Astoria Oregon, Columbia River Bar, Coast Highway 101
By Barry Murray
In the lexicon of RV travelers, thanks to John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley — In Search of America— which is a Penguin paperback classic in the library carried about in a limited library by full-time motorhomer’s, is the term “Mullygrubs.” It is almost as difficult to explain, as “Boondocker,” which refers to someone as myself, who prefers to ‘camp’ for the night someplace that has a view, plugged into solar panels for electricity, instead of doing the big city parking lot scene, no matter if out-of-pocket expenses cost less.
Mullygrub is an explanation of what happens when you have stuffed in scenery after having been overfilled. How ‘lousy explorers’ can actually pass an over-saturated limit of hearing and seeing, and not feeling. A modern, blase´ equivalent expression might be a cynical, “Been their, done that, got the T-shirt.” Bobby and I have survived 10-years of “full-timing,” by taking a lot of photographs, and writing about what we have stumbled across when, “changing the wallpaper.” You too could do the same for www.RVTravelMagazine.com, or with another of the 50 E-TravelMagazines.com states you may care to write about. Other than sharing real information with interested readers, the only real requirement is that we don’t run chamber of commerce publicity so out of touch with the financial capabilities that the only ones interested are CEO’s of corporations that went bankrupt paying bonuses, or ‘insider, bottom-of-the deck dealing Enron stockbrokers who have enough stashed away to enjoy being unemployed.
Sorry, I got carried away with a Steinbeckian Grapes of Wrath mood. He was a great author/playwright, but a little financially depressive at times.
The good news is we were able to break-out of a case of the travelers mullygrubs by winding our way on U.S. Highway 101, to Astoria, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River. Wow! Here was a river that not only talked to me, and sang, with a Woody Guthrie twang of, “Roll on Columbia”, from his Columbia River Collection
And mighty enough to qualify as a summertime visit blockbuster hit. When measured by volume, the high mountain snow-fed Columbia is the largest river flowing into the Pacific in North America. It was before dams, and the greed of corporate cannery exploitation, the largest fishery in the world. By any measurement it is a sight to see oceangoing ships on the way inland to Portland, to The Dalles, 190-miles from the sea. For the cultural tourist Astoria was built upon a heritage of Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Scottish, and Chinook ‘iron men’ who hand-crafted the wooden boats they sailed, rowed, paddled, against the strongest tidal current in America.
For the historical tourist know that Thomas Jefferson in 1793 referred to the Columbia as the Oregon River, Oregan, or Origan. This was the destination assigned to Captain Lewis, who had enough sense to ask frontiersman Lieutenant Clark to pretend he was equal in rank, so he could be a joint-commander of the Corps of Discovery. On the banks of the Columbia, Clark held the first democratic vote in American where a Negro, York, and the female Shoshone, Sacagawea, were allowed to voice an opinion in where to camp for the winter. The result was the site of Fort Clatsop. Lewis’s record at Astoria was that of stealing a “fine-crafted” Chinook canoe when leaving, and killing two Blackfeet camp visitors while on the way back to “civilization,” that truthfully was the start of the so called Indian Wars of the West.