June 28, 2019
Rescue mission on Mount Hood
A gift shop surprise
Many people have a tin ear, but few have a stainless steel one. I’m terrible with languages as a rule, but I am one of those lucky few with the the rare gift of being able to hear and understand stainless steelese. I don’t know what it is, but somehow I can pick up that faint sound when conditions are just right.
It doesn’t come up often though - stainless steel objects don’t talk to folks much, understandably enough, because no one can ever hear them. So naturally it was quite a shock when we were browsing in the gift shop at Timberline Lodge and I heard a faint Pssst; over here! break through the din of the customers in faint stainless steelese. Over here! It’s me!
Unbelievable! It’s our long lost pal, the Gumby bottle opener. Of all the gift shops in all the tourist traps in the world, we walk into his.
Unbelievable, but true. I can hardly recognize GBO at first, he’s so transformed from when we last saw him and realized he’d gone missing when we biked off from Matera months ago. There’s no mistaking that thin metallic voice of his though, and how many bottle openers are you on a first name basis with anyway? Of course it’s GBO.
And he has quite the tale to tell, as you can well imagine. It started out just as we suspected - he flipped head over heels for that hot corkscrew back in Rocca Imperiale and decided to follow his heart. A tragically bad idea though. After a couple of hot nights together she quickly got bored with our tame little friend and swapped him for a dime bag in a dark alley down at the port. He quickly swapped hands several times, and doesn’t really know for sure what happened after that; but the next thing he knows he’s lying in a tray in this gift shop and looks nothing like his shiny former self. Our theory is that he was picked up by the mafia, worked over in one of their body shops to disguise his true identity and increase his market value, and then sold into the lucrative stainless steel slave trade.
We’re a bit put out with him at first and not as sympathetic as we might be; but as Frost said, “Home is the place where when you go there, they have to take you in”. Of course we’ll take him back and make room for him in the tool bag. And, truth be told, we like the new look - his recycled skateboard veneer adds a lot of class.
Family Reunion
So what were we doing in Timberline Lodge anyway? Not biking, that’s for sure. We had our chance to bike up to Timberline a few years back when we circled Mount Hood, but our day then was long and hard enough already without piling a 15 mile detour and a 2,000’ climb on top. So, there’s nothing about the bike in here today. Just some family photos, so feel free to turn the page if you’re not interested.
We’re up at Timberline as part of our visit with our son Shawn and his two daughters, out in Portland for a short visit. They haven’t been out to the northwest for several years, and with our summer as crowded as it is it seemed like a good time to have them come out here rather than us go back to Minnesota. The highlight of our too short visit was this trip up to Mount Hood.
I don’t recall for sure, but I don’t remember being up to Timberline Lodge for over thirty years, when I was up here with Shawn, our dog Shasta, and Colleen, a girl who lived next door to us when we were batching it for a few years before Rachael finally showed up. It’s about time - it’s of course beautiful up here high on the south face of Mount Hood, the great lodge (built in 1937 as a WPA project) is awesome and inspiring, and of course we would never have gotten GBO back into the tool bag without this. It’s fate!
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And so lucky to be back with you 2 for the next tour.
Very happy to see he made his way back to Oregon.
4 years ago
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