Continuing an occasional series of blogs about SuperOregon, a blog last week that mentioned StandardOregon has resulted in a chain of texts with a group of associates.
We started plotting a road trip to SuperOregon for the Pendleton Round-Up this fall. Planning road trips through the western United States is where I’m a viking!
When Bob Barker announced his retirement, an associate in Portland and I made a road trip to Hollywood to see The Price is Right.
In a separate case, I drove from Portland to Las Vegas for a college associate’s bachelor party. In that scenario, I was adamant that I’d get to the bottom of this Area 51 situation.
During that same drive, I was pleasantly surprised to have stumbled across the Winnemucca Road. Not so pleasantly surprised to pull over, but pleasantly surprised enough to take a picture while I sat at a red light.
So I laid out a road trip that would take us to Area 51 [one of my associates works for the government, so I’m positive he could get us in.]
The road trip would also take us toting our packs along the Winnemucca Road, then north up to Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Mount Hood.
Much like reporters in DFW get acclimated to the area by getting assigned to drive into a tornado, reporters in Portland cut their teeth covering the search for hikers who get lost on Mount Hood.
My first trip up there, I was somewhat concerned to arrive in Government Camp and find the staging area for search crews was the hotel from The Shining.
“Are we certain Jack Nicholson wasn’t involved in the hiker’s disappearance?!” a reporter asks.
Each September, I fly back to Portland to attend a rodeo in SuperOregon with my first boss, his son and some associates. He texted me the other day with tragic news: COVID19 had forced the cancellation of the Pendleton Round-Up. Previously, the only things that could cancel the Round-Up were world wars. And not just any world war, mind you, only the second one canceled the Round-Up.
So the road trip will have to wait.
And so back to Idaho: in that first link at the beginning of the blog, I carefully diagrammed the State of SuperOregon. Now, Idaho wants in. I wonder if my brethren would be open to the name, “SuperIdaho,” or perhaps, “Greater Oregon.” Regardless, while COVID-19 has shut everything else down, the Marketplace of Ideas is open in the Inland Northwest.
And we will continue to take pity on StandardOregon. Hermiston, Oregon is well known as the watermelon capital of the Pacific Northwest. The melons come in around Labor Day each year.
Each fall, a coalition of leading Hermistonians load up a truckload of watermelons [which, I learned while living there, are technically vegetables. Feel free to use that one at parties.] and drive them over to Portland.
I was hosting the midday news hour and interviewing a former mayor who had made the trip to Portland. At one point [in the middle of the interview, mind you] he handed the phone off to the person next to him because it was his turn in the watermelon seed-spitting contest. Hermiston city leaders were actually involved in a very heated seed-spitting contest with Portland city leaders.
The head of the Hermiston Chamber of Commerce took the phone and then, to my knowledge, delivered the first #LIVE play-by-play of a watermelon seed spitting contest in radio history. Obviously, KOHU won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence that year. Obviously.
The Federal Watermelon Board, an organization that really does advocate replacing tomato on a BLT with watermelon, now allows the melon to identify as both a fruit and a vegetable. There’s no mistaking, though, that their use of the phrase, “no matter how you slice it,” is quite sweet.
