The Drive

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 18: The Drive

Three hours and twelve minutes from the parking lot of Evergreen House in Portland to the construction lot of Orchard House in Bend, three hours and twelve minutes that Miriam drove every week, usually on Tuesdays, usually leaving Portland at six in the morning when the city was still dark and the streetlights were still on and the Willamette River was a black surface reflecting the orange sodium lights of the bridges, the bridges that David could have named by their structural type -- the Steel Bridge a vertical-lift bridge, the Burnside a bascule, the Marquam a cantilever -- and that Miriam saw as architecture, as the bridges that connected the east side to the west side, the bridges that were corridors, that were passages, that were the horizontal equivalent of doors, the openings through which the city passed from one side of the river to the other, and the first bridge she crossed each Tuesday was the Morrison, heading west to pick up I-84 east along the Columbia River Gorge, and the crossing was the beginning.

The drive was a corridor. The drive was the space between two buildings -- the building where her mother was dying and the building she was constructing for other people's mothers and fathers and husbands and wives to die in -- and the space between the two buildings was one hundred and sixty-three miles of road that climbed from sea level in Portland to thirty-six hundred feet in Bend, the climb gradual, the elevation gained incrementally over the three hours, the landscape changing as the elevation changed, the road carrying her from one world to another, from the green world of the Willamette Valley to the brown world of the high desert, and the changing of worlds was the drive's narrative, the story the road told each Tuesday, the same story, the same route, the same sequence of landscapes and elevations and temperatures and light conditions, and the sameness was the routine, and the routine was the structure, and the structure was the thing that held her together during the months when the two buildings -- the one completing and the one declining -- were pulling her apart.

East on I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge. The gorge was the first passage, the first corridor, the river cutting through the Cascade Range in a channel eighty miles long and four thousand feet deep, the channel carved by water and ice over millions of years, the geological equivalent of Miriam's corridors -- a passage designed by forces rather than by intention, but a passage nonetheless, a space through which things moved, the river moving west toward the ocean and the traffic moving east toward the mountains and the two movements sharing the corridor the way two beds shared the hospice corridor, moving in opposite directions through the same space, and Miriam was moving east, moving toward the building, moving away from the mother, the moving a form of leaving, and the leaving was necessary, was the professional obligation that required her to be in Bend one day a week while her mother was in Portland seven days a week, the obligation that said: the building needs you, the construction needs your eye, the translation needs your approval, and the mother needs you too, but the mother has Thea and David and Room 6 and the building has only you and James and the drawings and the questions that arise when drawings become buildings, the questions that the architect must answer in person, on site, standing in the framing and looking at the rough opening and saying: yes, this is right, or: no, move this wall four inches east, and the yes and the no were the architect's essential acts, the acts that only the architect could perform, and the performing required presence, required the three-hour drive, required the leaving.

The gorge in the early morning was dark. The basalt cliffs on either side were darker than the sky, the cliffs rising like walls, the road between them like a corridor -- Miriam could not escape the analogy, could not stop seeing corridors in every passage, could not stop reading the world as architecture -- and the darkness was the corridor's night mode, the pre-dawn mode, the mode in which the passage was navigated by headlights rather than by daylight, the headlights illuminating sixty feet of road, the same sixty feet that Miriam limited her corridors to, the maximum visible length before the curve hid what was ahead, and the hiding was the design, in both cases, the design of the manageable, the design of the distance the eye could comfortably resolve, and the sixty feet of headlight on the gorge road was the manageable distance, and beyond it was the dark, and the dark was the future, and the future was Bend, was the building, was the construction that awaited her arrival.

The light came as she drove. The light came from behind her, from the east -- no, she was driving east, the light came from ahead, from the east, the light rising over the mountains she was driving toward, the Cascades ahead of her, the sun climbing behind them, and the light spread across the sky the way light spread across a room, from the window inward, from the source outward, the sky the room and the sun the window and the light the thing that filled both, and the filling was gradual, was the slow increase from dark to dim to gray to gold to white, the color temperature climbing the way it climbed in the patient rooms, from the warm gold of dawn to the clear white of morning, and Miriam watched the climbing from behind the windshield, the windshield her window, the car her room, the drive her corridor, and the watching was the practice, was the architect's morning practice of observing the light, of studying its behavior, of reading its quality, the same practice she performed at every site visit, the practice that began at Sage Hill when she learned to look at the light first, before measurements, before soil reports, before anything else, the light the first thing, the light always the first thing.

She passed Hood River. She passed The Dalles. She left the gorge and climbed onto the Columbia Plateau, the landscape flattening, the basalt cliffs receding, the river falling behind, and the flatness was a different kind of space, an open space, a space without walls, the landscape the garden, the garden at its most extreme, the room with no ceiling and no walls and no floor except the earth itself, and the openness was the high desert, the openness that would be visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Orchard House, the openness that the dying would see from their beds, and Miriam drove through the openness and she thought about the windows, thought about whether sixty-six inches was wide enough, whether the glass was clear enough, whether the view from the bed would include enough of this sky, this distance, this landscape that went on to the horizon in every direction with the clarity of dry air and altitude and the absence of everything that obstructed, and the absence was the high desert's gift, the gift of nothing between the eye and the distance, nothing between the room and the world.

She turned south at Biggs Junction. She followed US-97 through the Warm Springs reservation, through the juniper and the sage and the dry brown hills that rolled like waves in a sea of earth, the hills undulating, the road following the undulations, rising and falling, the driving a form of breathing, the car rising on the hills like a chest rising on an inhale and falling in the valleys like a chest falling on an exhale, and the breathing was the drive's rhythm, the rhythm that carried her from Portland to Bend, from the building where her mother breathed to the building where the future patients would breathe, the breathing connecting the two buildings the way the drive connected them, through the body, through the air, through the rising and the falling.

She descended toward Bend. The descent from the plateau was the transition, the road dropping from the Columbia basin through the Warm Springs pines and into the high desert, from the gray sky that clung to the gorge to the blue sky of central Oregon, and the blue appeared as she descended, the clouds thinning, the marine layer gone, the sky opening the way a ceiling opens when the grid is removed, the sky revealing itself the way Miriam's acoustic plaster ceilings revealed themselves -- smooth, continuous, uninterrupted, the sky a ceiling without a grid, the sky the ceiling that Walter had asked for, the sky that the dying needed, and the sky was here, was above the road, was above the building she was driving toward, and the building would receive the sky through its windows the way it received the light through its windows, completely, honestly, without the green tint of standard glass, without the grid of the institutional ceiling, the sky and the building meeting through the glass, and the meeting was the architecture.

She arrived at the site. She parked. She walked to the building. James met her at the entrance, the entrance that was level, the entrance that she had graded to prevent the uphill arrival, and the arriving was the completing of the drive, the completing of the corridor, the passage from one building to another finished, the three hours and twelve minutes traveled, the one hundred and sixty-three miles covered, the thousand feet of elevation gained and the four hundred feet lost, the landscape changed, the sky changed, the light changed, everything changed except the architect, who was the same, who carried the same drawings and the same pen and the same professional attention from Portland to Bend, from the mother to the building, from the dying to the constructing, the same attention applied to both, the same care, the same precision, the same love.

And then the return. Every Tuesday evening, the drive in reverse. Bend to Portland. East to west. Dry to wet. Blue to gray. The descent from the high desert to the valley floor, the ascent over the pass, the descent into the gorge, the river, the bridges, the city, the streetlights, the parking lot of Evergreen House, the lobby, the corridor, the door, the room, the bed, the mother, the hand held, the light from the bedside lamp falling on Lin's face, the face that Miriam looked at after the drive, the face that was the destination, the face that was the reason for the returning, because the drive was a corridor and the corridor connected two rooms and the rooms were both hers and both needed her and the corridor carried her between them, back and forth, Portland to Bend, Bend to Portland, the mother and the building, the building and the mother, the dying and the constructing, and the corridor was three hours and twelve minutes long and one hundred and sixty-three miles wide and the corridor held her the way all corridors held the people who moved through them, temporarily, in transit, the holding brief, the holding the duration of the passage, and then the room, and then the holding that was not temporary but permanent, the holding of the room, the holding of the mother's hand, the holding that the drive made possible by carrying the daughter from one holding to another, from the holding of the building to the holding of the body, the corridor between the rooms.

She drove it every Tuesday. She drove it for four months. She drove it from September through December, sixteen Tuesdays, sixteen passages between the two buildings, sixteen crossings of the Cascades, sixteen transitions from gray to blue and blue to gray, sixteen mornings of watching the light climb over the mountains and sixteen evenings of watching the light descend behind the hills, and each drive was the same drive and each drive was different, the route the same but the buildings changed, the building in Bend more complete each Tuesday and the building in Portland -- no, the building in Portland did not change, the building was finished, the building was what it was, it was Lin who changed, Lin who was different each Tuesday, Lin who was less, less mass, less voice, less presence, the declining visible across the Tuesdays the way the construction was visible across the Tuesdays, the one diminishing while the other grew, and the drive was the space between them, the corridor that connected the diminishing and the growing, the dying and the building, and the corridor held them both, carried the architect between them, carried the daughter between them, and the carrying was the drive, and the drive was the corridor, and the corridor was the space between the rooms, the space where Miriam processed, the space where the grief and the work coexisted in the body of a woman behind a windshield watching the light change across one hundred and sixty-three miles of road that connected the two buildings, the two rooms, the two holdings, the room where her mother was dying and the room she was building for other mothers to die in, the corridor between the rooms.