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.