In 1854 my great grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Langworthy, was born in what is now Washington County, Oregon. She was 5 years old when Oregon Territory became a state. Thinking about the Oregon Sesquicentennial, I was doing math. How old would she, and the state have been at the time of her 1930 death when I had a huge mental jolt. The state celebrated 50 in 1909. My dad, Robert Maxwell, was born that year, the year Oregon turned 50. Never made the connection before now! If he were still living he'd be 100 in November, and talking about the changes he's seen, the history he's witnessed, how it used to be when he was a boy.
He often talked about his great-greats and how they came to Oregon Territory on the Oregon Trail.
They had come from England to Connecticut, went to Indiana after 150 or so years and then to Missoui to join a wagon train to Oregon. In 1848 they left for the west, came across country and along the Columbia Gorge.
They first settled in Grays River, across the Columbia, where his grandfather, Thomas Foss, ran a logging operation and boarding house with a Chinese cook for the loggers. It was quite a deal for him. Less so for my siblings and me. Now I wish I'd paid more attention.
He was a walking history lesson; perhaps a living history lesson is a more apt phrase. In his teens and after high school he logged.
Familiar words of our childhood included cat skinner, donkey engine, skid road, dog line, gyppo. At one time I could have told you the meaning of all, now I'd have to look them up.
I think he may have been a boom cat for a short while, a dangerous job that involved herding the logs at the water dump into rafts for sorting or transport.
No longer a logger, and working for a newspaper distribuiton service when he married my mother, he eventually spent most of his life in the lumber industry. 
As children in Southern Oregon near the lumber mill, with the acrid scent of burning sawdust surrounding us, we played our own dangerous game, climbing on and around the redwood logs. He encouraged us, to our mother's horror but she did take the snap shots.
Some of his favorite times centered on the highways of Oregon. I think he loved the highways, the beauty of cliff-face construction along the Columbia River Highway. The grandness of the Oregon Coast Highway which took him through the Coastal Range and forests was a favorite. Started when he was 10, after the enactment of the nation's first gasoline tax, it was completed in 1932, perfect timing for a 23 year old.
All his life he drove those roads, and becoming a family man did not deter him from his beloved haunts; he still drove the roads and took us with him. The Tillamook Burn, really a series of four fires, the first of which began in 1933 at Gales Creek Canyon, was pointed out on every drive to or from the Coast.
Drives from Portland to Astoria or Seaside almost always included a picnic at Fort Stevens and a trek to see the skeleton of the 1906 shipwrecked Peter Iredale. The ship was wrapped in barbed wire which stretched to Point Adams after a Japanese submarine fired on the coast in June of 1942.
Or we'd stop at the Sitka Spruce, and hear that Lewis and Clark had described the newly discovered species as a marvel: "..., and in several instances we have seen them as much as 36 feet in the girth or 12 feet diameter perfectly solid and entire. They frequently rise to the height of 230 feet and one hundred and twenty or 30 of that height without a limb." (Meriwether Lewis Journal, 2/4/1806)
Six generations of my family have seen that tree, walked around it, taken snapshots of it, and in my case even hugged it, or at least tried to wrap my arms around it before they put up the walkway barrier. Now, damaged by lightning in the 1950's, wounded again in the coastal storms of 2006, the more than 700 year old tree received a fatal blow during the winter of 2007 when the top snapped at 75 feet. It is dying and he would hope that the tree would be allowed to fall to the forest floor and become a nurse log for future giants.
He knew Portland and its neighborhoods. Pointed out who built the big houses in Irvington and the Alameda. Described attacks on the Chinese and how they would hide in tunnels under the Benson Hotel. True story or not, there are tunnels throughout Old Town, Chinatown. Today they are called the Shanghai tunnels; even though there is some dispute as to how active the practice of being shanghaied was here in Portland.
When he managed a lumber mill in Southern Oregon we'd go to Crescent City on the Redwood Highway through Jedediah 
Smith State Park. He'd name every type of tree along the way. In his 80's he was still selling lumber. He could estimate the board feet of a tree just by looking, and be accurate. In the old days he might have been known as a timber cruiser. One of his last deals was to broker to the government enough board feet to build barracks in South Korea.
Not a fan of Franklin Roosevelt, he nevertheless bragged about many of the works completed during the Depression by the Works Project Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). During the Portland years, a Sunday drive might take us to Timberline Lodge, a make work project of the WPA which opened in 1937. The post-war years' Saturday morning drive might mean a stop at a lumber yard for a sale on our way to the Oregon Caves where an old CCC camp cabin still exists.
One of his legacies to me is the appreciation of structure: houses, tunnels and stone walls, tall redwoods that we walked or drove through, and bridges.
I 'collect' bridges. I love them. I photograph them, or memorize them. My mind sees the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a small depression era bridge outside Myrtle Beach, and the Golden Gate; but more interestingly my favorite bridges are the McCullough bridges of Oregon.
Yaquina Bay, the Siuslaw River Bridge, the Rogue River Bridge at Gold Beach are three of the more than 600 beautiful bridges Conde McCullough either designed or for which he supervised the design and construction. I absorbed them all in the many drives we took as children, and later as an adult visiting my parents after their return to Portland. We always took a drive some where.
I'll pick up and drive some where, any where, doesn't matter where - it's the going, the driving, the looking along the way that's important - at a minutes notice. A silent passenger, my dad is always present, pointing out a piece of history, or a change, something new, when I drive some where.
An Oregon legacy, a father's legacy: the love of the road, of the drive to somewhere.
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