There is something like a coup in my insides, pouncing only when unexpected and I have blearily wiped it from my recollection; only when I am blithe and reporting “I feel fine now, it’s gone now” does everything in my geographical center suddenly grind to a halt and then there is squeezing almost like my solar plexus is holding its breath. And this goes on for days, with plunges into nausea and despair.

It’s the same malaise as in Las Vegas; it keeps poking at my sanity with its sourceless-ness. I keep thinking some adjustment to my intake or environment will thwart it: a boozeless fortnight, a caffeine-free week, less one medication, plus another. And for a fluttering few days I think, Eureka!, that’s the ticket!, until like an abusive parent it smacks me across the face again and I find myself contrite and swearing I won’t do it again, ever, whatever it is.

Last week it struck hard and coincided with the constipated response of my health insurance to the coverage of the “good stuff” anti-nausea pills and the “stuff that at least nominally works” acid-reducing medicine. Like some sort of hallucination involving maniacal harlequins in executioners’ roles, such has been the past few months with respect to clarity of policy for pharmacy coverage. In a word: arbitrary. The eight-hundred-dollar anti-inflammatories covered with nary a whisper; the fifty-dollar run-of-the-mill antacids rejected outright.

So, why despair? The formlessness of how I feel when I’m sick, the failed diagnostics, the rootless (heh) shedding. No one knows what’s wrong with me but it continues to happen and completely at random. I’m very fatigued of composing emails to my co-workers that start out “I’m so miserable again.”

Early last week, in the throes of  stupid optimism, I bought plane tickets to San Francisco to practice flying. Things went all dumber the following day, when, predictable in its unpredictability, the clenches struck. And hard. Banished to my bedroom hard. Bleakly, I cancelled the (fortunately refundable) tickets and took to moaning and laying about. And then David left for a long long weekend in the midwest with family.

The negative elements in my life made me ache.

In a bid to fling myself out of the sand trap of quease and self-pity I’d become mired in, I scanned my thoughts and the Internet for local, warm escapes. A quick one. An overnight somewhere within a 100-mile radius of town where I could take the dog–I was dog-sitting on account of David’s absence–and do some pleasurable reading and sitting. Preferably in the shade of a dusty locust or box elder. I also like cottonwoods. Perhaps a breeze catching the sun-dry hot leaves? Maybe some grass that has gone pale for the season? Maybe could I be so lucky?

I decided on the Lyle Hotel, a 105-year-old railroad company building that now is a boarding-house-like (I mean that in a good way) hotel with bathrooms down the hall. Lyle is a yellow-sunny town on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge about a 90-minute drive from Portland. Tiny. Sun-blown and perfect. If I could manage to keep my insides in check for 24 hours, perhaps I could make a nice outing of it.

Saturday

Part I: Getting there; Heat

The dog and I left town at about 11 in the morning on Saturday for points east. She was of course ricocheting off of surfaces with excitement. I feel like we had some sort of Troutdale-area adventure but I cannot recall it.

We stopped for serviceable, if very slow, lunch at the Venus Cafe in Stevenson, Wash., just northeast of the Bridge of the Gods (yes, honestly, we have a bridge called that; it spans the Columbia and it is incredible). Let’s just say that I tipped a buck, and it was a 20% tip. Economical.

It was 72 degrees and breezy in Stevenson. We departed for points east. The proprietor at the Lyle Hotel had been clear that I needed to arrive at my specified 3PM, and it was only 1:30. So Sydney and I headed for Columbia Hills State Park and the Temani Pesh-wa (“Written-on Rock”) trail. In the late 1950s, the spanking new Dalles Dam did the densest collection of Pacific Northwest rock art known the favor of burying it under water forever. A bunch of samples were hewn out of the canyon beforehand by some dudes in the Army Corps of Engineers to, I dunno, prove that they were there? The whole thing is so peculiar to my modern, tree-hugging perspective. But at least I can power my air conditioning compressor, I guess.

In 2003, some of the petroglyphs were removed from their truly weird location under the fish ladder at the dam, and, by the request of and with the assistance of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Nez Perce Tribe, arranged where  you can see them now, 10 miles east of Lyle (and not far northeast of The Dalles, Oregon).

I feel chagrined that I didn’t know of these works, especially with my interest of late in rock art (albeit I am more fascinated by pictographs (painted images) than petroglyphs (carved)).

During the not-long drive from Stevenson to Lyle to Columbia Hills, the temperature rose by 25 degrees. Sydney lay hotly in the shade of the car while I wandered slowly along the (short) trail.

Of course, much of the historic imagery is currently closed to the public (except for pre-arranged tour) because of vandalism dipshittery. That kind of thing leaves me at a breathless lack of expression for the anger it overstuffs me with.

It was hot.

I returned to Lyle and checked in, getting an earful from the proprietor for arriving ten minutes early and bringing a lot of heat and wind with me. I accidentally cut in front of another couple–dastardly folks were also ten minutes early, the nerve–and felt double-awkward because the proprietor already hated me. I put Sydney in the room because I wasn’t sure I’d be allowed to have her at Maryhill winery and I didn’t want to leave her in the car.

Part II: Aborted Nap, Languishing, The Good Part

Back in Lyle, I decided it was high time to do the Lyza part of the trip. Novel and nap. My fave.

Before we head into this section, a disclaimer. I found that I was feeling like I wanted to take some portraits of people. I was the only person with me. As such, you’ll see a lot of self portraits in the following photos. I apologize in advance for the self-absorbed vibe they may give off.

If nothing, these are all really self-portraits–as in, my finger on the shutter every time. Tricky to pull off with a DSLR.

It was a blustery-warm late afternoon and Sydney and I headed on foot toward the Columbia River, which was about a quarter mile south of the hotel. Access was via a surreal paved network of intertwined single-lane road-lets. We tromped off into the waist-high grass and scampered over basalt.

Back at the hotel, a prix-fixe dinner that was billed as family-style, which put me in the frame of mind of serving bowls full of mashed potatoes and tubs of margarine but really meant sharing a table but getting your own grub for the most part. After waffling I got a pork loin but later the chef felt bad for me and gave me a sample of the Thai curry, too. At table with me was an almost eight year old who was magnetic but clearly did not want to be there at all. He liked trains a lot and the only time I saw him smile was when he and his grandfather and I left the dining room mid-meal to charge across the viaduct and watch a handsome freight train stream by towards the distant tunnels blown out of solid basalt. It was deep dusk by that point.

The other high point was that a winemaker was at my table and was pimping his offerings on us. My Rosé mostly sat in the hotel’s freezer, lonely-like, while I downed local Syrah and Zinfandel. The dude nearly spit out his wine when I immediately said “peppers, bell” after tasting his Cab. Apparently he bills “Anaheim Peppers” as its frontmost taste. Ah well, one victory, I guess. I was on a social low-dip; mostly felt I was annoying my tablemates, though I did try to listen and ask careful questions.

Napless, I found myself comfortably fatigued after dinner. Sydney was oddly jumpy in the room, leading me to frustration a couple of times. I lay and read and read and read. This part of the evening was great.

Up until now this could have been any of countless sojourns taken by me or David or the dog or a combination of all three.

Part III: The Scary Part

A few things unfolded.

One, I stayed up somewhat stupid-late because I was so immersed in my book. It was nearly two before I turned out the light.

Two, a windstorm hacked its way into the night at about this time. The hotel, which has walls of 6-inch-thick concrete, was a hell of a barrier, but the whistling flew around the window frames and made shadows jump crazy on the walls. It was difficult to get to sleep.

Confused, not long later, I woke to Sydney panting and moving uncomfortably around the room. I shushed her and told her to go to sleep but the scene repeated itself half a dozen times, and, finally, after about an hour, I relented. It was 4:30 in the morning by this point. The gale blew with full passion outside.

As soon as I opened the door to the hall, Sydney, already leashed, leapt forward with such abandon down the stairs that she entangled herself and I nearly suffered a grave injury. We made it to the front room and she tangled into me more as I tried to negotiate the deadbolt lock, the loud screen door, being slammed at by wind going a lot of miles per hour. Outside it was howling and Sydney barely cleared the porch before squatting into a pile of diarrhea.

In my defense, this is not the first time that I have had Sydney get the squirts on me while traveling. Desperately afraid of her having an accident in the room (though this would be extraordinarily out of character for her, in her defense), I put her dog bed, and her, into the back hatch of the wagon.

Dog thus secured, I didn’t fall back into a blissful slumber. It was 5:30 by the time I closed my eyes soundly again, and I woke to the entire hotel’s ablutions at 7AM. I dragged myself vertical and dressed myself and whatnot at 8–that was the best I could do–and headed down to check on Sydney.

My first hint that things might be awry was that she was actually in the back seat–not the back hatch–of the car. Maybe the wind had freaked her out, I thought.

I let her out and she yelped and leapt and immediately hunched over and (this is graphic) sprayed a frightening amount of liquid from her rear end that ended in a solid bout of plain, pure blood. I was terrified for her. She repeated this action about three or four times. Then she crawled miserably back into the car and curled up. I’m fairly new to dogs, and this struck me as very bad. She was so sick that I worried that she’d been poisoned, was going to keel over dead.

I immediately called David in Michigan, and he was a voice of calm. I asked the hotel proprietor about local emergency veterinary services but she was unaware (the hotel had just recently been graced with new owners, they were new to town). I put out the panicky question on Twitter, hoping folks would help me.

They did. David got a hold of an on-call vet in Bingen, just a few miles down the road.

While I waited for the vet to call me back, I sat in the car and tried to get my shit together. It was then that I realized the car smelled ungodly awful and discovered that Sydney had vomited all over the footwell of the front passenger seat. Embedded in the puke were identifiable, individual prawns.

Poor girl.

The vet calmed my ass down. Dogs commonly get what is basically the bloody flux; when they get the gastroenteritis bad, their intestines tend to bleed. It was probably OK, he said; was she able to keep water down? I indicated that she had, and that she seemed very interested in water. He told me to go buy some Immodium and shove a pill down her and make sure she didn’t throw up again and got some water. Using some hotel towels I sponged out the worst of the puke in lieu of shampooing it thoroughly (that would have to be done back in town).

I gingerly coaxed the dog back in the car and headed for Portland.

–

Afterword

First: The dog is fine. She is laying here lazily as I write, after a day of eating and drinking and not barfing or squirting.

Second: I talked to Dr. Gravitas today. Two things came out of that.

2A: It was he who faxed a begging letter to my insurance to cover my prescriptions. “Someone must have received it who had some compassion,” he said. “I wrote, ‘Look, this lady has Crohn’s Disease, she’s fighting nausea and pain every day, can’t you just let her have what she needs?‘” Thank you, Dr. Gravitas.

2B: We both agreed that, for piece of mind and sanity, it made sense to, as he puts it “get the scopes out.” We’re going to knock me out and go in from both ends, scouring every inch of my digestive system for anything that is not behaving as it should. Even if we find nothing, my life will feel better. Wish me the best.