A Bird and I

After two mornings in Oakridge, I have visited all the cafes except the Mazatlan, which opens later.  Yesterday I tried the Trailhead  and Mcgillicuddys, each run by a woman working alone, except that two women sometimes work at Mcgillicuddys.  This morning, I shuffled through last night’s snow to the counter of Mannings Café, where the owner, Helene Coulter, served coffee and poached eggs between washing dishes and frying eggs.  She is also the maker of homemade bread and pies.




















Mannings Cafe

The once thriving Village Café and Sportsman Restaurant have gone out of business.  A&W Restaurant, McDonalds, Dairy Queen, and Subway have come.  Is this the way a town carries on after its men lose their jobs?  Do women run themselves ragged, while emasculated men hang around saying they’re looking for work?  And when the women can’t make ends meet for their children and their husbands, do the corporate chains come in and replace them?  Is this a parody of second-growth sitka spruce and douglas fir coming in to replace the oldgrowth that survived here for millennia until logged away?  It’s too quick a judgment.  I have much more to learn.

The bird and I will continue our delve into the once deep woods where old trees reached fifteen feet in diameter and rose three hundred feet high, into the damp mossy woods where men came and worked in some great clanging organism of progress.  And through it all, fog was and is on the land and ravels down from the needles and up through the branches.  It creeps down the river and winds around the base of my motel room.


(close-up of moss on a tree)

Some of you remember that while I was in International Falls, Minnesota, I could not find a snowman, so dry was the snow that it would not roll into balls.  Not so here, where the grandson of a neighbor to the motel rolled and sculpted these beauties.

In all, my impressions so far in Oakridge could not be better expressed than by Russell Salamon who wrote these words yesterday after seeing my pictures and blog post.

Wisdom Sonata 59

Not influenced by space, snow falls white

flecks, slush on the path, mute white trees.

Pure knowing, not time, falls as presence--

silence between snow flakes.

Not touched by energy, before invented

currents of time rivers, knowing which kind

of infinity to breathe. No lungs yet invented,

eyes breathe black breath, down the vortex

of spaces shrinking. What to put down as true?

Only the escape into you: with solid forests

arms and legs and slanted languages of

light, springtime grasses--flowers animals--

back through breathing eyes to winds

seeing this wash of sunlight on raindrops.

We are the visible depths of real spaces,

the faith seeing silence--the all knowing

pursuing the unknown.




The main street of Oakridge, Highway 58, in the center of a spread-out town