The Roquefort Files

We followed the 101 down the Oregon coast for a hundred miles before turning east towards Roseburg. Ash drove, and I was left to take the odd photograph, man the iPod and take in the scenery. The view from the passenger seat was dramatic: the sky was still patchily grey, with lazy, white capped waves coming in off the Pacific. The upper branches of the trees lining the road formed a continuous, wind-blown carpet of green except where roads and residential lots were cut into it like wounds, exposing leafless, stubby branches under the verdant canopy. We skirted lakes and bays and crossed bridges and viaducts as the road snaked along the coastline.

The weather brightened and the forest closed in around us as we turned inland, following minor roads back towards the I-5. The landscape eventually opened up, the trees retreating up the valley slopes to reveal yet more epic scenery. So unremittingly spectacular was the view, in fact, that we eventually stopped caring about it. You’ve seen one sweeping plain bordered by majestic mountain peaks and dotted with regal stallions grazing peacefully in the afternoon sun, and you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all.

In amongst all the pastoral beauty, we came across a string of industrial emplacements dotting the landscape. I don’t know what they all were, exactly — generic factories or mills of some sort, I supposed — but they were shocking in their abruptness and incongruity. They were all alike, with big piles of shale, gravel, logs or whatever other raw material they happened to process piled up next to an array of rust-coloured buildings emitting smoke or steam. The surrounding land would be exposed, hard packed earth scoured clean of plantlife and enclosed by a chain link fence. The car park would inevitably be occupied exclusively by full-size pickups. Just as soon as we’d caught sight of one of these blots on the landscape it would be hidden again by a bank of trees, and we’d settle back into the beautiful monotony of pristine meadows and picturesque vales.

We spent a quiet night in Grants Pass, staying at a Knights Inn motel. It was short on both luxury and punctuation, but then the former was a necessary side-effect of our (lack of) budgeting and the latter is apparently endemic to the region. Most disappointingly, the decidedly literal approach to exterior decorating displayed by some of the original members of the Knights Inn chain was absent. Appropriating some chemically-enhanced super-muffins from the breakfast bar in the reception the next morning, we headed towards our first honest-to-God tourist trap destination: the Oregon Vortex.

Excuse me while I compose myself for a hopefully deadpan explanation of what, exactly, the Oregon Vortex is.

Ah, fuck it. I can’t.

The Oregon Vortex is an ingenious roadside attraction trading off a combination of optical illusions, bad science, apocryphal legends and sheer luck. Sometime in the 1890s, near the town of Gold Hill, a wooden cabin owned by a gold mining company was washed down the side of a hill by a mudslide and smacked into a large tree near the bottom. The cabin was left crumpled and bent out of shape but otherwise intact. Separately, the hill and its environs were reputedly avoided by the local Native Americans, who called it the ‘forbidden ground’.

Then, in the 1920s, a ‘physicist’ (just to warn you, the inverted commas are going to fly thick and fast in this paragraph) named John Litster turned up. Litster noticed that the odd perspectives and background angles of the twisted ‘mystery house’ gave rise to optical illusions such as people within the house changing height or leaning at a slight angle when they should by rights have been standing straight up. By happy coincidence, he then happened to ‘discover’ a hitherto-unknown phenomenon he called the ‘vortex’, a spherical region of space centred on the house whose radius roughly corresponded to the ancient ‘forbidden ground’. Its effects were, he said, to refract light within the sphere so that the optical illusions in and around the house’s weird angles were not a simple result of forced perspective but instead an awesome disruption of the Earth’s magnetic field.

A canny Scot, Litster then opened the site for public viewing in 1930. For a small fee, of course.

If there was ever a canonical American Roadside Attraction, the Oregon Vortex is it.

The road from Grants Pass to the vortex (God, I feel daft typing that in over and over again) took us back into the forest, and if Newport had been Steven King territory then this neck of the woods was bordering on Deliverance. The trees closed in over us and the road seemed to narrow as we drove onwards. The few houses we passed were trailer-tastic, accessorised with shuttered windows and satellite dishes, their yards littered with broken down farming machinery.

We reached our destination just as paranoia was setting in, paid our $9.50 and joined the tour. There was no self-guided option; the effects of the vortex were clearly so subtle as to have to be explained rather than just being self-evident. Anyway, our teenage guide took us through the tour with a great deal of enthusiasm, if not particularly persuasively (“Can you see that she’s shorter now? No? Anyone?”), and I did my best to bite my sceptical tongue. I will admit to being a little disorientated within the house itself, but then that’s because it fell down the side of the mountain during a mudslide, hit a tree and came to rest a crumpled mess with its floor at a 30° angle. I’m fairly sure space-time was not being refracted through an anomalous bubble of inexplicable magnetic interference. But then hey, I’m just a physics graduate.

Maybe I’m a sucker for these little enclaves of credulity and wonder, but I did kind of enjoy it, as did Ash, and in a certain American Gods way, the Oregon Vortex is really the ideal tourist attraction.

We got back into the penalty box and headed south: next stop California!