WINDING for just over a hundred miles on either side of the picturesque Willamette River (p.r.o.nounced "Will-ah-met" locally), the Willamette Valley is a relatively new region for Oregon wines. As the main destination for the 500,000 settlers who travelled the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, the valley, with its lush vegetation and fertile soil, was taught to say beans and carrots long before it was allowed to say grapes. Now, like the longer-established Umpqua Valley farther south, it is best known for its Pinot Noirs. The soil is, apparently, Pinot-friendly. I'm a Merlot man, myself, but am not averse to stepping up to a good Pinot if I have to.

Our idea is to cut east on Route 47, do a short raid through the Yamhill Valley (an offshoot of the Willamette), pull into a few local vineyards for some late-season degustation, and then cut back west to the coast with a trunk full of vintage red that will see us into California. Alas, what we drive through looks more like pork and onion country than the state's premier wine region. We pa.s.s a few fields of vines and the occasional sign for a winery-Elk Cove, Kramer Vineyards, Domaine Serene-but mostly it is dry-looking fields, tumbling barns, rusting tractors and riotous fencerows. It looks a lot like eastern Ontario.

Since the 1960s, the number of wineries in the Willamette region has risen from nine to more than a hundred, but they all seem either elsewhere or closed and boarded up for the winter, the growers probably in California or Chile, depleting the compet.i.tion's stock. We do stop at a wine market near McMinnville, a well-appointed establishment called Bellevue, with racks and racks of wines, a tasting bar, and a friendly, talkative manager named Patrick, who guides me through a tasting of six very nice local bottles, none of the names of which I write down.

The wines I like come from the places I've been. The small house we rented in the Cotes-du-Rhone, with its peeling wooden shutters that rattled throughout the mistral and nearly drove Merilyn crazy; the ten days we spent driving around Tuscany in a small silver convertible; a month camped in a desert in northwestern Argentina, drinking local Malbec around the fire at night. I can recall the night I first tasted wine from Oregon: it was in Boston, in a small restaurant across the Common from Cheers. Now, every time I taste it, I think of that trip and the friends we were with. Wine, for me, is more than immediate pleasure: it evokes layers of past experience, just as travel does.

"We don't get many Oregon wines in eastern Canada," I tell him.

"One or two," he says. "From the bigger producers. There are some very nice local wines that no one outside the valley ever hears about."

When he has guided me down a row of six selections, he asks me which I preferred.

"I think the one from Amity Vineyards," I say, selecting a bottle at random.

Patrick nods owlishly. "One of the bigger producers," he says.

He goes on to complain of a visit he had earlier in the day from a man who was getting married and wanted to hold his reception at the Bellevue, so that his guests could "sample" a wide variety of Oregon wines for free. Patrick pours me a Merlot. "Oregonians still have a hard-liquor mentality," he says.

"All North America does," I say, sympathizing. "You don't see John Wayne or Frank Sinatra bellying up to the bar and ordering a gla.s.s of Chardonnay."

"'In a dirty gla.s.s,'" Patrick laughs.

Portland was settled mainly by Scandinavians who worked in the timber and fishing trades, and for whom a good night out meant drinking vast quant.i.ties of schnapps before going to midnight ma.s.s. McMinnville was one of those towns that William Least Heat-Moon says were placed on the map to fill a blank s.p.a.ce, until the surge in interest in Willamette Valley wines in the 1980s made it quite prosperous. Nevertheless, there were still objections when local vintners on the town council wanted to put a cl.u.s.ter of grapes on the munic.i.p.al emblem.

Patrick rails at length against the tyranny of Pinot Noir and presses more gla.s.ses of Merlot upon me. I have the impression that sales of Merlot have dropped since the movie Sideways. I buy an armful of Merlots and a few Zinfandels, mostly because they are inexpensive and I like the labels. Merilyn buys a packet of smoked hazelnuts, and Patrick throws in a chipped tasting gla.s.s with "Amity Vineyards" printed on it. "When they're chipped," he says, "I can't use them."

When we leave, Merilyn has to drive.

"You'll have to navigate," Merilyn says resignedly as I climb into the pa.s.senger side after stowing the wine in the trunk. She loves driving and is always eager to do her share of it, the only impediment being my hopelessness as a navigator. Unlike me, she likes to know where she's going before she gets there. The general rule is, if my instinct tells me to go one way, we should probably turn in the opposite direction. This makes for some awkward moments at intersections. Merilyn, in contrast, has developed the art of navigation into a virtual science. She is always saying things like: "Three minutes from now you'll see a large water tower with 'Forest City' painted on it, and a sign saying Denning 38; turn east there." To which I reply: "Would that be left or right?"

From the plethora of maps and brochures tucked away under the seat, in the glove box, and in the little compartment in the door panel designed especially to hold used Kleenex tissues, chocolate bar wrappers, and little plastic bottles of body lotion pilfered from hotel bathrooms, I select a map at random and study it carefully.

"When you get to the Pacific Ocean," I say, "turn left."

MONTHS before the trip, I had a thought: Must get some brochures, check out the Internet, make a plan. I like to know what's ahead, even if it morphs into something else. At home, I'm the one with the tidy desk, pens in a row, books squared, something I spend an inordinate amount of time justifying. Sometimes, I insist, a messy desk is not a sign of a creative mind; it's just a disgusting, messy desk.

Wayne is always telling me to stop thinking about the papers that need filing and concentrate on my writing. I did that in Vancouver- there's a ma.n.u.script in the back seat to prove it-and my plan to plan this trip got pushed aside until it was almost too late. At the last minute, I dashed off requests to the tourism offices of the states we'd hit first: Washington, Oregon, California. We were packing the car when the bulging envelopes arrived.

From the tub in the Cannery Pier Hotel, I'd read the brochures aloud to Wayne, who was sipping wine in the adjoining bedroom. Along the Oregon coast, apparently, it's geology that dominates. "Listen to this," I called: "'Cannon Beach: nine miles of wide, walkable beach . . . scenic beauty of the sea stacks offsh.o.r.e and headlands onsh.o.r.e . . . sea creatures in tide pools.' There's something called Haystack Rock, the third-largest coastal monolith in the world, whatever that is."

"Sounds like a garage band."

I ignored him and went on to the fine print. "A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single ma.s.sive stone. Says here the Haystack is a 235-foot-high chunk of basalt. More than two thousand seabirds nest on it."

I had his attention now. "Tufted puffin. Pigeon guillemot. Have we seen those?"

I may be the organized one, but Wayne is better at keeping up his life list. If I had my way, I'd make a note every time I met a bird, not just the first sighting. I remember birding with Roger Tory Peterson one cold, November day near his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut. I drove us to the sh.o.r.e; he was over eighty and his wife wouldn't let him take the wheel. "He'll get distracted by a bird and end up in the Atlantic," she said. The wind off the ocean was bone-sharp; the clouds, a weight overhead. I scanned the skies. Not much to see, I was thinking, when he raised his binoculars to focus on some ring-billed gulls fighting over what looked like a french fry on the wharf. "I love gulls," he sighed.

But there aren't even gulls flying when we get to Cannon Beach. The wind is bl.u.s.tery and the rain has started up again. I had visions of wandering among the tide pools at the base of the Haystack, through what the brochures call the Marine Garden, a 300-foot radius rich with sea stars, iridescent anemones, and idiosyncratic crabs, creatures so delicate that the whole a.s.semblage could be obliterated in an hour by careless tourists. "Walk only on bare rock," the brochure warns. "Barnacles are animals too!"

No need to worry about dealing a death blow to a barnacle today. I roll down the window to take a picture-the sun is shafting out from under the clouds, a deadly, sulphurous yellow that defines the word "inhospitable."

Monoliths rise from mercury waves all down the coast. Goonies Rock. Arch Point. Otter Rock. Their slick shapes call out to be named. Not far from where we turn back onto the coastal highway from our Willamette detour is Proposal Rock, so named because some turn-of-the-last-century romantic went down on one knee to a fair maiden in the scrubby forest that sits like a bad toupee on top. To get up there, not only do you have to climb a steep cliff, you have to cross a wide, cold creek with your pant legs rolled and skirts. .h.i.tched. How romantic is that?

After our detour to the Willamette, the weather does not improve. Wayne dozes while I squint through the windshield at the central part of Oregon's coastal highway. The waves are gelid, whipped into grey foam against the monoliths. On a sunny day in mid-July, these beaches must be a lovers' delight, but in December, in a storm, they fill me with despair, even though I'm warm and dry and safe in our little car. At Cape Foulweather, the breakers pound as though they mean to end the world. And maybe they will. More than once, the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, nicknamed Terrible Tilly, has had her light smashed by rocks flung 133 feet up from the sea floor by the waves. And then there's the Devil's Punch Bowl, an enormous basin formed when the roofs of two sea caves collapsed along this sh.o.r.e.

I keep my eyes on the road, on the endless slap-slap of the wipers. If we want to see the splendours of the Oregon Coastal Highway, we'll have to come back. In July. In a heat wave. In a convertible. I'll file the brochures. Planning will be a breeze.

WITH the tapioca sun a pale, lucid orb in the upper right quadrant of the windshield and the Pacific Ocean on our starboard side, Merilyn is a.s.sured that we are heading due south, and I can relax. The effects of the wine are wearing thin.

"You were snoring," Merilyn says comfortably.

"I wasn't asleep," I protest. Navigator falling asleep is a grave offence for which we have yet to establish a suitable punishment. "Name the next five towns we'll pa.s.s through" has been suggested. "Drink less wine" has also come up. We've sent it to arbitration. Driver falling asleep is a much graver lapse, and it is part of the pa.s.senger's duties to prevent it, hence the stricture against a nodding navigator.

"Then you were awake and snoring," she says, "which is worse."

"Where are we?" Wrong question, coming from the navigator.

"Coming up to Florence," Merilyn says.

I look at the map. This entire coastline seems made up of one protected area after another: Beachside State Recreation Site, Yachats State Recreation Area, Neptune State Scenic Viewpoint, Carl G. Washburne Memorial State Park. To our left is the Siuslaw National Forest, a vast green area on the map that connects a little farther south with Elliott State Forest. If it is true that only about 15 per cent of American wilderness is protected by legislated parkland, most of that must be concentrated here, along the Pacific coast.

We are, I note aloud, pa.s.sing through some very tall trees. They soar above us like rockets, their noses vanishing out of sight, their tangled, exposed roots trailing on the ground like ribbons of exhausted fuel. They completely dwarf the notion of what we easterners think when we think tree. At home, a log cabin might be made from forty logs; here, it seems, one log would make forty cabins.

The forest is primarily Douglas-fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, western red cedar, and tanoak. Every now and then we pa.s.s a stump that seems broad enough to build a house on, and I am rather surprised no one has. In fact, the nascent hobbit in me wonders if a person could simply carve out a western red cedar to make a house. A tree needs only 10 per cent of its outer cambium layers, a few dozen rings, and its bark, and it will keep sending sap up to its branches. A fifty-seven-foot-diameter sugar pine would give about fifteen hundred square feet of floor s.p.a.ce. In fact, carving a house into a tree would seem to make more sense than felling the tree, sawing the wood into boards, and then rea.s.sembling the boards to make a house.

William Least Heat-Moon looked down this highway and saw four hundred miles of "clapboard-by-the-sea motels, Jolly Whaler buffets and clear-cut mountain slopes with tall stumps bleached into tombstones by the salt wind." Having read Blue Highways, I rather expected the coast of Oregon to be shoulder-to-shoulder cottages jammed between towns and quaint outports and former logging camps-more industrious, somehow. Compared with the megacity we drove through yesterday, this stretch seems almost deserted. To our right, glinting between gigantic trunks, is the sluggish ocean with its soupy light, into which we occasionally emerge when the highway swerves out around a scree of fallen rock and scrub. Then we hear the sound of surf and gulls. Always, to our left, the sentinel forest.

The trees are second-growth, of course, and there is a leafy under-storey of swordfern, salal, and huckleberry, encouraged by gaps in the forest canopy; their light-green leaves make the woods appear brighter and less cathedral-like than David Douglas found them in 1825. But there persists nevertheless an alluring sense of vastness, of endlessness, of forest everlasting, of inexhaustible wilderness that was new and exhilarating to Douglas because it had ceased to exist in Europe long before the dawn of Romanticism, when nature was extolled as the model and source of all human virtues. It was that Romantic notion that had sent Douglas and Lewis and Clark and hundreds like them to places like this, to the ends of the earth, to find the spots on the globe where nature still reigned like an infinite deity, forever and aye, world without end, amen.

Such infinitude was a deception, of course, as these second-growth forests attest, bereft as they now are of wolves and cougars and grizzlies and spotted owls. Douglas and Lewis and Clark lived in a Romantic era-the whole notion of exploration is romantic-and Romanticism has more to do with what is going on in our own solipsistic imaginations than it does with what exists on the west coast of North America.

WET SNOW adheres to our windshield as we approach North Bend, halfway down the Oregon Coast. We decide to look for a place to spend the night. A few motels appear on the right, and one of them looks clean and tastefully appointed. The front is well lit, the units seem cheerfully painted, the parking lot isn't cracked and weedy.

"That one seems nice," Merilyn says.

We drive on. This is how we choose a motel: we drive until just after it's too dark to see anything that isn't lit up; only then do we begin to watch for likely candidates. When we see one that looks good, we slow down and peer at it as we drive by, then continue on down the highway for another ten or twenty minutes looking for something better. Then we give up, turn around and go back. This time, we drive all the way through North Bend to see if there is some kind of quaint inn on the waterfront, but the town's main drag offers up only factory outlets and drugstores. A sign over one of the shops says Last Chance Liquors, Open 24 Hrs. We turn back.

Merilyn is now the designated motel maven. I wait in the car while she goes into the office to see about a room. A large camper van is parked beside me. A rather well-padded woman sits in the pa.s.senger seat with a small dog on her lap, and both the woman and the dog stare at me through the window. Whenever I turn my head toward them the dog begins to yap, a high-pitched, shrill, infuriating sound that penetrates our car like an insane bell captain's cab whistle. The woman glares at me as though it is my fault the dog has gone berserk.

Merilyn seems to be taking a long time, which I a.s.sume to mean that there is a room available and she is negotiating the rate. Maybe there are several rooms and she is getting the keys to all of them and lining up an inspection. I smile at the woman, deliberately baring my teeth, which sends the dog into renewed paroxysms of demented fury. Then Merilyn comes back smiling and dangles a key from a square of masonite.

"What a lovely woman," she says, meaning the woman in the motel office, with whom I imagine she has been sharing recipes for morning glory m.u.f.fins. "Our room has a view of the harbour. What's with the dog?"

MOTELS, by their nature, always seem a bit seedy, perhaps because they slink so close to the ground.

Wayne didn't like the looks of the one I pointed out as we entered North Bend-too vacant, too old-fashioned, he said-but I am happy when we turn around and go back. I have a good feeling about the place, which intensifies when I notice the 1950s cigarette machine outside the office door. It looks as though it still works.

"Betty," the woman behind the counter says. She has a broad face with poor skin, the pores large and the colour wanting oxygen. Her sweater is pilled, and the office smells of disinfectant. "They call me Bay Bridge Betty. I've owned this place for twenty-two years." She laughs. "I mean forty-four. See what happens when you get older?"

She takes down the key for number 15-"My best room," she says- and leads me down the narrow cement walkway, limping a little, as though her feet hurt. In the daylight, she tells me, we'll be able to see Coos Bay.

"I don't know what's wrong. It's never been so slow," she says, fitting the key into the lock. Only two other rooms are taken, one by a trucker, the other by an eighty-seven-year-old woman who comes up from California every winter. Her car is parked at an alarming angle outside her door, as if it had been heading over the cliff into the sea and she'd managed to stop it at the last minute.

"The woman's husband is gone," Bay Bridge Betty says in a way that makes me wonder if it was his choice or hers. "I promised to see to his wife. She's hemming some pants for me right now." I'm afraid she's going to take me to the room and show me the woman as proof, but she carries on to room number 15, where she flicks on the light switches and tugs at the flowered bedspread. "She makes me blankets, too. I do what I can for her."

The room is clean, perfectly adequate. Two neat double beds, a decidedly small-screen television, a long credenza, a small table and chair by the window. Standard motel fare. I take it without a quibble. Back in the office, I sign the register and hand her enough bills to cover the price she quotes, which isn't much. She slides the money into a drawer.

"Thank you," she says quietly. "We need you tonight."

FOR REASONS I don't quite understand-maybe it was the cigarette machine-I'm thinking of my father. He would have loved it here. He was a coffee lover and all through Washington and Oregon I've been noticing drive-through espres...o...b..rs, pert little sheds set off from the road where drivers pull up to windows to get their caffeine fix, coffee kiosks with names like Good to Go, Jumpin' Java, and Hail Mary's Espresso.

If there are drive-through banks, drive-through weddings and divorces, drive-through meals, why not drive-through espres...o...b..rs? Motor Moka was apparently the first: it opened in Portland in 1992. Now there's one every mile, or so it seems. Back home, there are only Starbucks, Second Cup, and Coffee & Company, all catering to the sitdown crowd, and Tim Hortons, where doughnuts are the draw as much as coffee. Canadians aren't in such a rush, I guess, at least not yet.

Tim Hortons (which used to be Tim Horton's) offered the original roadside cup of joe. The first outlet opened in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1964, and by 1967 it was a chain. But it was Starbucks that turned coffee into a gold mine. In 1971, three friends in Seattle-an English teacher, a history teacher, and a writer-decided to go into the coffee roasting business, selling the beans retail. The writer, Gordon Bowker, loved the novel Moby-d.i.c.k and wanted to call their new enterprise Pequod after the ship in Melville's story.

"Who would drink a cup of something called Pee-quod?" asks Wayne.

"I guess that's why in the end they named it after the Pequod's first mate, Starbuck."

Sixteen years later, the trio sold out to Howard Schultz, who had been struck by the espresso culture during a trip to Italy. He added baristas to the bean sales and started building shops all over the country until today there are more than eleven thousand stores in the United States and another five thousand in forty-four countries, compared with a paltry two thousand for Tim Hortons. Schultz wasn't interested only in shilling coffee: his whole idea with Starbucks was to create a "third place," a spot other than home or work where people could relax with friends and a cup of good coffee. For the people of Oregon, that third place seems to be their cars.

"Oregoners sure must drink a lot of coffee."

"Oregonians, surely," Wayne suggests. We've settled in our motel room overlooking the bay, he with the crossword in the local paper, me with the computer.

"True or false?" I ask. "Coffee consumption is higher than it's ever been. Americans drink more coffee than Canadians."

"True," he says, "on both counts. Now can you unplug the computer, please, and plug in the kettle? I'd like a cup of tea."

"False. On both counts. Can you believe this? Coffee consumption in the United States today is half what it was in the 1940s. In 1946 these people were drinking forty-six-plus gallons each per year, compared with somewhere around twenty-five gallons today."

"What happened in the Forties? Besides the war."

"I'll give you a clue: 'Good to the last drop.'"

"Peak oil?" he says. "Hang-gliding?"

"No, you goose. Instant coffee."

My father invented instant coffee. A clever man without much formal education but with a creative imagination and a practical streak, he came up with all kinds of things he never patented: cupboard doors that hinged upward so you'd never b.u.mp your head, fast-and-easy comma-shaped bathroom towel hangers, and coffee you could make in a second just by adding boiling water. For months, he perked pot after pot of strong coffee, experimenting with ways of dehydrating the brew without ruining the flavour. He was still at the sticky-goo stage when Maxwell House came on the market with its fine powder. It was an instant hit. Packets of Maxwell House were put in soldiers' mess kits, and when they came home, that's what they wanted on the breakfast table-and in the lunchroom and at their local diner. Far from being chagrined that some American company had beaten him to the punch, my father wouldn't have anything but Maxwell House instant coffee in the house. "Those Americans," he would say, shaking his head. They were even smarter than he was.

But why the downturn in coffee consumption since the 1950s? There was no equal and opposite spike in tea drinking: tea has held onto its steady 10 per cent. The difference was soda pop. In 1947, Americans consumed around eleven gallons per person; now that's up over fifty.

Coffee hit its century low in 1995. Since then, it has been regaining ground, no doubt thanks to these drive-throughs. Today, 167 million Americans, 80 per cent of adults, say they sometimes drink coffee. The same proportion of Canadians claim an occasion cup of joe. But ask them if they drink it regularly, and 63 per cent of Canadians over the age of eighteen will admit to a daily habit, compared with only 49 per cent in the United States.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the notion of Canada as a nation of coffee swillers. Clearly coffee is an American drink-isn't it? It was the mainstay of settlers travelling the Oregon Trail, one of the primary overland migration routes to the West. Not all the wagon trains that left Independence, Missouri, made it as far as their final destination in the Willamette Valley-some cut off onto the Mormon Trail or the California Trail-but those settlers who did littered the landscape with names that attested to their preference in hot beverages. On the map of Oregon alone, I find Coffee Creek, Coffee Lake, Coffee b.u.t.te, Coffee Gap, Coffee Chute, Coffee Island as well as Coffee Pot Island, Coffeepot Crater, Coffeepot Basin, and Coffeepot Flat, more coffee place names than can be found in the entire 3.8 million square miles that is Canada.

Still, it's hard to argue with statistics and the Coffee News, the free weekly we picked up when we stopped for our daily decafs. Distributed at coffee shops in 225 cities in the United States every week, as well as in thirty countries around the world, Coffee News is the largest franchised publication in the world. With such hyperbole, it has to be American, right? No. It was started in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1988 by Jean Daum, a woman sitting alone during her coffee break with nothing to read but the sugar packets.

"How about a cup of coffee?" I call across the double double beds to Wayne. "I think we're out of tea."

I've set up a makeshift kitchen on top of the credenza: our two red plates, our travel mugs, the folding leather case with a single setting of silver flatware, a salesman's sample from the last century that Wayne bought me at an antique store one Christmas, in answer to my complaint that the cutlery in most restaurants might as well be plastic for all the heft it has in the hand. Lined up beside the coffee, cream, and sugar are my oatcakes and Wayne's Raisin Bran for breakfast, a couple of apples, the local hazelnuts I bought at the wine-tasting shop, and the last of the smoked chinook.

"Got any cookies?"

"Just oatcakes."

"Coffee's fine."

The pound of Kicking Horse decaf we bought because it was roasted near the headwaters of the Columbia is almost gone. I make us each a cup with the Melitta drip filter we always carry, boiling water in the kettle that I borrowed from Betty. I think of the settlers huddling around their fires within the ring of their prairie schooners, of the Union soldiers stirring a few crushed beans into their tin cups of water. Those men received eight pounds of roasted beans or ten pounds of green beans with each hundred pounds of rations. Confederate soldiers were reduced to drinking chicory, so whenever the two armies crossed, there would be an active trade: southern tobacco for northern coffee beans. When they bivouacked at night, writes John Billings, a Union veteran, in his memoir, Hardtack and Coffee, "the little campfires, rapidly increasing to hundreds in number, would shoot up along the hills and plains, and as if by magic, acres of territory would be illuminous with them. Soon they would be surrounded by the soldiers, who made it an inevitable rule to cook their coffee first."

I hand Wayne his coffee. I wonder if he knows the old Abyssinian proverb: When a woman gives a man coffee, it is a way of showing her desire. Maybe Anthony Capella made that up. I copied it from his novel The Various Flavours of Coffee, an erotic love story set in fin-de-siecle London about a f.e.c.kless dandy who takes a job with a coffee merchant and falls in love with the boss's daughter. His only talent is his palate: he's hired to create a vocabulary of coffee to rival that of wine-the hot nut aroma of a Java as water first hits the beans; the beeswax-on-leather aftertaste of a Yemeni mocha; the earthy, claylike flavours of coffees from Africa that evoke the stamp of naked feet on sun-baked ground.

Here in the American Northwest, coffee seems to be going the same way as alcohol in other ways, too. Drive-through espresso shacks have started offering hot girls along with their hot java. New joints are springing up that cater particularly to the male coffee aficionado: Bikini Espresso, the Sweet Spot. The staff are all female, young, and pretty. The service windows are elevated so that customers can look in at the short skirts and high heels. Some of the servers take time to fling a leg over the serving bar or strike a Playmate pose. They flirt, blow kisses, and vamp for the customers. At Cowgirls, the barista may be wearing a pink see-through negligee with matching panties. I've read there's talk of a Thong Thursday, a Saran-Wrap Sat.u.r.day. Never satisfied with steak, they want their sizzle, too.

It's only Friday. I'm wearing my silk dressing gown, and not much else. "You want honey with that?" I purr.

"Sure," Wayne says, and puts down the crossword.

4 / EUREKA! CALIFORNIA.

WE thought western red cedars were big trees, but when we cross into northern California we make the acquaintance of some true giants. Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are a California specialty: few of them grow outside the state. In Redwood National Park, we leave the car and walk into the forest with our binoculars, though most of the birds are in the canopy, hundreds of feet above our heads. Only a few chestnut-backed chickadees and golden-crowned kinglets twitter in the lower branches. After a short stroll along what looks like an old logging road, we return to the car and drive to another parking area, where, when I open the car door, a Steller's jay perches on it a few inches from my head and peers expectantly into my face. Its feathers are a brilliant, iridescent blue that pulses against the forest's dark green. I try to figure out if it is so innocent of people that it is unafraid, or if it is so accustomed to people that it a.s.sociates me with food, but it isn't giving me any clues. In return, I don't give it any food.

The park encompa.s.ses more than 150 square miles of old-growth coastal redwoods, about half those left on the planet. A century and a half ago, there were eight thousand square miles of old-growth redwood forest in California alone, which means 99.5 per cent of the original dawn forest has been cut. Redwoods, also known as sequoias, grow to fantastic sizes and live for millennia. The largest tree in the world, the General Sherman in Sequoia National Park, is a redwood; its base is 102.5 feet in circ.u.mference, and it is thought to be 2,700 years old. The trees here in Redwood National Park are slightly smaller and younger, probably no more than 1,500 years old, mere saplings when Clovis drove the Visigoths out of France.

I gently close the car door and the Steller's jay flies to a nearby shrub and scolds me. There's a path and we follow it, eventually coming to the first big tree. It's fifty feet around if it's an inch, and so heavy it appears to be sinking around its own root ball, the way an obese man's ankles sink around his shoe tops. There isn't much we can do with it except stare, so we stare at it, then turn and follow the path deeper into the woods. This is a mistake, as there are paths bifurcating off the main path and we stumble along them, staring mostly up at the trees, until quite soon we are no longer certain how to get back to the car. Well, Merilyn is certain, but I insist on a different path and she follows under protest until neither of us knows where we are.

Merilyn has an apple and a packet of trail mix in her shoulder bag, and there is a path of sorts to follow. Walking through a forest, even on a path, is infinitely better than driving through it, especially if part of the purpose of the experience is to get lost. You can get lost faster, and stay lost longer. By the time we have meandered on intersecting paths for half an hour, I am hopelessly turned around, though I don't admit it, especially when the path takes us to the road.

"The car park is to the left," I say confidently.

"Then we should go right, right?" Merilyn says.

"Left," I say firmly.

"Let's just go right until we round that curve," Merilyn says. "If there's no car park, we'll turn around and come back."

Of course, the car park is around the curve. There is the traitorous Echo, waiting where it shouldn't be. I check the plates before inserting the key, but it's our car, all right. Merilyn somewhat pointedly asks me if I would like to drive.