Merritt announced in May that he was becoming "a summer systems guy." He said this with the energy of someone who had just discovered a personality and was immediately over-committing to it. He bought a small notebook. He started saying things like "friction points" and "flow state" and "I've been thinking about this roundabout a lot." There is no roundabout yet. That is important to understand going in.
The roundabout is planned. It's a real thing — Port infrastructure, 2nd Street and Riverside Drive, final design expected by December. Merritt found this information at some point and treated it like insider knowledge, like he'd cracked a municipal code that no one else had bothered to read. "They're thinking about traffic differently here," he told me on the drive down from Portland. "I'm thinking about traffic differently too." I turned up the radio.
His system, as explained to me while I was trying to eat a breakfast sandwich, was as follows: bottle-flip probability (I don't know either), sun angle as a proxy for pedestrian crowding patterns, and what he called "roundabout psychology," which applied the behavioral logic of a roundabout to a street that is currently a regular intersection. He had a diagram. He had drawn it in the car. It had arrows.
We arrived at Hood River around ten. It was 58 degrees and overcast, the Gorge doing that thing where it feels like the weather is being decided in real time, like somewhere upstream someone is still filling out the form. Merritt looked at the waterfront, looked at his notebook, looked at the sky, and announced the sun angle was "suboptimal but workable."
By 11:15 he had rerouted us twice based on "projected crowd vectors," which appeared to mean he kept walking toward whichever street looked emptier and then acting surprised when it didn't go anywhere useful. We passed the same mural of a windsurfer three times. The third time, I stopped and looked at it for a while because at least it knew where it was.
By noon, we were three blocks from where we meant to be, standing next to a cargo van while Merritt consulted a photograph he had taken of his own diagram, because he'd lost the original page. "The bottle-flip metric is off," he said, in the tone of a man who has been failed by his instruments. "I think I calculated for a lighter crowd." There was, in fact, a moderate crowd. It was a Saturday. In summer. In Hood River. On a waterfront.
I asked him where we were trying to go. He said "the marina area, generally." I pointed. It was visible from where we were standing. He looked at it. He looked at me. He looked at his notebook. "There might have been some overcommunication on the route," he said, which is a sentence I am going to be turning over for years.
What I will say — and I mean this — is that he was delightful about it. He did not double down in a defensive way. He kind of laughed at himself, but in the specific way boys do where they're also already quietly revising the system for next time. By the time we actually reached the waterfront, the clouds had cleared and the Gorge had gone full Gorge, all wind and light and that particular June brightness that makes you feel like you've earned something. He stood there with his little notebook and the breeze was doing something dramatic to his hair and he said, "Okay. I see some adjustments."
He's already talking about the Gorge Games.
I made him put the notebook in his bag.
He has started referring to the notebook as a "beta version," which is new.