Things Seen Driving Home from Ontario, OR on a Foggy Afternoon

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Wednesday found me in Ontario, OR (& later Payette, ID & Weiser, ID) for a large portion of the day—left at 6:40 a.m. & beat my 5:00 p.m. guitar student to the house by about five minutes.

Yesterday almost all the land between here & Ontario was under an inversion: “warm air aloft,” & frozen fog down below. It’s pretty to look at, but it’s hard to drive thru, & it’s hard to breathe, especially if you’ve got a pulmonary system that’s been somewhat battered by genetics & a youth spent smoking cigarettes. The frozen fog occurs quite often in winter in the western valleys; it’s also referred to as “pogonip,” a Native American word. But the landscape between here & Ontario has a sort of stark & dilapidated beauty, somehow enhanced by the gray air, & I hope this list conjures some pictures.

• A water tower adverting “Spanish Onions” displaying a cartoon dancing onion
• Gray ice & dirty snow surrounding pressure-treated fence posts
• 3 horses (2 roans & a dappled white horse) & 2 burros in a muddy corral right next to Oregon State Road 201
• A home in “Rialto Ranches” sub-division with plywood cutout Christmas decorations on the front yard's cyclone fence (Mickey Mouse & Santa Claus) & a steer grazing in the backyard
• A bend in the placid & partially frozen Snake River
• An old, faded black-&-white painted sign advertising “Starfall Farms”
• A dormant, skeletal cherry orchard
• A slack barbed wire fence held together with a number of splices, & also draped with orange baling twine, leading to a mailbox topped with a Santa Claus figure
• A yellow sign on a lawn showing tablets listing the 10 Commandments
• A nautically themed house (complete with miniature lighthouse & seagull figurine in the front yard) on the banks of the Snake River
• “Oregon Thanks You – Please Come Again”
• The Snake River, revisited
• “Idaho is Too Great to Litter”
• A snowman wearing a red cap & with stick arms open widce standing on the lawn of a trailer house in Payette, ID
• An old brick building banded across the top with white lettering against a black background: “Rinelli Fruit Co.”
• A fireman weathervane atop the Payette firehouse
• An old white wooden building with a tin roof & the painted sign: “Christian Feed Mill”
• A snow-covered soccer field with no nets in the goals standing next to an Idaho Power construction site
• Goats grazing underneath an old-style metal windmill
• Various large stacks of hay bales, both exposed to the elements & tarped
• Train tracks
• A lavender doublewide with lavender outbuildings
• 1 black faced sheep grazing; 1 all white sheep lying down
• A kestrel swooping into the tall grass emerging from snow beside the train tracks
• York metal silos
• Stacks & stacks of pallets beside the corrugated metal buildings of For Rivers Packing
• An old brick schoolhouse with a bell tower: now Weiser WICAP & Head Start
• A wooden sign reading “Rocks, Fossils, Art Gallery” next to a large orange Tyrannosaurus Rex fashioned from an unknown material
• The Weiser River runnig under a concrete bridge
  
• The Beehive Family Restaurant displaying a wood cut-out of an Angus steer
  
• A tarot & tattoo shop next to the Weiser Christian Church
• The orange corrugated buildings of Western Timber across the street from the cemetery
• A 40s vintage bright yellow pick-up with a sign in its bed stating: “States Produce Closed for the Season”
• Painted statues of a grizzly & an elk on opposite sides of a driveway
• Bitterbrush & sagebrush rising out of the snow
• Trees, shrubs & grass frosted white with frozen fog
• Cattle grazing on frosted white grass
• A crow gliding thru the gray air above Mann Creek
• Sunlight starting to burn thru as I head up the south face of Midvale Hill
• Bright sun on brilliant white snow at the summit: 3,338 feet
• Fog like an endless blue-gray cloudbank in the rearview mirror
• Descending into an endless blue-gray sea of fog halfway down the northern slope
• Wild turkeys scratching for grit beside US highway 95
• Tall trees completely frosted white along the Weiser River Trail as it cuts thru the Midvale, ID town park
• The Weiser River frozen & gray below dark, snow-dappled cliffs as the highway winds thru the Weiser River canyon south of Cambridge, ID
  
• The Frontier Motel’s sign proclaims they have served “1 happy guest & 0 grouches since Jan 1”
• An electrical sign in the shape of Santa Claus driving a tractor attached to the side of the Farmer’s Supply Co-Op; the sign isn’t illuminated at this hour
• Two RVs parked in a Quonset style building
• Large hay shelters holding big square hay bales
  
• A lot of junk autos & old farm equipment next to a tumbledown barn near the Washington County/Adams County line
• Sunshine emerging & Council Mountain becoming brilliant white to the east
• The old schoolhouse behind the closed Alpine Store
• The trailer house where we got a bantam hen & rooster almost 10 years ago
• Our llama Penelope kneeling down, camel style, inside our corrugated loafing shed; Mo the alpaca standing nearby
• The willow beside our house sparkling white with fog crystals catching the late afternoon sun

Top pic: Downtown Ontario, OR with water tower in the distance
Bottom pic: Frosted trees along the Weiser River Trail in Midvale, ID