Sunday, February 27, 2011

Snow People



Above Oakridge to the east, Highway 58 goes where the snow is eight feet deep and people play.  Chains have been required, and putting them on is my least favorite chore.  But after two days of sun, the restriction lifted, and with it my spirit.  We headed up there—me, my little pickup, and my spirit.  At the top of this part of the world, people were sliding on skis, on snowboards, on inner tubes, while some very pious ones observed.  But none, to my knowledge, brought antique wooden Nordic skis from Norway and worked them in fresh snow far from the ticket-paying crowd—none but me.  I brag about my skis because if you see me ski, there’s not much style to brag about. 





eagle
rendered in snow
tree sculptor














fetus
born too soon
world not ready















green skirt
white sweater and shawl
Mosque of Snow Mountain 


















white skirt
thin arms and needle hair
seamstress

















sculptured glass
heads in prayer
















hat on a cat’s tin roof












you can ask
I will tell
yes I did













I’m not so pleased
by your coming here
explain yourself

















virgin Mary
had a baby boy
folks keep seeing her

Joseph kneels
beside her
believing










 

I fall down on my knees
with my face to the rising sun
O Lord, have mercy on me.
        folk song










 


together in paradise
aghast, ashamed
heads bowed


 
Some of you can do better writing on these pictures.  To me they are just too revealing, so I blurt it out.  There is still time to write haiga for the collection which I will post in a few days.


Saturday, February 26, 2011

Logging Revisited





bird in tree
what kind is he
I do not know
I do not care
bird in tree’s ok by me

read on, I get sillier . . . . . .












scoop in the years
before they reach
the icy edge














old leaves released from snow
their patterns sharp
green and young—alive  














I ask the skeptic
what does it take
to make a rock float?

















not my fault
chainsaw error













I see logs traveling on I-5, and lumber too, but not a sign of either in Oakridge.  Its two big sawmills have been hauled away.  I had to go west to find logging.  So I drove to Eugene in the broad Willamette Valley, far from Willamette National Forest.  


Over two decades, restrictions of logging on federal land have pushed Oregon's loggers from national forests onto private lands in the Coast Range.  I continued west into the mountains where logging trucks go empty and return loaded.  I entered the checkerboard pattern of clearcuts in various stages of maturity.


Back in my college days at Berkeley, the doctrine of Sustained Yield would be accomplished in the centuries ahead, and the method of choice for the wet forests of western Oregon was clearcutting.  You either believed in Sustained Yield or you were either a theorist or an environmentalist—both shunned.  And like most doctrines held by large numbers of acadameans, it made a lot of sense.


Instead of trying to remove selected trees from a forest, you simply cut all of them.  It followed the notion that in nature before logging, fires would periodically kill all the trees, then they would grow back.  If we control fire, the theory went, and clearcut the trees instead, then the pattern of nature will be maintained, and we get great quantities of lumber, which previously went up in smoke.


The spotted owl symbolizes the end of a doctrine.  Today, forestry literature fills with complexities of ecosystems wherein clearcutting remains an option with limited application.  To be a theorist or environmentalist and still maintain status as a forester is entirely possible today.


I drove home from the logging woods, drove in the dark and cold following the big storm of Thursday.  Salt and sand from safety-minded government flew up and coated my windshield, weakening vision.  Distinctions between trees and road and sky disintegrated into black.  The ride was a nervous one as thawed snow and ice refroze on the road as night temperature fell.  








Today I am not driving.  Rebecca was not so bubbly at the Trailhead Café, not joking with the men.  PMS, they suppose.  Presumptuous of me to judge, you say.  Yes, I judge too quickly.  Del says it takes patience; twenty years he spent to map the Free Emigrant Trail.  “I want to organize all this stuff before I leave this world,” he says.  But judging from the mess it’s in, and the age he is, I have doubts.

 Rebecca and Del might take a tip from Katrina, the waitress in International Falls, who coopted the old men at her counter.  With just a few compliments and suggestions, she had them making coffee for her and clearing tables.  And when they went out the door she said, “Love ya.”









When I get old, I intend to sit by the fire picking out favorite passages from writings of wanderers—missives from the end of some road, or a cave on a snowed-in pass, or a weeping willow in tornado alley.  I will comment as if I were there, because in most cases I have been there in some real way.  And this brings me to my favorite lines in “Riding Chili.”

“It’s raining,” I yell up to him.  “May I use your tree for a while.”  [this after he escaped from a thunderstorm to take refuge under a weeping willow in a farmyard.]
He lifts a steamy mug to his lips.  He takes a sip, looks me over, smiles.  “Why don’t you roll that thing under that carport there, and come in for a cup of coffee?”

What sort of inane remark is that, Ross!?  Do you think this farmer does not know it’s raining?  But I remember Kansas one day when lightning struck close and hail began.  I was on a bicycle in open flatland, sticking up like a lightning rod, and there by the road was a barn and a farmer in its doorway.  I rode in that barn and said almost the same thing.  These are words of one who has walked wet into a café, and snowy white into a motel lobby, and done it enough times that meek humility has become natural.  Smart often turns to smart-ass, and I wanted shelter, not recognition for intelligence.  These words are the sign of a lone traveler of humble means.

We Oregonians, survivors of our coldest storm this winter, have sent you Southern Californians our white fluff, which has turned to tears for you, and rivulets of tears as they gather babbling symphonies of some lost love.  For this we apologize, but only to the extent that your tears have not led to benefit for us all.  Today, as the elements hole me up in a warm room where listening heals, I have heard several such benefits including a poem by Russell Salamon.

Wisdom Sonata 61

I listen to rain and feel the world wars,
the used tears falling distilled in clouds.
Fifty million souls who have lost bodies
and even now thousands fall in cold
rivulets into the street--symphonies
stain their eyes as they weep. Love
not given, not stretched in tapestry
of light and small fingers on lips.

Silence inhabits trees and the wind
shakes it out; stained in silence we
listen for the heat of minds, snow
falls on mountains and rain down
near the sea, at least elements hold
us warm in houses--listening heals.

A touch springs a river into the room.
You sit near me with jokes in hands:
frogs, no it's fleas. Keep those things
off of me I am in a brittle mood--rain
is falling out of a dark time at edges
of darkness, in six seconds cities fall.

Pick up instruments and begin to play
buds to trees, kisses to lips, coming
with eyes of raindrops, seeing without
planets the always standing sunlight.
 

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Big Storm

I see you are a logger
And not a common bum
For no one but a logger
Stirs coffee with his thumb

It froze clear down to China
It froze the stars above
At a thousand degrees below zero
It froze my logger love

We sang these old timber songs back at Berkeley—forestry undergrads, filled with logging romance, believing we were stronger and smarter than those literature ninnies dabbling in “fuzzy studies.”  We could handle cold, we said, and would stand out there as though we had lived and worked and logged in wet so long that we were no longer capable of distinguishing it from dry.  I’m a sissy today by comparison.




A cold dry snow fell in the night, and its big white cotton balls were still falling this morning.  I said hello to Sharon in Mannings Café.  “I’m glad it’s not that wet sloppy stuff of last Monday,” she says.  I soon learn that Interstate Five is closed and even Eugene has several inches, their first snow of this winter.  West of Eugene, the road is slippery, says a trucker who came through there earlier.  “It’s okay if the power stays on,” Sharon says, and I agree since my heater is electric.  I am understanding this unusual place a little more each day.  






The art of living in a small town depends so much on its geography and weather that I think the human species adjusts to it.  I think it happens by movement of the fittest to places where they fit.  I am fascinated with how different the long-lasting residents are from place to place.  They come and stay, rather than moving on, like species as different from each other as polar bears and rattle snakes.  They settle in where they are happiest.





As I spend time in different places, I find levels of understanding, depending on my length of stay.  I have been here just over a week and already feel closer than a visitor.  Upon arrival I’m usually enamored with the peculiar differences a place offers from what I know.  Here in Oakridge, it was the mountains with their mossy depths and people trying to live without their beloved logging woods and sawmills.  As time passes, both the place and my part in it wax gradually ordinary.  I notice more things that bother me.  As I get beyond polite niceties between visitor and locals, get deeper into people, geography, and culture, the place and I gain a kind of symbiosis, the way moss becomes at home on a tree.  I talk to a artist who wants to piggyback nature walks onto the mountain biking fad, and a businessman who wants to turn the old town, which is off the main highway, into a cleverly renovated attraction.


I will never be part of a tree, but the tree can accept me.  I can learn to be happy with that.  This one-month stay in Oakridge might be long enough to find a small foothold in the vanilla-sweet bark of a douglas fir.  Already I taste its goodness and feel like I owe some expression of understanding to this place.



Ross once helped to push an old single-propeller two-seater out of a shack and onto a strip of grass called a runway.  He got in the back seat and felt some particular differences between this new place and what he knew.  The pilot grabbed the propeller and pulled it downward into a spin.  The engine sputtered and started; the propeller disappeared.  The rest of the story begins on page 68 of “Riding Chili.”  He never stayed long enough to be more than a visitor, and maybe doesn’t want to.  Some places simply are not worth it.  

 

Oakridge, on the other hand is fascinating.  I am happy to have come here and hope the final three weeks will link into me as International Falls did, and Death Valley.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Mill Pond

 



An old mill pond, no longer floating logs



















A snowy day in Oakridge













This too is the old mill pond, with a twist
















Yesterday, I posted pictures of hot water flowing from a hillside near Salt Creek.  The water is too hot to touch for more than a moment, but it mixes with near-freezing creek water in pools near the shore.  And there I soaked my feet after a snowy slog.  



Near the pools stand river-rocks placed by the forces of nature.  Many times, along creeks and rivers, I have seen a rock resting on another and thought it not unusual.  A few times I’ve seen rocks stacked three high and figured it a low-probability result of natural processes where billions of chances make even improbably outcomes likely.  The probability of the rock stack you see here is so low that it’s easy to say it could not happen naturally.  Each rock has at least three points of contact with the rock below it, and all but the top rock transfer thrust from above vertically into the rock below.  I tried doing it and never got more than three rocks high.  Forces of nature more amazing than mine have operated here and their work has stood against wind and rain and snow for many days judging from the evidence of humans having been here. 

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A Stormy Day





Too cold to bicycle
too wet to hike
I’m down to the car










The blackberries are nearly gone since logging ceased in these hills, huckleberries too.  That’s what the old men were saying over coffee this morning, spreading homemade marionberry jam on toast from homemade bread.  Deer are fewer and harder to reach since they gated off most of the forest roads to keep us out, even took a dozer and scarified the logging roads so nobody can use them.  They spent tax dollars to get rid of roads that could be used to build this crippled economy—costing us money to keep us from earning money.  Rainy day talk in Mannings Café.

 
The subject changes: A limb fell on her riser that brings power into her house,  It broke the weatherhead, easy to fix.  So she paid me fifty dollars and I went to work.  But the county man came by and asked if I had a permit.  So I told her she needs one, and she went and paid seventy-five dollars for it.  The county man came back and said that whenever you get a permit it means everything has to be brought up to code.  He said the ground needs to tie to a water pipe, not just that rod driven into the ground eight feet.  That cost her another two hundred.  A fifty dollar repair cost four hundred when it was all done.  Permits needed for any little thing.  They want to stop all rural development—that’s the real reason for all the d__  permits.


The ratio of churches to bars says a lot about the nature of a small town; I am not the first to say it.  In Oakridge there are six churches and two bars by my count, ratio 3.0.  In many towns I’ve visited on bicycle, the ratio is about 0.3.  But the strangest thing is that the churches of Oakridge do not take credit a huge white cross on a hill that can be seen from all over town.  An old preacher built it in his yard, they say, and nobody knows much about him.  In the first picture, my camera is pointed to where they said the cross is, but it hides up there in the clouds.  The second picture shows it in a rare afternoon clearing.  The third picture is at night with lights on it like they are every night.

 x











oppressed and neglected
take to the street
in protest  














North fork
of Middle Fork
of Willamette River 

too many rivers
too few names
poet wanted 








nameless creek
too small to mention
poet wanted 











 


The Office Covered Bridge in Westfir is the longest covered bridge in Oregon—180 feet.


strong enough for log trucks
if any came here
anymore 













Hot water seeps from a rock beside Salt Creek