One morning as I was driving home from Vancouver (Washington) to Portland, I found myself thinking about something Kelly and I had been talking about earlier that morning, which was, “Wouldn’t it be fun to drive around and visit the places that both of us have lived?” With this thought in mind, I decided to stop by Officers’ Row on my drive home, because that’s a place that my dad and stepmom had an apartment for a short time, when the City of Vancouver first converted Officers’ Row into apartments and condos back in the late 1980’s. Unfortunately, the streets down there were all blocked off for some sort of event, so I couldn’t get down anywhere near that part of town.

I decided to head out to my favorite place that we lived. It was along the old Evergreen Highway.

Here’s a picture of the house. It’s about a hundred years old, and it was owned by some family friends of ours who lived up the hill. They were in their 60’s at the time, and her mother (who was in her 80’s at the time) had lived in the house for decades, and she couldn’t really manage living there by herself anymore. They didn’t want to rent it to anyone they didn’t know, and they really didn’t like the idea of such a beautiful house sitting vacant, so they offered to rent it to my dad and stepmom for $400 a month or something insanely low like that.

When we lived there, there were no other houses but ours and that of the owners’, up the hill. The land that the two houses were on was all owned by the owners, since it was a gigantic hundred-year-old lot. The hillside was wooded, and next door to us there was a field, and goats who lived on the hill. We would feed the goats and walk down to the river. I haven’t been by the place in quite some time, so I thought I’d see what it looks like now.

Well, here it is now.

None of the houses in the picture was there when we lived there, with the exception of the one you can see at the top of the hill, which was the first one that the owners built and sold. But the hillside was all woods and grass, and no houses were between ours and the Evergreen Highway (which is where I was standing to take the picture).

Continuing the nostalgic feeling, I decided to take a walk and see if I could still get down to the river, the way my brother and I used to. Well, surprise surprise, I couldn’t anymore. It’s all private property and fences and signs now. So I drove up a few blocks, parked the car along the railroad tracks, grabbed my camera, and headed out to see what I could find.

Obviously, it’s much more built up with waterfront McMansions now. That was just starting when we lived there. These days, almost all traces of river access have vanished. There are, however, still some vestiges of history. There’s an amazing little A-framed shack, a handful of hidden streams, gates, and waterfalls that look like they’ve changed little over the decades. There are a couple or three abandoned houses, which I would have loved to explore–one in particular–but it was surrounded on all sides by a huge barbed-wire fence, so I decided to give that one a miss. One abandoned house looked fairly modern, like it was built in the mid 80’s, but it had fallen into disrepair, and there was even a vacant lot next to it. ‘How is this possible?’ I thought, as I walked down as close as I could to the edge of the grass, before it fell away toward the river. By way of an answer, a train rumbled by, and I soon got my answer. Look how close the train comes to these two properties! No wonder they’re vacant.

So I kept walking, remembering how my brother and I used to sit in our upstairs window and look out over the river, at the boats and the airport, and I got a little nostalgic for being able to look out and see those things every day. I kept walking, and came to someone’s little bench they’d set up, apparently to watch trains, because whoever was sitting on the bench would have their back to the amazing view, and would be staring at the train track, its access road, and the ugly hedge that was just across the track. :) But I found that the bench made an ideal spot for a moody self-portrait.

So FINALLY I came to this beautiful little wooded area, whereupon I was greeted by this non-threatening sign, so I walked through. Once inside, it was too overgrown to really go anywhere, and there didn’t seem to be a trail down to the river, so I went as far as I could, and it looked like this was pretty much it. I mulled this over, thinking about how not so very long ago, this entire part of the country must have looked like that. Around this time, the sky started to look like rain was on its way, so I decided to head back in the direction of the car. I poked my head into a few more places that I’d missed on the way in, and it was a good thing I did, too, because there was a really amazing sailboat that was hidden behind a thick clump of trees at the river’s edge. I also managed to get a picture of Government Island, which really shows how much rain we’ve had lately, because the Columbia river has risen so high that there’s not really much of an island at the moment; it’s almost completely submerged!

The thing I kept thinking was that not only did I want to be able to have the experience of going and sitting by the river again (and not in some public park, either), but I wanted OTHER people to be able to have that, and it seems like that time may pretty much be gone now. My brother and I knew how rare it was, even then, to be able to have that luxury, which is why we went down there so often. Today I kept thinking that the only people who could have the experience we had NOW are the ‘few and the proud’ who can afford to buy the waterfront properties, proximity to railroad tracks notwithstanding. :)

I also wondered if there was a way to reverse this trend of using up every square inch of space on the planet. The little tiny strip of ‘resource conservation area’ wasn’t even that nice, because all the ‘good’ parts of the land had been bought up long ago.

Well, it may not be much, but I’ll sure take it over another McMansion any day.

I hope you had as much fun reading this as I did making it. My goal is to do more like this. My life is crazy, though, so I don’t know how often it’ll happen, but it WILL happen.