees have been evenly chopped that leads into the water. The stumps linger, making the bank feel inhabited by ghosts. The rush from the last several days is catching up to me and I’m feeling tired.

I doze off at the wheel – it must have only been a second – but I saw all these branches bearing down on me and woke up. I didn’t swerve or anything, just came-to holding the wheel on a straight away. After fifteen minutes along this lake fighting sleeplessness I wake up Sarah to ward off the feeling of dark dead trees. The sun is going down and we have no where to park and sleep and I’m not sure we’ll survive the trees, hungry for death, if we have to stop here for the night.