Yreka Blues

Roughly at the halfway point between San Francisco and Portland is Yreka, a town whose name looks like it may have been the last one available when its founding fathers got the place organized. Even the businesses look to have had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to locate a name for their stores. The big supermarket, for example, which is called Price Less Foods.

Of course, we are north of Balls Ferry, Hooker Lake Road, and Gas Point, here in this broad flat that is a gateway into the land of Lewis & Clark. The Oregon state government offers a map of the route taken by the explorers on its official website.

The Oregon Trail serves as young North America’s version of Asia’s ancient Silk Route.

We’ve stopped for the night at Motel 6, where a room costs roughly 7 times that much nowadays. Still, a pretty good deal, and I like the fact that kids are free. I actually think kids should always be free, because no employer pays you more than the next guy just because you happen to have a kid.

That would be un-American-like, right? A penalty against all of those who have not burdened the planet with offspring, further straining resources and diverting massive amounts of taxes for schools, playgrounds, and so on – money that might otherwise be refunded to childless citizens for whatever use they wished to make of it.

This, at least, is how I imagine the line of reasoning to go.

Not that I am unsympathetic to people who see children as baggage. It’s part of the social fabric that we now have a familiar type – the type who hates kids. In this way, we desert our own future. We never were going to be part of the future, anyway, but our kids will, which is why people have kids, so that people would have a future on this planet.

If the future doesn’t matter to us, then why would we do things like recycling, preserving resources, protecting wildlife, finding sustainable ways to grow food and utilize energy? Why not just live for the moment?

The current class divide in America between the super-rich and the rest of us has grown so large that only a generation ago, if you predicted this, you would have been branded an idiot.