"How far to the coast?" I ask Merilyn.

She looks at the map and counts. "About sixty kilometres," she says.

"Kilometres?" I ask.

"All right, miles," she says, as though the difference isn't worth quibbling over.

Finally a road appears on our left, rising away from the river, and I turn abruptly onto it. The truck roars by behind a wall of water, sounding disappointed, like a tomcat whose catnip mouse has fallen down a furnace vent. I turn the car around, and we sit at the intersection for a while looking out across the valley. The rain is still coming down hard and a strong wind is bending some fairly substantial trees above our heads. Before us, far below, we can make out the edge of the river on the Washington side, a fishing village, perhaps, or a farm. Maybe a winery. It looks calm down there.

"There's a nice-looking hotel in Astoria," Merilyn says. She spent much of last night surfing the Internet for likely lodgings. "Maybe we should stay there tonight."

"Sounds good," I say half-heartedly. We are vagabonds in America, dogged by rain. But Astoria seems too close to Seattle. Shouldn't we try to make it farther down the coast?

"We have lots of time," Merilyn says, as if reading my mind. "We're on holiday."

PERHAPS IT was our close encounter with the transport truck, or my post-border jitters, but I am still nervous about our trip. I have always had rather ambivalent feelings about America or, at least, America as seen from afar. It speaks a version of our language, but with its own idiosyncratic touches: chinos, sneakers, zee. Maybe that's why America makes me uneasy: it's eerily familiar, like a song I don't remember hearing yet somehow know the words to. Being in America is like walking around in someone else's dream.

Here is what I have come to believe about America, based, I admit, largely on circ.u.mstantial and even hearsay evidence: America is an annoying and dangerous mixture of arrogance and ignorance. Its citizens barge around foreign countries looking for hamburgers and pizza and fried chicken, unaware of, or unconcerned about, or impatient with the possibility that the country they are in might have its own cuisine, customs, economy, political system, and religion with which it is quite happy, thank you very much. It holds that "different" is a synonym for "inferior." In an Irish pub in Buenos Aires I met an American who told me his hotel was better than mine because his was closer to a Wendy's.

The dream we're walking around in is "the American Dream," which seems to involve having a chicken in every pot, a new Detroit car in every garage, 2.86 television sets in every home, and broadband Internet access on every street. It's the dream of fame and fortune, of success measured in material wealth. This is a newish version; the original American Dream, as defined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America, had more substance. It was of "a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity to each according to his ability or achievement." Nothing would be handed to you on a silver platter: you had to earn it: "It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable." This is a dream I could live in.

But the dream has changed. In What Is America? Canadian writer Ronald Wright charts how far the American Dream has sunk: "Here are the ingredients of the American Dream: love of the new and dismissal of the old; invaders presented as 'pilgrims'; hard work both rewarded and required; and selfishness as natural law."

There is an appalling arrogance and a pitiable naivete in America, which a.s.sumes that the winner of four out of seven baseball games between teams from, let us say, St. Louis and Detroit is by definition the best team in the world. The same att.i.tude caused Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in 1860, to declare Boston "the thinking center of the continent, and therefore of the planet," and causes a place like Utah to advertise itself as having "the best snow in the world."

"America shapes the way non-Americans live and think," wrote Ian Jack, then editor of Granta, in his introduction to a 2002 issue ent.i.tled "What We Think of America." "What do we think of when we think of America?" Jack asked. "Fear, resentment, envy, anger, wonder, hope?"

All of those things, I would say, and almost in that order. I am in the "fear" stage at the moment, moving into "resentment." The very thought of Homeland Security rattles me: it's as if the whole country were a border. It makes the United States a nation of 300 million border guards.

These thoughts are not unique to me: according to recent polls, 37 per cent of Canadians dislike the United States. In fact, it is almost a national pastime, identifying ourselves by what we are not: that is, American.

Nor are the sentiments new. The word "anti-American" appeared in Noah Webster's first dictionary in 1828 and was defined pretty much as it is today: "Opposed to America, or to the true interests or government of the United States." It's hard to imagine being opposed to an entire nation, but consider the remark of an earlier prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in the House of Commons in 1903: "We are living beside a great neighbour who . . . are very grasping in their national acts, and who are determined upon every occasion to get the best in any agreement which they make." Pierre Trudeau said something similar when addressing the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in 1969: "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or even-tempered the beast . . . one is affected by every twitch and grunt." People are always saying things like that about Americans, which may be why only 26 per cent of them think they are liked by other countries, and much fewer than that give a d.a.m.n. But most Canadians agreed with Trudeau when he said, "We are a different people from you and a different people partly because of you."

When asked to think about America, some Granta contributors thought of things that had arrived in their countries from the United States. The Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh, for example, remembered a gift sent by a cousin who had immigrated to the United States to study aeronautical engineering-a red satin pillow with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, "a good-hearted woman wearing a crown on her head and holding a lamp, a torch." It is a torch, but I like Franz Kafka's version better. In his novel Amerika, published in 1927, his hero, Karl Rossmann, looks at the Statue of Liberty as his ship edges into the New York harbour: as Kafka describes it, the woman is "holding aloft a sword," one of those Freudian slips that no one seems to have caught. But of course it's a sword-how appropriate! With what else would the United States bring democracy and freedom to, for example, the Middle East? A lamp?

Having grown up sharing a river with America, it is difficult for me to pinpoint any one thing that came to me from across the border. Everything did. In few other places on the continent do Canadian cheeks live in such close proximity to American jowls. Almost everything in the room, including the air, would have been from the States. The dance music my father played, the books my mother read voraciously, all American. The Pablum I ate, although invented in Canada, was produced and marketed in Chicago. During the day, my father worked at Chrysler's and my mother shopped at Woolworth's. At school, we played baseball-hardball, not softball, and not hockey. When we got our first television set, I watched Soupy Sales and Bugs Bunny and Popeye, all of whom I thought lived in Detroit. It never occurred to us to be anti-American; it would have been like being against life itself, and not even the good life, just life. Canada was a long way from Windsor; America was just down the street.

That was in the mid-1950s, when the American Dream was already beginning to morph into the American Disturbed Sleep Pattern. I was too young to know about McCarthyism and was blind to racism, but they were as present in our home as Frank Sinatra and Roy Rogers. They "came with," as the waitresses in Woolworth's would say to my mother about the Jell-O. My father joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1957, and we left Windsor to live on remote radar bases in the north, DEW Line stations (for Distant Early Warning-distant from whom?) that were built in Canada by Americans during the Cold War so that Canadians could stand on guard for missiles coming across the Arctic Ocean aimed at Washington, D.C. We imbibed the fear of creeping Communism with our Sergeant Rock comic books, soaked in racism with every episode of Amos 'n' Andy, and loved every minute of it.

Only later did I resent living the American Dream in Canada. I wonder how I'll feel about travelling through it in the United States.

"The Cannery Pier Hotel," Merilyn reads from the brochure, placing special emphasis on its strangely Germanic sprinkling of capital letters, "is a luxury boutique hotel built on the former site of a historic cannery six hundred feet out into the Mighty Columbia River in Astoria, Oregon. The Hotel offers . . ."

"How do we get to it?" I ask. "By boat?"

" . . . the Hotel offers guests an unparalleled experience in a real working river. Private river-view balconies in all rooms. Fireplace. High-Speed Internet in room. Clawfoot tubs with views. Terry robes."

I am still feeling anxious.

"Who," I ask, "is Terry Robes?"

MY estimates are wildly out of whack. Clearly, I have forgotten how long a mile can be. It is late in the afternoon by the time we turn west off the I-5, toward the Pacific. The direction seems all wrong. Aren't we supposed to be heading home?

US Route 30, the highway we're on, ends just a few miles down the road, in Astoria. If we turned the other way, we'd be in Atlantic City in just over forty-eight hours. We'd head east through Bliss (Bliss!) and Twin Falls, Idaho, across the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers, skim the southern edge of Chicago, then cut straight through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, until we hit Virginia Avenue, a few blocks up from the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

Route 30 is the main east-west highway in the United States. It's not an interstate; it's a highway. A main cross-country road, like Route 66, except that long stretches of that iconic cross-country road have been replaced by multi-lane throughways that stop for nothing, not a crossroad, not a town, not a megacity. "Life doesn't happen along the interstates," William Least Heat-Moon notes laconically in Blue Highways. "It's against the law."

This narrow road taking us west to the sea is the only red highway that still runs uninterrupted across the continental United States. Even Route 66 went only to Chicago. Not only is Route 30 the last of its kind, it was the first of its kind in North America. In 1912, Carl Fisher, the man who built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and turned a Florida swamp into Miami Beach, proposed what he called the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway. There were already some 2.5 million miles of roads in the United States, but they weren't connected. Dirt tracks radiated from settlements to farms, logging camps, and mines, petering out at the last signs of human habitation. Fisher's idea was to connect all those communities with a gravelled road that would run from Times Square in New York City through thirteen states to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, the first transcontinental road built for the automobile instead of oxen, horses, or mules. A Main Street across America-which is how it came to be known.

The road would cost $10 million, with each community along the way pitching in to do the work. To pay the bills, Fisher asked automobile manufacturers and accessory companies to contribute 1 per cent of their revenues to the project. Packard and Goodyear agreed; Ford refused. The public would never learn to pay for their roads if industry built them, Henry said.

Fisher went ahead anyway. To whip up public enthusiasm, he renamed his new road the Lincoln Highway (after the president, not the car, which was later manufactured by Ford). The idea caught on, and so within a few years, highways with names like the Dixie Highway, Jefferson Davis Highway, the Atlantic Highway, and the Old Spanish Trail criss-crossed the country. There was no system of road signs, just painted bands on telephone poles at important intersections, something like the pointing markers on Fremont's Center-of-the-Universe post.

The Lincoln Highway opened in 1915 in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Most of it was graded and oiled, but parts never evolved beyond muddy tracks; it all depended on the locals in charge.

By the time the idea for Route 30 came along in 1925, government was taking over road building. With bureaucracy came a federal highway system determined to make sense of the myriad quaintly named thoroughfares. To a foreigner like me, the United States National Highway System ill.u.s.trates the remarkable pragmatism of the American character. Look at a road sign and just by the number, you can pinpoint where in the country you are. Major east-west routes are numbered in multiples of ten, from US 10 across the north to US 90 across the south. Major north-south routes end in 1 or 5, with the numbers starting at 1 in the east and increasing as they move west. The US Route 30 sign we just pa.s.sed tells me we are in the northern tier of the country, and we're heading for US Route 101, which runs down the Pacific sh.o.r.e into California.

The Lincoln Highway was severed into several numbered roads, but almost two-thirds of it became US Route 30. The new road was identified, as every road in America is and has been since 1925, with a shield that encloses the number and, at one time, the name of the state. To avoid confusion, all signs showing named highways were taken down.

Where we live in eastern Ontario, planners a few years ago decided to remove apostrophes from road signs. What, the apostrophe takes too much time to print? Too much ink? The curlicue is aesthetically displeasing? Whatever the logic, the result was that Chaffey's Lock, where Wayne lived for a time, became Chaffeys Lock. The possessive apostrophe, which denoted the name of the person who had founded the town or built the lock, disappeared, though not without considerable outrage from the local citizenry. Likewise, the shift to numbered highways in the United States was not an easy one. As an editorial in the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald noted in 1927, "The traveler may shed tears as he drives down the shady vista of the Lincoln Highway, or dream dreams as he speeds over a sunlit path on the Jefferson Highway, or see n.o.ble visions as he speeds across an unfolding ribbon that bears the name of Woodrow Wilson. But how in the world can a man get a kick out of 46 or 55 or 33 or 21?"

The numbers stayed. After all, the original rationale for a federal highway system in the United States was national defence, and soldiers are not sentimental, at least not about other people's history. But a few Americans refused to see the old highway names disappear. On September 1, 1928, thousands of Boy Scouts fanned out along the Lincoln Highway to install concrete markers, one per mile, with a small bust of Lincoln and the inscription This highway dedicated to Abraham Lincoln.

A rock road from coast to coast; markers every mile to preserve the memory of a revered name: it's by these grand, sweeping gestures that I know where I am.

Lincoln Highway was decommissioned in 1928. Route 66 went the same way in 1985. The last major route constructed was US 12 on the Idaho side of Lolo Pa.s.s, completed in 1962. No new highways have been commissioned since, except the interstates.

In 1962, the year he won the n.o.bel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck took a drive on the new interstate. "These great roads are wonderful for moving goods," he reported, "but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pa.s.s, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders. No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing."

Canada has no interstates. Roads are a provincial concern. It took various levels of government until 1950 to get together to build our one and only cross-country road-the Trans-Canada Highway- which wasn't finished until 1971. It is our version of Main Street across America: although you can take 1A bypa.s.ses around most cities now, Highway 1 itself still barrels through small towns and metropolises alike, stringing them together like beads on a necklace that stretches eight thousand kilometres (five thousand miles) from Atlantic to Pacific.

Route 30 reminds me a bit of the Trans-Canada that brought us west. It feels like a small miracle that this old American road is still here to be travelled, town to town, from one side of the country to the other. Although long stretches of it run parallel to or concurrent with interstates, this historic, eighty-one-year-old route has managed to avoid having its number hung up for good.

"What would you call this road, Wayne, if it didn't have a number?"

"The Twilight Creek Eagle Highway," he says.

"Really?" I'd been thinking of something more mundane: the Columbia Road, or Kelso Way. "Why?"

"After the Twilight Creek Eagle Sanctuary," he says, pointing to the sign near where we've pulled off to let a transport truck pa.s.s. "Want to go take a look?"

WE'VE pulled off Route 30 onto something called the Burnside Loop, which angles sharply down toward the river. After driving for a mile we come to the sanctuary, where instead of the milling eagles I expect to see, we find two forlorn-looking plaques looking out over a swampy lowland at river level. Here, one of the plaques informs us, is where the thirty-three members of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery made their camp just over two hundred years ago, on November 26, 1805.

Canadians don't know much about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. We know Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone because of the television programs their exploits inspired, but Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did far more than those men to open the West to American expansion. In 1804, they were sent by Thomas Jefferson to explore the source of the Missouri River, cross the Rocky Mountains, and find an overland route to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, they were to make note of anything "worthy of notice." They found a lot that was noteworthy: Lewis's journals alone filled a great steamer trunk.

"Great joy in camp," Lewis wrote on November 7. "We are in View of the Ocian, this great Pacific Ocean which we been So long anxious to See." To mark the occasion, Clark carved his initials and the date on a handy pine tree. Now they were moving back and forth across the river mouth, looking for a place high enough above the tideline to spend the winter. Like us, they hadn't booked ahead.

Out here in the wilderness, almost a year's travel from the Thirteen Colonies, the democratic principles of the freshly fledged nation prevailed. By a vote of the entire expedition-including York, Clark's black "manservant," and Sacajawea, the young Shoshone wife of one of the French-Canadian guides-the corps decided to make its winter camp on the south side of the Columbia, where elk were more plentiful, near what is now Astoria, at a place they named Fort Clatsop.

The Corps of Discovery scheme was inspired by Alexander Mackenzie, who trekked across Canada and reached the Pacific Ocean near Bella Coola, in what is now British Columbia, in 1793. Jefferson read Mackenzie's account of his trip avidly, pa.s.sed the book on to Meriwether Lewis, who at the time was his personal secretary, and began planning an American version of it, with Lewis in charge. Mackenzie even carved his name and the date of his arrival-not in a tree, but on a rock. I like the idea that the Lewis and Clark journey, one of the defining myths of American history, had its origins in a Canadian expedition that few in Canada today remember.

Standing on the slippery platform of the Twilight Creek Eagle Sanctuary, at twilight, looking down at the great river where the expedition camped, I understand what it is that has fixed this journey so securely in the American imagination. We have a river, we have a small band of purposeful men floating down it, and we have an ocean. What could be more American than that? It is Apocalypse Now. It is Huckleberry Finn. Clark even had his single-named slave, York, with him. But unlike Huck's companion Jim, York isn't a runaway. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim is the one character for whom freedom meant something tangible; his eventual emanc.i.p.ation elevates the novel to the status of myth.

In the Lewis and Clark story, the loyal and obedient York is not escaping from anything. In fact, he is scarcely visible. He is given no voice other than that of an animal when he is amusing some Indian children and is mentioned barely a dozen times in the three years covered by the narrative, and then only matter-of-factly, as in "set out at 7 o'clock in a Canoo with Cap Lewis my servant and one man . . ."

Because York is denied any role other than that of a slave, the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was essentially a scientific and commercial enterprise, becomes a different kind of epic journey, one that also delineates and defines the American spirit. If Huck and Jim represent the fictional way Americans would like to see themselves-as simple, honest, and freedom-loving adventurers-then Lewis and Clark reveal the true nonfictional nature of their national consciousness: entrepreneurial and freedom-loving, except when it came to Manifest Destiny and slavery-in other words, the rights of others. When the expedition was over, York asked Clark for his freedom. Clark refused.

The setting sun is coming from the west, casting long shadows over the Seal Islands. I realize that this is my first real view of the Columbia River. And that we have come here by land from Canada, after crossing the continent; in a sense, we have combined the journeys of Mackenzie and Lewis and Clark. I look around; there are several sizable trees, dripping with rain but suitable for carving. Unfortunately, I have left my Swiss Army knife at home; I didn't want to worry about it as I crossed the border.

MUTELY we drive through the gathering night toward the end of our second day on the road. The radio is off and Wayne is somewhere in his Lewis and Clark reverie, but even so, the air is filled with sound: tires on asphalt, wipers on gla.s.s, the bellow of a ship's horn on the river below, the wigwag of the railway track we just crossed.

True silence-natural quiet-is a rare thing. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist across the river in Washington State, has spent most of a lifetime searching for places where the sounds of nature might be recorded without man-made interruption. There aren't many left. He's made a few MP3 alb.u.ms of the sounds of silence: "Forest Rain," "Spring Leaves," "Old Growth." I like the idea of listening to a forest growing.

On Earth Day 2005, Hempton decided to defend a bit of wilderness from all human-caused noise intrusion. His "one square inch of silence" is in the Hoh Rain Forest of Olympic National Park, 678 feet above sea level and a two-hour hike in from the nearest trail, the exact location marked by a small red stone placed on top of a moss-covered log at 47 51.959' N, 123 52.221' W. He even convinced airlines to reroute their flight paths around the park.

Hempton defines silence as "the total absence of all sound. But because the whole universe is vibrating, there is no true silence- though silence does exist in the mind as a psychological state, as a concept."

Wayne and I are silent, but it isn't the silence of solitude. Even without speaking, he is part of my mental s.p.a.ce. I wonder what he's thinking, if maybe I should say something funny or smart. What kind of mood is he in? Should I bring up Christmas, how much I miss the kids? Or the novel that I so much want him to read. Maybe I should find something in the brochures to talk about, try to connect us with the river that is slipping by outside.

And what is Wayne thinking? Is he sitting in his silence the same way I sit in mine?

Probably not. Researchers at the University of California recently found that the amygdala, that almond-shaped structure nestled on either side of the brain, behaves differently in men and women at rest. When men are relaxed and quiet, the right amygdala is the more active one, while in women, it's the left. What's really interesting is the region of brain that the amygdala is talking to. In men, it's communicating with the visual cortex and the striatum, which controls vision and motor actions. In women, it's connecting to the insular cortex and the hypothalamus-the interior landscape. I'm thinking about our relationship; Wayne's wondering where he can pull over to pee.

"In human intercourse the tragedy begins not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood," Th.o.r.eau wrote. It's hard to believe he was never married.

After three months working alone on my book, I don't find it easy being trapped in this little Toyota with another person, even one I love more than I ever thought possible. How can I think in this Echo? Wayne won't be quiet for long. He has a penchant for golden oldies: he worked as a DJ in high school and knows all the words to all the songs up to about 1968. He has quite a good tenor, of the Gerry and the Pacemakers variety, so I don't mind sitting through endless verses of "The Sound of Silence," "Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa," and "When I'm Sixty-Four." But driving through this blackness, I long for the Blues. Maybe a little Dr. John crooning "Such a Night," or Sippie Wallace doing "Suitcase Blues," Sister Rosetta Tharpe belting out "Didn't It Rain," or B.B. King. I can almost hear him . . . Gonna roam this mean ol' highway until the break of day.

It's not really a mean ol' highway. In fact, there's something about driving through the gathering nightfall in the rain that feels almost cozy. Not fearsome or alien, though I can see how some might see it that way. The damp darkness outside our windows is impenetrable; the headlights obliterate the landscape, force our eyes down wavering tunnels spiked with glinting needles of rain. There's a rhythm to the slap of the wipers that lets me sink into myself, just as Wayne has sunk into some contemplative place of his own. We are making this journey together, but separately, too.

WE'VE been vagabonding in America, meandering the day away, eating in the car, drinking water from our metal bottles. We're more than ready for dinner. We arrive in Astoria just as the street lights are making pale, yellow smudges in the misty rain, but even so the streets look dark and deserted. Few of the storefronts are lit up, and our hopes of finding a quiet, excellent restaurant fade.

The main thoroughfare, Commercial Street, which we're on, is a miracle of Victorian bakeshops, olde innes, souvenir and gifte shoppes, and the like. The Liberty Theater, built in 1925 and recently featured on HGTV's Restore America television series as one of its twelve American Treasures, appears to be dark tonight, and is likely to stay dark until spring. Ah, well. According to the Visitors Guide, the town fairly hums with life in the summer: visitors flock to the Fort Clatsop National Memorial, and on the waterfront, a "beautifully refurbished" 1913 trolley car runs between the port and the East Mooring Basin. But it's winter, and the town seems moribund. We drive through the business section without stopping and soon come to a huge, steel-girdered bridge that soars upward and off over the Columbia River, somewhere to our right. Almost directly under it, jutting out into the river, is the Cannery Pier Hotel.

The building was built as a fish cannery back when salmon runs in the Columbia River were the biggest on the coast and Astoria was the second-largest city in Oregon, after Portland. Most of the fish plants shut down in the 1940s. Although this building has been fully restored and turned into a boutique hotel, the area around it still looks fairly desolate in the dark. To get to the parking lot, we have to ease the Echo over a dilapidated dock that must still be on the town's to-be-improved list.

The hotel looks like a Mississippi riverboat moored to the dock, flags flying, lights ablaze, ready to cast off and float off down the Columbia. Merilyn goes in to negotiate a room while I sit in the car, twirling the radio dial to find a baseball game. Instead I get Miles Davis, so I turn off the wipers and let his smooth, muted trumpet ease the rivulets of rainwater down the windshield. When he was on the road, Davis used to send his wife, who was white, into hotels to secure them a room, figuring she wouldn't be turned away and might even get them a deal. I'm doing the same thing. The Cannery Pier looks expensive, and after our small flurry of spending in Seattle, Merilyn and I have decided on a limit of $100 a night for accommodation and another $100 a day for meals, gas, and various other necessities, such as books and wine. It's an arbitrary figure, but this is our first night and we think we should be setting ourselves a good example.

Merilyn comes back to the car smiling. "The woman at the desk was reading a book," she says.

I take that as a good sign. "What was the book?" I ask.

"I couldn't see the cover," she says. "She told me the rooms were $160. I told her we didn't want to pay more than $120, and she said, 'I can do that.'"

A hundred and twenty is more than a hundred, but maybe we can skip a meal tomorrow, or a quarter of a meal over the next four days. Instead of steak, fries, salad, and a gla.s.s of wine, I'll just have the steak, fries, and wine. A budget is a budget.

The foyer is a marvel of modern architecture, all plate gla.s.s and weirdly angled Douglas-fir beams bolted to gleaming hardwood floors.

I admire the view over the river, with the bridge sweeping overhead like an inspired brush stroke. Cla.s.sical music plays softly from speakers hidden behind fabric wall hangings. The night clerk has gone back to reading in a soft leather chair by the window. A thick paperback with a glossy cover, but at least it's a book. She gets up and pours us each a gla.s.s of wine, "complimentary to our guests," she says. Merilyn doesn't drink, so I take hers, too, as we climb the carpeted stairs to our room.

It is s.p.a.cious, with, as advertised, a fireplace, a narrow balcony overlooking the river, a claw-footed tub with a view, and, yes, Terry Robes hanging in the closet.

"It's gorgeous," Merilyn says, running the bath. I find a corkscrew on the side table and agree.

In the morning, we go downstairs for our free continental breakfast and carry it up on a tray to our room. We're not being anti-social; there are no other guests in the hotel. From our balcony, we watch a huge grey freighter slip upriver past the hotel, inches, it seems, from our wrought-iron railing, so close we can see sailors through the portholes having their bacon and eggs and hash browns. American coots and western grebes paddle about in the ship's wake. On an adjacent, equally dilapidated pier, a lone fir grows improbably from a pile of rotting boards. It looks like a Christmas tree. We note with approval that no one has crawled out onto the pier to festoon the tree with coloured lights and tinsel or heap fake Christmas presents around its base. Maybe I could like it here, after all.

3 / HIGHWAY 101.

MY first impression of Oregon is that we have entered a no-nonsense state. Gone are Washington's chatty road signs: Watch for Falling Rocks, Slippery When Wet. The yellow diamonds now bark single words. Rocks. Slides. Ice.

I'm inclined to pay attention. Not much more than a week ago, safe in my Vancouver room, I anxiously followed the fate of the Kim family. James and Kati Kim and their two young daughters, Penelope, four, and Sabine, seven months, had spent Thanksgiving in Seattle, then continued on the I-5 to visit friends in Portland. On their way home, they decided to cross the coastal mountains near Grant's Pa.s.s in the southwestern corner of Oregon and spend the night at Gold Beach, before continuing south the next day to San Francisco.

When they turned their silver Saab station wagon off the I-5 onto what looked like a decent highway, early snows had already softened the landscape and whitened the road, so they were well lost by the time they realized they must have taken a wrong turn onto one of the myriad logging trails that meander through those rugged hills. They hadn't noticed the sign in the corner of the map: Not All Roads Advisable. Check Weather Conditions.

No one knew their itinerary. Days went by before friends and coworkers reported them missing. A full week after they'd run their gas tank dry to keep warm, the search began for the family. It wasn't long before a local pilot found Kati waving an umbrella as she ran up and down a road beside a giant SOS stamped in the snow. The mother and daughters were hungry and cold but otherwise fine. On Sat.u.r.day morning, James Kim had struck off on his own to find help. The Kims had no GPS, but they calculated from their map that they were only four miles from the nearest settlement. He left at daybreak, promising to turn back before sunset if he found nothing. He hiked down the road a bit, then decided to take a shortcut down the drainage bed of Big Windy Creek, past old-growth trees towering two hundred feet and more, over boulders and fallen logs, through virgin wilderness it's relatively safe to say no human had ever walked before.

Despite the freezing temperatures, he gradually stripped off his light jacket, a grey sweatshirt, a red T-shirt, a wool sock, leaving them as markers for anyone who might follow. The searchers tracking him found the clothes and indentations in the snow where he might have slept. On Tuesday, they figured he was still alive. On Wednesday, December 6, eleven days after the family had been stranded in the snow, James's body was found in the icy waters of Big Windy Creek. He had died of hypothermia after walking more than sixteen miles. The map was wrong. The nearest town was thirty-three miles away.

Wayne and I are sitting in the car, munching on a late breakfast of smoked chinook we bought at a fish shop in Astoria, trying to decide where to go next.

We have turned south onto Route 101, the most westerly highway on the continental USA, and are in a little park overlooking the Pacific, our first glimpse of ocean. We pore over the map. A budding oenophile, Wayne is keen to visit the Willamette Valley. We'd both like to see Portland, which, though it is a city (a category we've renounced for this trip), claims the distinction of being the greenest in the United States.

"We could take 26 up to Portland," he says, "go through the Willamette, then back on the I-5 and cross over to the coast south of Eugene." His finger is tracing circles around Redwood National Park.

The weather is lowering and there are breakers on the beach.

"Do you ever think about what we'd do if we got lost?" I ask. "Would we both stay with the car or would one of us try to find a way out?" It's like that lifeboat question: who do you throw overboard first?

Wayne sidesteps neatly. "We're not going to get lost," he says.

I haven't told him about the Kims.

"But if we do," I insist. I don't use the word "lost" lightly. I'm a mother; in the years after the divorce when my sons and I would cycle around the city we'd moved to, we often found ourselves in unfamiliar territory. "We're not lost," I'd laugh, to ease their minds and my own. "We just don't know exactly where we are."

"If we get lost, we'll call somebody," Wayne says, tapping the cellphone.

It was the cellphone that located the Kims in the end. Most of the area they were travelling through was out of range of a communications tower, but when a cellphone that's turned on goes in and out of a service area, it "pings," leaving an automatic signature at the tower. By combing the records of the towers the Kims might have pa.s.sed, two dogged engineers found a ping, and by determining the roads within line of sight of that tower, the search was narrowed to Bear Camp Road, where Kati and the girls were found.

Our cellphone is never on. No one has the number. We use it only to call out, so why drain the charge by keeping it powered? We've told our family and friends we're taking the long way home. We'll be back when we're back. We could be stranded on some s...o...b..und road for a month, maybe more, before anyone would think of looking for us.

"Let's stay on the coast road," I say to Wayne, closing the map. "We can loop up to the Willamette and back, then carry on to California. I want to see Gold Beach."

"Great," says Wayne. "And I'd like to see some wine."