I’ve searched worldwide to find a chocolate milkshake that tastes anywhere near as good as that one, but I don’t think it will ever happen.
We’ve selected a six pack of industry-leading favorites: some represent amazing values, some offer cutting-edge technological advancements and all stand, in general, as genuine marvels of speed.
Life is full of small adjustments – and then there’s the other kind. My wife, Greta Rose and I decided a long time ago that we wanted to live in a small town. We were both kind of overwhelmed by the ever-increasing and seemingly pervasive stress of life in a concrete jungle. Now, I know there’s a lot of prejudice about Los Angeles, and a lot of those prejudices are probably spot-on, but I’ve always thought that if a person’s happiness is dependent on his geography there may be something a little deeper to his discomfort. Nonetheless, I personally believe we all have places where we just fit better than others.
Six years ago we were invited to a wedding in Hood River, Oregon. The day after the wedding we went into town and sat on the grass in front of Mike’s Ice Cream, licking our cones and looking up and down Oak Street. Suddenly, it felt to both of us like we’d come “home,” which is an odd feeling when you’ve never really known one that wasn’t portable. And that was that.
Mt. Hood was named in 1792 after Lord Hood (Samuel) who, among other things, served in the British Navy during the American Revolutionary War. The British love to name big things after themselves. I guess that’s what you do if you come from a small island. The snow melted and became Hood River, which flowed into the Columbia and the appropriately named town of Hood River stands watch at that confluence.
The history of Hood River is a living thing. It’s like measuring a tree’s age by its rings. Parents raise kids in the same orchards they once played in. Kayaks and rafts run through rivers in deep gorges carved by flames and then flood, and Mt. Hood still stands a kind of bemused watch after a few thousand years of misspent youth. A big mountain watching over a small town
Then in the 70’s, a peculiar thing happened. The wind that blew hard down the gorge every afternoon from May to September (and annoyed the residents of Hood River to no end) was discovered by a legendarily anonymous board sailor. Well, one person’s annoyance is another person’s obsession, and soon Hood River was enjoying a culture clash of epic proportions. Oak Street went from hardware stores and diners with 25-cent coffee to board shops, bike shops, and $2.00 lattes. Over time peaceful coexistence came to be the order of the day, mostly because there’s something so grandly special about this place that no matter how much energy either side could muster, the most heated argument would stop dead when the clouds parted and the snowy peak of Mt. Adams suddenly appeared.
My first taste of the ethos of Hood River and outdoor sports came when I went to my first dentist appointment, which I’d waited a month for. When I arrived at the office for my appointment there was a sign hanging from the locked door that read, “When it blows, you goes. Closed for wind.”
Maybe it’s my age but I’m pretty much over all things “extreme.” Like most marketing catch-alls, the word lost hold of what it was trying to describe a long time ago and it’s all relative anyway. Around here, if you only play at one sport a day, your priorities are seriously out of order. A tough day may have to be shaved down to a short mountain bike ride in the morning and a sailing session before dinner, but it gets done. Then there are the tribes. Mountain bikers think of road cyclists as sissies who can’t take a punch and the roadies think the off-road crowd cheats because they don’t ride uphill. Whatever! The fact remains that unless you’re only here for two weeks in the summer, you’ve got to earn your turn. While I didn’t really enjoy my time outside the fire, once you’re in, it’s pretty damn warm. Windsurfers, kiteboarders, paddlers, skiers, roadies, off roadies, moto; if it can get your heart rate to 220 before take off, it’s done here and there are some seriously heroic people doing it.
There is a price to pay for all of this fun – and that price is gear. The running joke here is that Hood River is the home of the 800-square-foot house with the 3,000-square-foot garage. In the two years I’ve lived here I’ve had to add pegs in my storage for six different helmets alone. There are a lot of people here whose gear is worth more than their cars. Speaking of cars, if yours doesn’t carry at least one set of racks people will ask you what you’re doing here. Hood River is essentially a theme park for all of the grown-older but not -up ADD kids. One really good way to separate the show-ers from the go-ers is to check out the local emergency room on a summer Saturday afternoon. Did I mention that this theme park has consequences? Hood River has more orthopedic surgeons in a town of 6,000 regular residents than most big cities, and there’s a long wait for an appointment. If you eavesdrop in any coffee shop in town, you’ll overhear at least one carnage story at every table, and that’s carnage as in, “Yeah, but my back was only broken in two places so I was back in my boat after a month.” As I quickly learned, if you want to play here, you have to pay here and not just with insurance.
One of the things I love the most about this town is the people I play with, even though a lot of them have just started speaking to me. The great thing about being a 50-year old ADD kid is that the price of admission seems really cheap when you’ve finally found home.
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