I have driven so often across Oregon’s midsection that I feel I know its anatomy in something like the way a thoracic surgeon is familiar with the places she plumbs.

My knowledge is much less technical, of course.

And not so, well, messy.

I look at verdant valleys and fine old farmhouses and the great volcanoes that arise from our planet’s sometimes tumultuous episodes of internal distress.

Confronted with the topography that a surgeon deals with, I would be helpless to tell a pancreas from a gallbladder.

And probably a trifle queasy besides.

I drove between Baker City and the central Willamette Valley a few dozen times while attending the University of Oregon in Eugene from 1988-92.

The most direct route — but not the one, alas, with the most generous speed limits — is via Highways 7, 26 and 126 through John Day, Prineville, Redmond and Sisters. The only difference in that itinerary, when my destination was not Eugene but my hometown of Stayton, or Salem, where my parents moved in 1992, started at Santiam Junction, in the Cascades just west of Santiam Pass. There I would stay straight, on Highway 22 down the North Santiam River, rather than veer south on Highway 126, which follows the McKenzie River to Eugene.

After I graduated I made that journey — what I’ve always called “through the middle of the state” — much less often. Usually when I visited my parents in Salem I would take interstates 84, 205 and 5. The distance is about equivalent but the freeways, with their higher speed limits and scarcity of curves, cut an hour or so from the trip.

(This does not, of course, take into account traffic. Gridlock on I-205, the ring road on the east side of Portland, can erase the time advantage. And often does.)

But in 2016 my parents moved to Mill City, in the Cascade foothills about 30 miles east of Salem. The old route is shorter, and depending on traffic and weather the drive can take a bit less time than the freeway option.

Over the past eight years, then, I have followed the once-familiar highways more frequently than any time since college.

But never so often as in the past month or so.

My daughter, Olivia, is a senior on the Baker volleyball team. The Bulldogs’ schedule included tournaments in Bend, North Marion and Sheridan in a six-week stretch starting in late August.

I have in general enjoyed becoming reacquainted with this route. I think it’s a considerably more compelling drive than the freeway.

(Although I appreciate interstates for the engineering marvels that they are, and for their convenience.)

Landmarks that had dissipated from my memory have refreshed themselves.

I find that I anticipate certain places, or sections of road, as I did when I was an undergraduate.

I mumble to myself the names of side roads and then wait, with minor trepidation, to see whether I remembered correctly.

(Gable Creek Road, which branches off Highway 26 several miles west of Mitchell, seems to confuse me more than any other.)

Oregon is unusually rich in scenery, to be sure. But it seems to me that this driving route is more varied than most. Among the state’s major landscapes only the coast is missing.

(And the beach is only an hour farther, if you’d like to get sand in your toes and salty air in your nose.)

The drive careens from mountain ranges — the Blues, the Ochocos, the Cascades — to major river valleys, among them the Powder, Burnt, John Day, Deschutes and North Santiam.

The highways pass through forests of ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir and western juniper.

Sagebrush steppe swaps places with irrigated pastures, where cattle graze and coyotes and hawks hunt.

The journey can be measured in other ways.

I gauge my progress, often as not, by the series of passes — Larch, Tipton and Dixie in the Blues, Keyes Creek in the arid mountains east of Mitchell, Ochoco in its namesake range, and finally Santiam, one of the main breaches in the Cascades.

A handful of vistas thrill me anew with each trip. These remain immune to one of the unfortunate effects of familiarity, which is to transform the magnificent to the banal.

A small sample:

• When the north side of Strawberry Mountain fills the horizon as Highway 26 bends south just below Dixie Summit. Strawberry is not, to my eyes, a spectacular peak, lacking dramatic precipices and pinnacles. But few Oregon mountains dominate their surroundings as Strawberry does.

• The immediate shift from the broad valley of the John Day, which Highway 26 traverses for 50 miles, to the confined basalt walls of Picture Gorge west of Dayville.

• A pair of Black Buttes. These are quite different in appearance, but both are visible for long stretches, and both have a highway running along their ramparts.

One is several miles west of Mitchell, and I always anticipate the first view from Keyes Creek Summit on Highway 26. The other is along Highway 20/126 west of Sisters.

• The descent of Hogg Rock, just west of Santiam Pass, where Highway 20/22 heads straight at the impossibly craggy remnants of an ancient volcano called Three Fingered Jack.

• The short section of Highway 22 just south of Marion Forks where the west face of Mount Jefferson, Oregon’s second-tallest peak, suddenly appears, towering more than 8,000 feet above the road. The sight is tantalizing in its brevity.

The manmade sights enliven the journey as much as the natural ones.

My eyes always linger a trifle longer on, to name just a few, an old farmhouse beside Highway 7 near Austin, the Skyhook Motel perched on its narrow ledge above Highway 26 in Mitchell, a weeping willow, on the south side of the same highway just below Ochoco Reservoir, that surely casts a wider patch of shade than almost any other single tree in the state.

All long drives, no matter how compelling the scenery, tend to devolve at some point into a slog.

Sometimes the trigger is simple fatigue.

Or an incipient headache.

Or a bladder that insists on a rest stop.

But the unpleasant interlude always seems to pass.

And there’s always something interesting to see just beyond the next curve or over the next rise.