Through the Eyes of a Child

      I can't say that Christmas is always all about children, because I have had many Christmases without children that were as good as any other, but the best thing about Christmas for me this year was certainly the children: my granddaughter and her cousin, ten and eleven years old, respectively, two little girls just on the brink of adolescence and full of the imaginative play that makes childhood – and Christmas – so magical.

     I love to witness that creative play, but to participate in it is to have the privilege of looking more deeply again into the magic world of childhood. I played with the children this Christmas as an adult, not as a child, but this glimpse of the world through a child's eyes is the most wonderful thing children give us.

      The first enchantment from the children was the "mini bookstore" they created by standing a refrigerator box on its end and cutting in it a window and a door, outfitting it with a shelf in the back for books and a counter in front for customers, and opening for business. Buyers first had to earn "book bucks" and coupons to get money to buy books. I swept fallen needles from under the Christmas tree and straightened up the shoes people had left by the door as they came in, for which I earned enough book bucks to buy two books. The store was a confusing blend of a library and a bookstore because I was told I would have to bring the books back in 48 hours, even though I had paid for them with book bucks. I tried to bargain for more time, but the proprietors were firm. I did manage to read both books – Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, about the Lost Boys of Sudan, and A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness, about a boy dealing with his mother's cancer – within the allotted time. (If the girls were allowing me a glimpse of the creative play of children, I hope that both my quick reading and my enthusiasm for these books was a glimpse for them into the long-lasting pleasures of good reading in adulthood.)

      Sometimes the frenzy of opening Christmas presents can taint the magic of Christmas with children, so we, in this family paced the excitement more slowly. We each opened one present on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day we had breakfast first, then opened presents at a leisurely pace. My granddaughter had made a candle for me and also gave me a large alder leaf she had picked to add to the 75 leaves I am collecting for one of the items on my 75x75 project (see thingstodoinmy75thyear. blogpsot.com.) Her gifts reminding me of the homemade gifts I used to give my family while I was growing up.

      During the days before and after Christmas presents, we played games, mostly card games – blackjack, Sushi Go, slapjack. Snow added its own magic to the holiday. Christmas afternoon, my granddaughter, my son, and I walked into the street to throw a football around in the snow. The next day the two girls and I played hide-and-seek in the house for hours.

      I am no longer a child and don't want to be a child again, but I feel privileged and grateful when children include me in their world. That world belongs to them, and I love entering it with them, as an adult. Where there is pain I hope to soothe it, from my adult's perspective. Where there is confusion, I hope to provide clarity (though not in the difference in libraries and bookstores; that confusion was part of the charm of the game). And where there is magic, I hope to absorb it from them.

      After looking at the dead fir in front of my mountain view for eight years, I finally admitted that it wasn't serving as the wildlife tree I had envisioned and that it was, in fact, a blot on the landscape. It should be cut down. Mike said he would do it.

     The tree was enormous at the base and in dense woods. Mike sighted a narrow opening into which he thought he could fell it. He cut a wedge from the trunk, then took his chain saw to the other side and started cutting. The tree came down, not where Mike had intended it to go but into the top of a live oak. There it lay, hung up beyond saving.

      Mike was chagrined, but I just shrugged. "It was really too difficult a job except for a professional," I said, hoping to salve his smarting ego. "I'll call Chuck Dahl. He'll get this tree out of the tree it's in, and while he's at it, I'll have him cut down that dead cedar that's also spoiling my view." 

      When Chuck had come here nine years ago to cut the trees that were in the way of building my house, then milled them for lumber for the house, I discovered what a pleasure it is to watch him work. He moves with efficiency and grace. He knows immediately and accurately what needs to be done. When he got here yesterday, he drove Yellow Truck as close as he could get it to the targeted tree, then attached a pulley to a large fir seventy-five feet from the truck. He pulled a heavy cable from the winch on the truck to that pulley, then half the same distance to the hung-up tree, making a vee of cable. He wrapped the cable around the tree, telling me to stay outside the triangle, explaining the physics of pulleys and cables that made the inside vee dangerous. Then he started the winch. 

Slowly the cable tightened, then tugged gently on the tree. Chuck stopped the cable, made some cuts in the tree with his chain saw, and went back to the winch. Four times he went from his truck to the tree, changing the angle of the pull, sawing off limbs to facilitate a smoother pull, moving with the efficiency and grace I had admired before. As he passed me, he said, "Fun, huh?" I agreed and said something about how well he worked. "It's just engineering," he said, dismissively. Well, that and strength and a deep understanding of trees and a good flow of energy and a laudable attitude towards both his work and the trees he works with.

      When the tree was on the ground, Chuck turned to the dead cedar, which was growing a step down the hill from an open terrace. He made another vee of cable (truck, pulley-on-a-tree, cedar), 

cut partially through the trunk, then returned to the truck and turned on the winch. 

      With a loud crack and a crashing of branches, the tree came down, but not where Chuck had intended and I had expected it to go. It came down into the top of a live oak, and there it lay, hung up, just like the other one, except that it wasn't beyond saving. 

Chuck set out immediately to counter the error.

      I had wanted to write this post to extol the skill, precision of movement, and beauty of labor that make watching Chuck work such a pleasure. The first of that triad is not now nullified just because the tree was in the oaks. Chuck jumped out of the truck and didn't waste a minute with recriminations to himself or curses to the tree or scratching his head trying to figure out what went wrong. "We don't control nature," he said simply, pulling the cable. "That tree just didn't want to go there." He took out a tiny chain saw on the end of a long pole and set to work cutting up the cedar until it, too, was lying on the ground, in sections. "The only thing hurt is my ego," he said cheerily, putting away his tools.

      He didn't want me to tell this story on my blog, but I do because it amplifies the purpose of writing about Chuck in the first place. The cedar in the oaks does not speak badly of his skill, and the smoothness of his motions that translated directly into smoothness of attitude in adversity only increased my admiration. And, in the end, I have two large trees lying on the ground ready for Mike to saw into firewood and cut into kindling.

The Right to Protest

      The December 10 issue of the New Yorker has an article by Anand Gopal titled, "The Island of Democracy," about a town in Syria where free elections were held for the first time anywhere in Syria since 1954. Candidates were chosen, campaigns were held, and, in spite of the dangers ("from Syrian and Russian jets, from concertina-wire-crowned berms and highway checkpoints under the control of Al Qaeda"), people came to the polls to vote. When election results were announced, at 3:00 a.m., "applause rolled across the room. The results mattered less than the fact that citizens had taken part in a ritual of democracy. People were in tears."

      The ability to vote – to say, publicly, "This is what I would like to see happen in my town" – had come at a high price. In March 2011, six young men "decided to hold a protest in Saraqib that Friday and took an oath to secretly invite one or two other people they trusted." The protest was simple: during the recitation of prayers at a mosque, a young man shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" (God is greater), a "standard religious interjection" which, in this context, also implied that Assad wasn't the greatest of all things real and conceivable (the "abiding principle of Syrian life"). Years of killings, suppressions, fear, and destruction followed, in spite of which a democratic election was eventually held.

      All those citizens wanted was to be able to say, one way or another, "This is what I believe or think or would like to see happen." In this country we are familiar with this right. I can join protests and hold up signs and write letters and make my opinion clear in any way that doesn't infringe on the rights of others to do the same.

      But it seems that that freedom has become an illusion, at least here in the Applegate. An organization in the Applegate was wanting to hold a rally at the Star Ranger Station to protest the Forest Service proposal to include new off-road vehicle (OHV) trails in the Upper Applegate Watershed Restoration Project. The reasons to protest that plan are not relevant here. In fact, the very relevance is in not knowing the issues. The point is that whoever has an opinion about the issue has a right to express that opinion in any legal way, a right to make a statement: "This is what I would like to see happen in my town."

      As in Saraqib, notice about the protest was sent secretly only to people personally invited, but somehow, of course, word leaked out. The next notice I got from the organizer was to inform me that the protest was canceled because "OHV enthusiasts are threatening both to personally come to my house and harass me and to crash our protest. They are organizing it as an 'open carry event' and we don't feel we need to subject ourselves to armed thugs."

      What?! Those whose opinions differed were bringing guns to the event? They threatened personal danger to someone solely for planning to publicly express opinions different from theirs? The opinions of some people were not allowed to be expressed because they were on the"wrong" side, according to other people? Is this really a country were freedom of expression is a sacred right?

      The USA is not Syria, of course, and the Applegate is not Saraqib, but the differences are not as great as one would like to think. And that makes me inexpressibly sad. 

Winter!

      Snow fell lightly at my house this past week. I'll be skiing in the mountains this Saturday! Hurrah, it's winter!

      Not everyone is as excited as I. My new neighbor, who recently bought the only other house on the road, is leaving for the winter, the ice and uneven frozen ground being more of a challenge to his recently broken leg than he had anticipated.  It won't be the first time I've spent a winter up here on the mountain alone.

      I've been on this mountain for almost half a century, and I wouldn't dream of leaving for the winter. I love the winters. Maybe, maybe, if we're lucky (as I see it), we'll have a good, cold, snowy winter this year.

      Hints of winter, in fact, inspire me to poetry: 

First Rain (Sept. 20)

At last
a smattering of rain
Not the clatter and chatter of rain in March
Not the stormy bluster of December
or the soldierly muster of later months
Just the pitter-patter of a callow beginner
The first-step quiver of rain trying it out
A splitter-of-seasons rain
A gentler of dried-up tempers
Timid tremors of inchoate storms
Reminders of showers
downpours and gully washers
A shiver of excitement
A glimmer of hope
that winter
is icumen in



First Snow (Dec. 1)

The season's first snow
falls like tiniest down from angel wings
or a fairy-fall of droplets
after a cosmic bath in the clouds
that swaddle Humpy Mountain.
The outdoor scene is a silent movie
after the drumming rain
(before talkies
before Technicolor).
Live oaks and evergreens
lift snow-lace limbs.
The fire is warm on the hearth.
The tea steeps.
Curled in my lair
I watch snow float
past the window
gentling the earth
into winter.

Can Poetry Do What Science Can't?

      At the coast not too long ago, I watched, mesmerized, as waves pounded through a hole in ocean rocks with an irregular, asymmetrical explosion of white spray. What could be throwing those waves? I understand the force of water over a waterfall, but this water was coming from a flat surface. Whither such force? Something was pushing the waves from afar, flinging them with fury and strength – an angry Neptune, maybe, on the other side of the ocean, slinging those waves around. I could even see God doing it, though it's hard to imagine that overworked deity having to stand at the ocean's edge pushing waves one after the other.

      Okay, so, all right. I'm an educated 21st-century woman, and I know that the moon makes tides. But what does that say? The moon? Are you crazy? You're telling me it's the ocean yearning for the moon, leaping towards it again and again, only to fall back each time in frustration and despair, like a dog, enfenced, trying to escape? I could make up a myth to give your explanation understanding, but just to look at the ocean and know the moon is causing that force –? Not really. Your explanation doesn't tell me anything.

      I understand the thinking of pre-Galileo days. Of course the world is flat, not only because we can see its edge but because there has to be a flat box there to hold the water. If the world were round, the water would roll off. That's not hard to see. Do an experiment: Take a ball and try to make water stay on it. If the ball were big enough, a dab of earth would stay there, but no matter how big the ball is, water won't stick. Anyone can see that the world is flat.

     So then you tell me that there's a thing called gravity in the center of the earth that exerts a pull on everything, including water, that makes it stick to the surface. Oh, yeah? What do you mean, "a pull"? Show me.

      And so you take a magnet and iron files, and you tell me that gravity is like a magnet in the center of the earth and everything in the world has something like iron in it that responds to gravity like files to a magnet. So, okay, I can see that, but why, then, don't the stars fall through the sky onto earth?

      I was hiking with a friend once among the golds and scarlets of big-leaf maples and viney maples, the subtle purples of dogwoods and the pale lemon of alders, mesmerized by the colors as much as by the waves at the ocean. My friend, a scientist, marveled equally at cause-and-effect explanations. "It's a gene," he said excitedly, a gene that is responsible for this glorious revolution of color. 

      I tried hard to internalize the information, but it wouldn't stick. After all, what is a gene? It's the thing that gives me a short stature and the viney maple its fiery autumn color, but what does that tell me? I could make a myth about genes as I did about the moon and know no less. If our science explains mysteries, I need the poetry to explore the wonder.

Prayers for Humanity and the Earth

      One of the items for my 75x75 project (75 things of 75 repetitions each for my 75th year; see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com) was to make 75 prayers for humanity and the Earth. Today, Thanksgiving Day, 2018, I list some of those prayers:

1. May the children know laughter, love, song, and freedom from fear.
2. May the leaders of the world make decisions based on the rock bed of fact and wound 'round with the glow of truth.
4. May the apple limbs hang low with rosy-cheeked apples.
5. May the snow fly thick.
6. May the geese have joy in the journey and solace at its end.
7. May the gardens flourish all over the world.
8. May the springs flow full.
9. May the earth forgive our trespasses against it, which are legion and severe.
10. May we listen to what the earth is telling us and pay heed.
11. May we never silence another living voice.
12. May we allow the earth time to lick its wounds and recover.
14. May the songbirds fill the woods and meadows as of old.
15. May the owls meet in parliaments outside my bedroom window for years to come.
17. May the voice of reason and the aura of compassion prevail.
18. May all children know the joys of childhood.
19. May the balm of sleep and the calming touch of an adult ease the pains of childhood.
21. May women and men be treated with equal respect all over the world.
22. Nature, my muse: I pledge that I will never ignore you, never neglect you, never take you for granted.
23. Nature, my muse: I pledge to find the words to speak for you to those who speak my language and do not understand yours.
24. Nature, my muse: I pledge to you a voice – a voice of beauty to your beauty, of strength to your power, of tenderness to your fragility.
25. Nature, my muse: I pledge to listen to what the earth is telling me, to hear your voice in the butterflies and frogs, in the clouds and rain, in the fires and in the stones under my feet.
26. Nature, my muse: I pledge to climb the mountains and swim the lakes, hug the trees and hold the flowers in my fingertips, letting their perfume fill my heart.
28. May the ospreys fish with abundance and the fish swim in the shadows.
29. May the streams stay cold.
30. May the rivers run free.
32. May there be increasing pockets of machine noiselessness in the world.
33. May Thomas Berry's dream of the Earth prevail, in economics, in education ,in business, in personal devotion.
34. May the trees grow tall and the flowers spread their colors over the meadows with abundance.
35. May the summers be cooler.
36. May the winters be colder.
37. May the autumns be brighter,
38. May the springs be always the season of joy.
39. May communities thrive with compassion, respect, neighborliness, and conviviality.
40. May those with illness find relief from pain.
41. May we learn to tune our hearts to the aches of others.

(See thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com for the rest of the list.)

A Madcap Summer at Camp Glisson

      When I was having lunch with my siblings in Dahlonega, Georgia, last October (see previous post), I started reminiscing about being a counselor at Camp Glisson, a Methodist Church camp just outside Dahlonega, when I was in high school. I asked our waitress if Camp Glisson still existed.

      "Oh, yes," she said with a bright smile. "It's close by." When I said I had been a counselor there, decades ago, she urged me to go see it. My siblings were willing to indulge my nostalgia, so on our way back to the lake house, we stopped at Camp Glisson.

      I recognized, or thought I recognized, the large log reception building with its porch and pole railings, but I was thrown right back into my Camp Glisson days when we walked to the top of the waterfall. 

Vivid memories returned: swimming in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, dinners in the rustic dining hall, the campers under my wing, and, most of all, the coterie of young people who worked at Camp Glisson that summer.

      The head counselor, older than the rest of us but probably just a recent college graduate, was one of the most ebullient people I've ever known, with an outsized sense of humor and imaginative ways to use it. He name was Charles, I think. His powerful charisma bonded all the counselors in a summer of madcap fun. Without ever being irresponsible to our campers or disrespectful to God and the church, we centered our summer around adventures, games, and play with each other. 

      I wish I could have walked down to the little stone chapel, nestled in the woods, but I was too cognizant of dragging people around a place that held no memories for them. I had loved that chapel. I used to go there alone, more to sit in its serenity than to worship or pray. I was more romantic than religious in my church days, and the sweet little chapel, with its stained glass windows and large cool stone floor, fit my teen-age romanticsm perfectly.

      If I had walked through the rows of cabins, would I have recognized the corner of the cabin where one of my campers was bitten by a copperhead? I remember the girls crowding around me as I took her to Charles, who put her, me and another camp leader in the car and drove us fast to Dahlonega to find the town doctor. At this point the story has become myth to the extent that I don't know if what I remember really happened or was another exaggeration in that exaggerated, bigger-than-life summer. Was the doctor really drunk? That's what I remember we said when we told the story. Did he really use a rusty razor blade to make the X cut over the fang marks? That's what I remember our saying. I doubt the latter, maybe not so much the former. After all, it was north Georgia in the fifties, deep in the Appalachian Mountains, and it was already after dark. At any rate, my camper survived without ill effects and, if I remember right, returned to finish her stay at the camp.

      One weekend, between camp sessions, Charles had one of his innocent-practical-joke ideas: why didn't we catch lightning bugs, he said, put them in a jar, then go to the movies in Dahlonega and let them loose there? Immediately in the spirit of the game, four or five young people were leaping around the yard in front of the cabins, snatching the blinking lights from the air. Fireflies! Lightning bugs, those most magical of all creatures, not only because they light up the night with their cold yellow blinking lights but because they don't bite or sting; they're easy to catch, and they sit on your palm, blinking a few times before flying into the air again, unperturbed by their brief stay on that warm surface. Who could object to seeing them fly around a movie theater?

      When we had a jar full of lightning bugs, we hid it in a bag and took off for town. We filed into the theater quietly, respectfully, but secretly gleeful. I don't remember what movie we saw, but I do remember when Charles opened the jar and let out the lightning bugs. They flew off in all directions, flashing their lantern lights everywhere in the dark theater. I don't know whether the other patrons were annoyed or amused, but the counselors from Camp Glisson were suffused with glee at our harmless and maybe even charming stunt. 

       I was a bit in love with Charles, in my teen-age way. I was mad about him, but not seriously. That a future with him wasn't contemplatable was a good thing in more ways than one. Once, when I served him his dinner, he looked at his plate in dismay and said, "But the peas should be on the other side of the potatoes!" When I told my mother that story, she shook her head and said he would be no man to marry! 

      I could see her point, even then. Nonetheless, he was one of the most brilliant personalities I have known, and he made that summer at Camp Glisson a bright star in my galaxy.

Siblings' Reunion 2018

      After our parents' deaths in 2005 and 2006, my siblings and I promised we would try to get together every year. This year the opportunity came in September, after my cousin-once-removed's wedding in Birmingham. The four of us would spend a few days together – no in-laws, children, or grandchildren – at my sister Laura's house on Lake Lanier, in north Georgia.

      As soon as we arrived, late afternoon, we walked down to the lake and dove in. Sharon and I took a swim while Laura was putting the two paddle boards in the water. Then, while Lee did some quite passably good swan dives off the top of the boathouse, Laura, Sharon, and I did some sometimes passably good paddle-board yoga. The sister without a board would call out poses – "Down dog" "Arta chandrasana" – and the two on the boards would do the pose. Yoga is a skill of balance to begin with. To do poses on a slim piece of hard foam wobbling on a moving surface takes the utmost concentration. The first person to fall in gave the board to the sister waiting her turn.

      As the sun was going down, we pulled the paddle boards off the water and sat on the dock drinking wine as the setting sun sent a flashing brilliance of golds and pinks across the lake. We toasted each other and our reunion. With a glance towards the heavens, we toasted our older sister, who died exactly a year before. We basked in the beauty of the sunset and of each other's company. We laughed a lot.

     That evening Lee showed me pictures of his raft trip down the Colorado River. After dinner on the screened-in porch, he gave each of us an "early Christmas present" – a digitized copy of the home movies from the family trip to Alaska in 1959. We reminisced about that trip, talked about family, our favorite books. We moved inside and worked a jigsaw puzzle to completion.

      The next day we took a hike on the Appalachian Trail at Neel's Gap, just strenuous enough, just long enough, beautiful in the Appalachian woods. 

We had a late lunch at the Bourbon Street restaurant in Dahlonega, where I temporarily forgot where I was and ordered jambalaya because I thought I should have local fare. Back at the lake house, we had time for another swim and more fun with the paddle boards before dinner.

      Then there was more good talk. Laura brought out another puzzle. We worked together on it for a while. Then Laura said good night and went to bed. Shortly thereafter, Lee did the same. Sharon and I worked steadily on. We didn't say much, only the occasional mumbled exclamation of success when a piece slipped into place, or a description of a piece we were looking for, in case the other person spotted it. The silence and the concentration made a cocoon of camaraderie around us. At 1:00 a.m. we put in the last piece we had. Two pieces were missing. We went to bed having done all we could

     The next morning someone found one piece under the table. Sharon found the other one on the kitchen floor. It must have stuck to the sleeve of my sweater when I leaned over the puzzle, then dropped off when I walked to the kitchen. We put the final two pieces in place with a satisfying sense of completion.

      We had breakfast, then tore the puzzles apart and put the pieces back in the boxes. We cleaned the kitchen and remade the beds with clean sheets. We loaded Sharon's paddle board on top of her car, closed up the house, and drove back to Atlanta.

      There we concluded the siblings' reunion with expanded family. The in-laws rejoined us. Laura's daughter and two grandchildren came over, as did my son and granddaughter, who happened to be in Atlanta at the same time as I, though for different reasons. We played croquet in the back yard. (My ten-year-old granddaughter beat the socks off us!) The cousins, close in age, played as though the two years since they had seen each other had left no gap. We had dinner on the patio that night – children, grandchildren, in-laws, siblings.

      The next morning Sharon drove back to north Georgia. Lee flew back to Charlottesville. The children and grandchildren had left for their own places of abode the night before. Laura's husband went to work, leaving her and me alone in the house. Before I left for the airport that evening to return to Oregon, Laura played the piano for me – Schubert, Beethoven, Gershwin.

      Sharing the lake, the meals, the conversation – intimate times with each of my siblings – the easy flow from one to the other: I love my family.

For Those with Colorless Autumns

      When I talk to my East Coast friends, from Boston to Atlanta, they lament the lack of color in their trees this autumn. To boost their spirits, I offer this essay, written one year when the Siskiyous, too, suffered autumn browns.

      What happened to the autumn color? Where are the golden yellows and the flaming oranges, the scarlets and the vermilions? Who dulled the brilliance? Who rubbed the blush from the complexions of the trees? Who sucked the energy away? Who gave us achromatism, pallor, wanness in our autumn this year?

     Brown, brown, brown – everywhere it's brown. On a road I drive frequently, a long row of incense cedars, interspersed tree by tree with broad-leaf maples, is usually an autumn checkerboard of green and yellow. This year the maples between the cedars are lifeless brown. Yellow turned buff, red turned russet scarlet turned chestnut. Far from being vibrant and exciting, the woods have become dull: spiritless, wearisome, prosaic, lackluster, humdrum, drab, and monotonous. The woods this year are brown.

      Is this lack of color a depiction of weather past? Or a prediction of weather to come? Does it mean we had a hot summer? A dry year? A late fall? Or does it mean it will be an early winter? A dry winter? A hard winter? It must mean something. What kind of energy is sucking at the roots of the trees, drawing their color right out of their skins?

      Things are bad if I had rather look at my calendar picture than at the mountains themselves. How can I accept brown? Well, first I should stop pining for gold. Once I stopped looking for Renoir, I found Rembrandt. In a reversal of art history, we have gone from large areas of pulsating color to a soft, retreating chiaroscuro. Brown is not just brown. If it were, the Mona Lisa and The Night Watch would be dull pictures: prosaic, lackluster, humdrum, and monotonous.

      Brown is a vast spectrum of variations. Brown in one tree is Sudan brown, in another Arabian brown, in another Vassar tan, a real term for a real color, a trim derived, in reality, from Vassar College, but my dictionary doesn't say whether it originated from the color of the New England trees around Vassar College or from the tan the girls returned to school with after their Christmas vacations in Florida. Some trees are chestnut brown, some pearl-brown, some sand brown. Some are somber umber; others burnt Sienna, Sienna brown, or Sienna drab. Are the trees this autumn Sienna drab? It's a real color, a "light grayish brown to reddish brown that is duller than sandstone and paler than wood rose." Sandstone? Wood rose? What beautiful colors! Some trees seep with sepia: "a dark grayish yellowish brown that is stronger and slightly yellower than seal and stronger and slightly yellower and lighter than otter." Seal and otter, too? Other trees are only ocher, "a moderate orange that is yellower and deeper than honeydew, yellower and darker than Persian orange, and duller than mikado orange." Honeydew? Persian orange? Midado orange? All that in the autumn woods? Wood rose, seal, otter, honeydew, mikado? How could I ever have thought this a dull autumn?

(This essay is found in my book, Fire from the Dragon's Tongue: Essays about Living with Nature in the Siskiyou Mountains.)

An Autumn to Fulfill Dreams

       This is. The most. Beautiful autumn.

     I couldn't wait to get on the Cameron Meadows trail this fall. I have hiked it often in late spring, when the dogwoods are in bloom and the bear grass waves silver in the sun. I've hiked it in early summer, when pink clusters of rhododendron blossoms crowd the trail, and later, when tiger lilies rise orange among masses of yarrow, Oregon sunshine, Indian paintbrush, and dozens of other wildflowers. I generally leave the trails to the hunters in October, so I had never hiked this trail in the autumn, but this year I couldn't bear not to do it. 

       I know the trees on the Cameron Meadows trail – broad-leaf maples, viney maples, black and white oaks, and dogwoods among the big-trunked evergreens: Douglas firs, Ponderosa pines, and incense cedars. I have always thought it would be an artist's showroom in autumn, and this year promised more than usual. I imagined walking up the steep trail through masses of scarlet-red viney maples. I envisioned the woods on fire with color. I was a-twitter with excitement, but as the car neared the trailhead, I tried to let go of my expectations. I told myself it would be what it would be. Resolutely unanticipatory, I put my poles in my hands and started up one of the steepest trails in the Applegate, one I knew at other times of the year as one of the most beautiful. In autumn, it would be what it would be.

        The trail did not disappoint.

      The woods were dark under the forest canopy, but when the sun hit a particular broad-leaf maple, the color burst from it in gleaming butter-gold. 

The dogwoods were more subtle but no less beautiful in their pinks and salmon. One dogwood was such a pale lime-green it was almost ghostly. The viney maples were sometimes the flaming scarlet I was expecting, but even more often, they came out in softer yellows and, even better, in leaves ranging, each one, from yellow to orange to red. The oaks wore russet and orange. In his pumpkin-yellow hunter-deterring sweatshirt, Mike fit right in. 

Low bushes wrapped leafy yellow arms around the dark trunks of pines and firs. We were walking through a painter's paradise. A writer's paradise. A hiker's paradise. Anyone's paradise who would make the effort to climb up there.

      I was ecstatic. I stopped again and again, to take pictures, to hug trees (see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com.), and just to gape at the beauty around me.

      At the top, Mike and I sat under an immense incense cedar at the edge of the meadow for a bite of lunch. We didn't have much time to linger because we were going to town that evening for a postcard writing session to get out the vote. But even with that time squeeze and even walking on a trail I had just come up, I couldn't just hurry through. Walking down the steep trail was like diving into yellow, like diving in and swimming  through color, the variations in shades of yellow like swimming through shallow water into deeper water, the yellow in the trees varying from champagne to lemon to goldenrod like the blues of water varying from turquoise to lapis. The orange-tipped trees were like white-caps on the ocean. Everywhere there was new beauty. 

      This was. The most. Beautiful autumn hike. I came home color-saturated and soul-satisfied.

Dogwood leaves

      

Crash!

      I screamed the whole long, extended, slow-motion moment before my Toyota Yaris hit the BMW SUV that pulled out in front of it.

      Mike, who was driving my car, cried in alarm, "Are you all right?" but I wasn't sure what "all right" meant in this case, and I said, "I don't know," as I struggled to unbuckle the life-saving seat belt. What I did know was that my door wouldn't open. Mike appeared instantly on the outside of the door and with superhuman force wrenched it open. Then we stood in the road, looking at my Yaris strewn in parts on the road, our weekly hike up Table Rock Mountain at daybreak also in shatters

      The woman in the BMW who had slid through the stop sign without caution was full of apologies and concern for us. I was alarmed to see she had a baby, but the baby had been in a car seat in the back and I think didn't even know anything out of the ordinary had happened or why so many people – cops, emergency workers, strangers, her grandparents, who had raced immediately to the site – were milling around. She was fine. As was everyone else, more or less.

      The driver who had caused the accident took immediate responsibility and was only concerned about everyone's well-being. When the policeman asked me if I wanted him to issue her a citation for running the stop sign, I said, no, she didn't need that on top of everything else. The policeman, the emergency vehicle drivers, and a witness to the accident who left his name and contact information with me all said the accident was clearly her fault. I was doing the young woman a favor not to issue her a citation, so I was a little annoyed when, later, she insisted on placing partial blame on Mike with the insurance company.

      When I tell people I was in a "little accident," they often look askance, as though there were no such thing. My massage therapist, Haley May, with May Massage Arts, told me that such an impact is always hard on the body. Nonetheless, it was, in fact, a little accident. I know enough to be grateful. The tow truck driver, who had lost a daughter in an automobile accident years ago, kept saying, "It's just a bunch of metal. You're alive; that's what counts." But he didn't need to remind me. It really was a little accident.

      Mike and I both have pain from ligaments that got strained by the pull of the seat belt across our chests. I have a big round bruise on my left breast, at first black and blue, now green and yellow, and one long, across-the-belly bruise where the seat belt stretched across my lap. It looks like a forest fire: striated vertically, black, with streaks of red and green.

      The day after the accident, I left for Georgia and sat for hours on an airplane, then more hours in a car. When I returned to the Rogue Valley, Haley told me she had a cancellation and could get me in for a massage two days later. As soon as she started working on me, I thought, "I really need this." 

      The bruises are healing. Sore muscles are relaxing. I can breathe deeply and turn over in bed without pain. The Yaris is in the wrecking yard. Fortunately, I had had two cars, so I could drive my RAV4 while I was looking for a replacement for the Yaris. I need a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get up my driveway in winter, but the RAV4 is 20 years old and has about 300,000 miles on it, so I needed the Yaris for ordinary driving. Now I decided to replace two cars with one, which would be an all-wheel-drive but more like a car than a truck, a description a Subaru fits better than any other make.

      Therefore, behold now the Subaru Crosstrek in my carport.

How I Knew I Wasn't in Oregon Any More

      Songbirds? Now? It's October! 

      Yes, it was the first week of October, but it was also not Oregon. In Oregon, all the songbirds have long since flown south. Last week I was in the South they might have flown to, but hearing them sing in October was still an oxymoronic experience. It wasn't the way things are supposed to be, to my half-century-determined Oregon sensibilities.

      Birdsong wasn't the only oxymoronic experience I had in Birmingham, where I had come for a family wedding. On the same walk, through a neighborhood in Birmingham, I saw trees and bushes in bloom. How could one tree be pink with blossoms while just up the street another tree was just turning pink in its foliage? Isn't it supposed to be that nature colors its trees with blossoms in spring, with foliage in autumn, as it does in Oregon? What kind of place was this that mixed up spring and autumn in such a way?

      During the hours before the wedding, my family (sisters, brother, in-laws, nieces) and I walked through Birmingham's botanical gardens. The tropical greenhouse was like any tropical greenhouse in any botanical garden, never the way things are supposed to grow in that particular climate, but the walk through the woods took me back so thoroughly to the woods of my childhood that I felt like long-leaf pines, swamp magnolias, and pawpaws

This is me in a swamp magnolia tree.

were as much the way woods are supposed to be as the sugar pines, Jeffrey pines, Ponderosa pines, madrone trees, and Douglas firs of my own woods. 

      The wedding itself was the way it was supposed to be, West Coast or East Coast, with a bride beautiful in white and the groom ecstatically happy. Watching the late afternoon sun break through the clouds and highlight the bride just as she walked down the aisle between the rows of chairs set on the long sloping lawn above the river was certainly the way weddings should be, in Alabama or in Oregon, and even the smattering of rain before the ceremony wasn't any more unusual in an Alabama October than in an Oregon October. It didn't last long enough to affect the ceremony, but it was enough to send the violinist scurrying under the cover of the porch roof and to wet the seats of our chairs, which the men in my party gallantly wiped dry with their handkerchiefs. They would have done the same in Oregon.

      The suddenness of being now in Oregon and then, in only a few hours, in Alabama or Georgia – and then, a week later, doing the same in reverse – emphasized these oxymoron. Jet lag is the indication that, according to our bodies, that's not the way things are supposed to be. 

Baking Lessons

      My friend Tracy asked if I would like to give her granddaughter, Mataya, a lesson in making pies when she came down for some cooking lessons last summer. I, of course, was delighted. I thought I had learned enough since the first pie I baked, in the kitchen of my boyfriend's house in Cambridge fifty years ago, to teach an eleven-year-old child something useful. 

       We decided to cook at my house and to make one savory pie and one sweet one. I sent Mataya some recipe choices. She picked chicken pot pie and strawberry lime mousse tartlets. She and Tracy would come over mid-morning, and we would eat what we cooked for lunch.

      "Pie crusts are tricky.," I told Mataya as we began. "Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't." She was not intimidated.

      I explained that it was important to keep the butter cold, to work the butter-and-flour mixture to a uniform consistency, to add very cold (iced) water to the butter-and-flour mixture, and not to overwork the dough.

      Mataya moved quickly and with confidence. It wasn't that she didn't listen to me but that she didn't seem to need to know what I was telling her. She whizzed through the process, moving from one step to another without hesitation. The dough was made, divided into four parts, and refrigerated. 

       While the dough was chilling, we made the crust for the chicken pot pie, then turned to the lime mousse filling for the tartlets. I started to instruct again, talking about the importance of timing and so forth. That's when Mataya told me about the cooking camps she has been to and what she learned there and the variety of things she cooked and how well she had done. I began to think I had nothing at all to teach Mataya. I never took a cooking class. She probably knew stuff I didn't know. I began to see that my role wasn't to teach Mataya anything about baking but simply to give her an opportunity to make some pies. 

      I knew that Mataya had also taken skiing lessons and had done some rigorous bicycle camp. She told me about going to a computer coding camp earlier in the summer. When I asked which activity she preferred, she said cooking (though maybe now, after another even more exciting bicycle camp, she might have changed her preferences).

      While Mataya and I were making the lime mousse filling, Tracy realized we weren't going to get around to cooking the chicken, so she took over that part of the project, chopping celery and carrots and stewing the chicken in its vegetable broth.

      I spread my pastry mat on the kitchen counter, anchored it with tape, and brought out the chilled dough, then, unable to leave the teaching mode, started instructing Mataya on how to roll out a pie dough. Full of confidence, she wielded the rolling pin briskly. "Don't push so hard," I suggested. "If you work it too hard, the dough will be tough." Four pastry rounds were cut out and pushed into the tart shells, filled with beans, and put into the oven.

      Mataya admitted that she was the kind of cook who made a mess in the kitchen, but she impressed me by being the kind of cook who also immediately cleaned that mess, readying the kitchen for the next step, which, in this case, was to fill the cooled tart shells with the lime mousse, then to decorate the tarts. Mataya cut the strawberries into quarters and stuck them jauntily in a quadrant pattern. The bold red strawberries looked cute on the lime green filling.

      The tarts went into the refrigerator and the chicken pot pie into the oven. Tracy, Mataya, and I gave the kitchen a final cleaning and set the table for lunch. 

      Mataya's pie crusts were excellent. They were not tough. The crust for the chicken pot pie did not turn soggy. The crusts for the tartlets were flaky and perfectly complementary to the sharp citrus flavor of the filling. Mataya talked about how she would adjust the recipe, what she would do different next time. She talked liked a judge on the British Baking Show. 

      I was impressed with what Mataya had done. In not too many years, I think, I'll have to go to her house for baking lessons.

Fire Stupidity

      These early autumn days have been lovely in the Applegate – little or no smoke, Delft-blue skies, gentle breezes that carry a hint of autumn. One Sunday, Mike and I set off for a hike to Azalea Lake, in the Red Buttes Wilderness Area. The Fir Glade trailhead is only about thirty minutes from my house and the lake about five and a half miles from the trailhead.

      The trail begins in a deep evergreen forest, dark and cool, then rises to a ridge, overlooking several Siskiyou peaks in the near distance and Phantom Meadow far below, before it tips over the ridge-top and down the other side. That whole side of the mountain had burned in last year's Miller Complex Fire. The trees, which grew sparsely anyway, were now but blackened poles. 

Underneath burned snags, the shrubs and bushes were already greening the ground, but all the way into the valley, down to the lake itself, we could see burned forest, near and far. The lake was rimmed with burned trees except for a small finger of forest the fire had neglected. That, of course, was where we headed.

      Even as we were descending the hill, we heard voices at the lake. As we got closer we could see four men, in camouflage outfits, just packing up to leave.

      Ah, right. I had forgotten that part of the Red Buttes is in California and that California's hunting season starts before Oregon's. These men had shot two bucks the day before and had packed out half the meat. Now they were leaving with the rest of the meat and their camping gear, all packed in what looked like very heavy packs. The men were staggering with the weight. Two of them had tied the heads of the deer, with the antlers, onto the backs of their packs so that to walk behind them would have been to stare into the eyes of the dead deer. To approach them from the front, as Mike and I did, was to fleetingly mistake the man's head, with the antlers sticking up over it, for a deer's head. I thought it was a pretty dangerous way to walk.

      But these men seemed carelessly oblivious of danger. They had built a fire and left it burning. "Oh," they said casually when we pointed it out to them, "we thought it would be all right." 

      I was incensed. How could they leave a fire burning when they had camped among fire-dead trees and hiked for two miles in view of hundreds of acres of the same? How could they walk away from a burning fire when they had been living with smoke in the Rogue Valley for two months? Hadn't they seen the billboards with the picture of a campfire and the words, "Wanted: Dead out"? Didn't they know that the fire in Crater Lake National Park a few years ago, for instance, was started by a campfire? Hadn't they noticed that there was a wind even now? Hadn't they thought about what happens when a wind sneaks into hot ashes and live embers in a fire pit? With only a handful of trees still green at Azalea Lake, how could they not care about the chance they were taking of destroying even those? How could they be so ignorant and so careless and so stupid?
        And illegal. I looked up fire restriction rules when I got hone, and, as I had suspected, campfires are not allowed in Northern California at this time.

      Mike and I had lunch; then I took a swim while Mike made numerous trips filling his water bottle in the lake and pouring the water over the fire until he had put it out. He stacked rocks in the fire pit so no embers that might have escaped the drowning would be whisked out by the wind. We could be sure that this fire was going to do no damage. The hunters who left it burning could have had no such assurance.

Louse Canyon: A Beautiful Hike but a Lousy Trip

      Louse Canyon is up the mountain from the Crabtree Trailhead, in the Emigrant Wilderness Area, just north of Yosemite National Park.

 Bob Cook, with whom I've backpacked annually for the past fifteen years and who was doing this seven-day trip with me, had hired a packer to take our packs to the campsite in Louse Canyon so we could hike the first day carrying minimum weight: lunch and water.

      As the packer, Doug, was loading Ellie, his mule, with our packs, Bob told him,"We'll be going up the Golden Staircase [the name of the route up the granite cliff above Louse Canyon to Rosasco Lake] tomorrow morning. Leave our packs at the campsite at the base of the Golden Staircase." Doug nodded, tightened the cinch, mounted Viola, his horse, and started up the trail.

      Bob and I met Doug a couple of miles up the trail as he was returning. He said, yes, he had left the packs in the campsite at the bottom of the Golden Staircase.

      We stopped at Grouse Lake, where I had a good swim,

and got to the arranged campsite around 2:00. No packs! We searched behind every tree, around every boulder. No packs. Bob walked up the canyon while I rested my feet, but it was a fruitless search. We both walked the other direction, down the canyon to its end, then along the canyon from that end all the way up the canyon where Bob had just walked ("Four eyes are better than two," Bob said) and even farther. We followed hoof prints (but were they Viola's and Ellie's or those of other horses?). We hunted and hunted. For three hours we looked, probably adding two miles to the eight we had already hiked. Finally, the only thing to do was to go back.

      Go back where? It would be a moonless night, so it seemed unwise to hike the full eight miles to the trailhead. Probably, I thought as I hiked, we would stop at Grouse Lake and spend the night there, huddled under a pine tree, trying to keep warm, getting up every so often to stamp our feet and flap our arms.We both had jackets, but I was in shorts. It would be a long, cold night.

     A couple of miles down the trail we met two men with two rambunctious dogs. They greeted us cheerfully: "Hi! How're you doing?" Not so well, we said and explained our predicament. Immediately the first man opened his pack and took out two twenty-pound bags of dog food (!), dug a little further, and came up with two energy bars for us. He filled our water jugs, told us there were some campers at Grouse Lake, and wished us well.

      Encouraged, we hiked another mile to Grouse Lake, where we saw two men (Craig and Franc, we learned later) just setting up their tent. We explained that we were without supplies and did they have anything that might help us, like, for instance, Bob said, something I could put on my legs for the night?

      I said apologetically that I knew that backpackers carry only what we need. I wasn't expecting them to have anything extra.

      They leapt into action. Were we exhausted, they asked, or would we like a flashlight for hiking to the trailhead?

       It had already been a 13-mile day. My feet refused to go another five miles. Besides, it was a pretty rocky trail to do by flashlight. I said I was exhausted.

       Craig gave me a pair of long johns, brand new, he said. Did we need food? Water? And, look, he and Franc had been considering sleeping in the open air, anyway. They would do that, and we could have their tent.

       Images of sleeping huddled under a pine tree vanished with the offer.

       Craig told us there was another couple camped on the lake; we could hit them up, too.

      I winced at the vocabulary, but Bob and I walked to the next camp. Michelle and Anthony were standing by a fire that was cooking a fish, impaled on a stick. We explained our problem, and they, too, went into immediate action. Did we need food? Water? What could they give us to make our night more bearable? Melissa thought of the light polyester cape she carried with her on camping trips. Anthony gave us a sleeping bag liner and a large down jacket. We left their campsite with out hearts as full of gratitude as our arms were full of provisions for the night.

      I had eight cherry tomatoes and four little squares of beef jerky left from lunch. That and the two energy bars the hikers with the dogs had given us would be our dinner. We would save the other two energy bars for the morning. We sat on a log to eat. I thought if Bob could turn our water into wine, we would be doing just fine. He said he didn't know how to do that, and where was that guy when you needed Him?

      Thanks to the kindness of strangers what was merely an uncomfortable night was not a dangerous one. The ground was hard, and a poorly positioned rock under the tent poked Bob's back all night. We were cold (there was ice in the water bottles the next morning), but not as cold as we would have been without the tent. As soon as we saw dawn creeping through the forest, we crawled out. Craig, who was already stirring about camp, said I could continue to wear the long johns and leave them on his car at the trailhead. We took Michelle and Anthony's borrowed items to their campsite, laid them on a log, and headed for the Crabtree Trailhead.

      Five miles later, well before noon, we were at our cars, and I was taking off my boots.

      We were glad to see that Doug was at the pack station and not on the trail somewhere packing someone else's gear into the wilderness. We told him the packs weren't at the arranged place. He smiled a bit and said, yes, they were. We said we had looked for a couple of hours and couldn't find them. Still with that barely perceptible smile, he said he would take Viola and Ellie and go get the packs. He would be back some time between 6:00 and 7:00.

      Bob and I drove a few miles to the Pinecrest Chalet, where we would spend a comfortable, warm night in a lovely little cabin with hot showers and large clean beds with beautiful white down comforters. While we waited for our packs to return, eating sandwiches at Pinecrest Lake and watching the boaters, Bob took another look at the Emigrant Wilderness map. Scouring it closely, he now noticed that there were two depressions in the granite wall above Louse Canyon that led to a spot of blue on the map indicating a lake. The first was above the campsite where we had expected to find our packs. The second led to a spot of blue indicating a lake that was named, on the map, Rosasco Lake. That meant that that route was the Golden Staircase, not the one Bob had thought. The packer had been exactly right. We had been wrong. We should have pointed to a map and said, "Here. Here is where we expect to find our packs."                                

     As a wilderness survival story, this one really isn't very exciting. But as a kindness-of-strangers story, it is superb: the two hikers with the dogs who gave us food and water; Craig and Franc, who gave us food and shelter; Michelle and Anthony, who gave us warm coverings; and Doug, the packer, who didn't hesitate a minute about making an extra six-hour trip into Louse Canyon and, when we offered to pay because the mistake had been ours, only smiled his slight smile and said no.

      (This post is dedicated, in gratitude, to Craig and Franc Volodonsk and to Melissa and Anthony Gillepsie.)

(To find out how the 75 x 75 project is going, check out the latest post on http://thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com.)

   

Seals, Herons, Egrets, and Good Company

            For the Labor Day weekend I wanted to immerse myself in a smoke-free ecology, so I took Mike with me and went to visit my friend Wallace Kaufman, who lives on Poole Slough, on the Oregon coast near Newport. Wallace spends his days observing the wildlife, kayaking the slough, taking photographs, and, in general, immersing himself in the coastal, tidal-river ecology.

      As soon as Mike and I arrived Friday evening, the three of us jumped in Wallace's kayaks and paddled to the bay, where the harbor seals obliged us with their clown routine, popping up behind our boats and gazing at us with their puppy-eyes, their whiskers alert. Then down they would go, only to pop up again in unexpected places.

     The next morning Mike and I took the kayaks upriver. Blue herons flew at the edge of the forest, landing in trees above the slough. 

Sand pipers ran along the muddy shores. A red-tail hawk soared overhead, and a kingfisher made a bee-line up the river then hovered mid-air with his wings awhir before settling on a wire over the river. Mike and I paddled at a leisurely pace, setting athwart our paddles from time to time to train binoculars on the birds. We paddled until the salted river became too shallow to continue.

      It was easy and fun until the return, when we were paddling against the wind. Oh. My. God. I wa sure my kayak was standing still no matter how hard I pulled on the paddle. What would I do if I weren't strong enough to get back to Wallace's dock? I gauged Mike's progress. I figured he would manage to get back to Wallace's, and then he and Wallace could come after me in the two-person kayak. I would be rescued.

      In the event, it wasn't necessary. I managed to get back to the dock, my arms aching.

      Wallace steamed oysters from his catch down at the dock for dinner, and I made a cobbler from the blackberries he had picked. He brought kale and tomatoes from his garden and offered us all sorts of chutneys and blackberry syrups he had canned. Mike had brought both wine and port, and Wallace served his homemade blackberry brandy. In spite of the lively conversation that flowed with the alcohol. I finally gave up and went to bed, both nights, leaving Wallace and Mike to solve the problems of the world.

      Early Monday morning, before Mike and I had to leave for the Rogue Valey, Wallace joined us for a last kayak trip down the slough to the bay. The sun was just coming up through the mist, perfect light for good photographs. 

We watched a flock of seagulls dive-bomb a blue heron who had found a perch in their territory. As we got closer to the pier where the harbor seals aggregate, we saw five snowy egrets on the bank. 

Slowly and silently we paddled closer, until Wallace got quite close to them and took some beautiful photographs.

      On the way back to the house, Wallace decided to take the route through the marsh instead of the river route. The tide was going out, but he thought the water would stay deep enough for us to get back to his dock.

      The muddy banks of the marsh stood tall above the water, and Wallace was soon so far ahead of Mike and me (Mike because of me, as he kept waiting for me to catch up) that we lost him in the twists and turns of the marsh. We valiantly paddled on, following what we thought was the channel, trying to avoid the shallowest places. Finally we came to an ambiguous turn. I tried one way, Mike the other. My kayak got stuck in the mud, and I had to do some fancy maneuvering and strong pushing to get it free again. Mike was having similar trouble. Finally, though we knew the house was now directly across the marsh, we didn't know anything to do but turn around and paddle – fast, to beat the out-flowing tide – back to the river, where we could move more freely. As we rounded the last turn in the river, we heard Wallace blowing a signal to us on his bugle. He and his neighbors were on the dock, watching for us: our three-person rescue crew.

      Wallace had had his own trouble with the outgoing tide and eventually had gotten out of his kayak and walked through the marsh, toting the kayak behind him like something on the Eerie Canal.

      After a quick breakfast, Mike and I gathered our things and repacked the car, then waved goody-by, leaving the exciting salt-water ecology behind and turning back to the familiar but, I'm sorry to say, still smoky mountain ecology of home.

When the Smoke Lifted

      When the smoke lifted, even slightly, last week, I immediately left for a quick hike on the Stein Butte trail. I didn't have time to go to the top of the mountain, but I did have three and a half hours, enough time to jam to the top of the ridge and back. From there, I could look onto the Siskiyou Crest and see whether the smoke had lifted enough to hike in the Red Buttes yet.

Still smoky in the Red Buttes, but the smoke cleared several days later.

       In my hurry to get on the trail I didn't think about bug repellent. To my regret. The trail was plagued with tiny flies that bombard the eyes. I was constantly having to bat at them, slapping them against my face, which was slick with sweat but not quite as wet as on an even hotter day a few years ago, when the flies I slapped against my face probably died not from the blow but from drowning. It was awkward, now, dragging both hiking poles from one hand while I swatted flies with the other. Then I would walk normally until the flies started swarming into my eyes again and I had to start swatting again.

      I was hiking in a short summer dress, just what I happened to have on when I dashed from the house. There was no one else on the trail; I was certainly alone in the woods. Maybe, I thought, if I could make a hood over my face, I could keep the flies out.

      It worked. I could see a score of flies in front of my face, but they wouldn't enter the tent. The disadvantage was that I had to keep my head bowed to keep the hood in place, so I couldn't see much around me. But there were more advantages than disadvantages. Mainly, of course, I was keeping the flies out of my eyes. Hiking only in my underwear, I was cooler. Because vision is a factor in the perception of steepness, I wasn't aware of how hard I was climbing. Because I couldn't see familiar landmarks, I couldn't estimate how much farther I had to go and was at the top before I knew it.

      The air was still smoky over the Red Buttes that day, but a few days later it cleared enough that  I set off for a hike in the wilderness with Mike. We had a fabulous hike, 10 miles to a sweet little lake, one of the jewels of the Siskiyous, where I had a couple of delicious swims and was able to hug one of my favorite trees.

      While the air has been clear, I have worked in the garden and taken hikes. I have taken walks around my house again. I ate lunch on the deck (until the yellow jackets drove me inside). I saw Love's Labour's Lost at the outdoor Elizabethan theater in Ashland. I breathed deeply and grew drunk on blue skies. Today the smoke has returned, but like everyone else in southern Oregon, I have gone around with enormous gratitude in my heart for a few days of breathable air and a well exercised body.