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.

Put This in Your Pipe and Smoke It

     Smoke is a gray-white pall on the blue sky. Outside my window it bleaches the small, foreground peak of Little Humpy into the gray-white silhouette of the larger, looming bulk of Humpy Mountain. The horizon line of the mountain itself bleaches into the sky. In the valley, smoke masks the mountains.

Humpy Mountain from my front deck on a day when the smoke wasn't too bad

     Day after day, ever since lightning started fires in southern Oregon on July 14, the air in the Rogue Valley has been "unhealthy" or "hazardous." I even heard that, for a day or so, the air quality in the Rogue Valley was the worst in the world, worse, even, than in Jodhpur, India, worse than in Tangshan, China. It's true that the valley's infamous inversion layer traps air on the valley floor, but most of the time this summer, the air hasn't been much better up here on the mountain. There's no such thing as being above the smoke this summer. I might as well smoke a pack of cigarettes as hike for an hour these days. Day after day I stay indoors, writing, sewing, reading. I debate which is worse: exercising in bad air or sitting around the house with no exercise.

      People suffer from depression and weariness. Eyes water, throats rasp, heads ache. Businesses suffer. No one is walking around town; no one is shopping or eating in restaurants. The cost to southern Oregon, I hear, has been in the millions of dollars. People don't want to float the Rogue River or hike in the mountains. The Shakespeare Festival in Ashland has refunded hundreds of tickets for canceled performances in its outdoor theater. The Britt Festival in Jacksonville, with its summer "concerts under the stars," has done the same. 

      No one wants to vacation here in 100-degree weather and smoke-filled skies. No one will think it beautiful here. But it is so beautiful here. I do so love it. My beloved home is suffering a very bad,  but temporary illness.

      And then the wind shifted. Yesterday, here on the mountain the sky was a very pale blue. Humpy looked hazy, not smoke-choked. In the valley, to my surprise, the sky was a normal blue. Jacksonville was teeming with people. Ecstatically happy crowds were carrying chairs and blankets to the Britt Gardens for the concert under, yes, under the stars, except that last night the concert was under the full moon. I went to sleep last night ogling at a pure white full moon shining through clean air into my bedroom window, and I woke up to a day of brilliant sunshine and a true-blue sky. Tomorrow I'm hiking in the Red Buttes Wilderness, my beautiful back yard.

A Visit from Mr. Bear

      While I was gone in June, first to Sweden and then hiking on Corsica, I asked four nearby neighbors if each would take a week to come to my house once or twice just to check on things. I would water the deck flowers with a timer, so there wouldn't really be anything to do. I just wanted there to be a presence around the house.  

      The four neighbors smilingly agreed and worked out a schedule of who would be here when. I left for Corsica without any worries, either about my house or about an imposition on my neighbors. I didn't think they would have much to do except just to check on things.

     When I got home, Joan told me that one day when she came to check on things, the flower boxes along the front windows were in disarray. A bear had clamored over them to look in the house. The paw prints were evidence: on the window of the writing nook, on the next, bigger window, on the window of my sewing room  

Here the smudge is clearly in the shape of a bear claw, above the sewing machine.

– muddy paw marks at each stop. Then the bear ambled around the corner of the house and stood on his hind legs to peer into the glass door of the bathroom, leaving a smear of six-foot-high paw marks. 

The bear paw mark is in the upper left quadrant. The rest is reflection from outside.

       Joan turned the flower boxes right-side up and cleaned up the loose dirt. When I got home, I wouldn't have known the bear had been there except for the muddy prints on the windows. But when I told Joan how grateful I was to her, she said the person I should really thank was Lauri.

      It was Lauri who thought to make sure all the doors were locked. She found the bathroom door unlocked. She locked it.

      How could I have been so careless as to leave a door unlocked? I remembered going around to all the doors and checking that they were locked before I left the house. 

      Then I remembered: When I got to the car as I was leaving home, I realized I hadn't put my contact lens in, so I came back to the house, and instead of going in the front door, as I generally would, I went in the bathroom door so I wouldn't have to take off my shoes to walk through the house. I seldom use the bathroom as an entrance to the house, so I wasn't doing a habitual thing, and I didn't think to relock the door. I inserted my contact lens, walked out, got in the car, and took off for Sweden.   

      I shudder to think of the damage the bear would have done if Lauri hadn't locked the door for me. In the first place, I think a bear knows how to pull a handle down to open a door, and even if he didn't, it would have been easy for his paw to hit the door handle as he dropped his legs from his upright position – the door would have opened and in he would have gone. He would have wrecked my pantry, at the very least, but probably the whole house, just for the fun of it.

      As it was. though, everything looked normal when I came home. I wouldn't have known there was any bear danger if Joan hadn't told me and I hadn't seen the verifying paw prints of the would-be break-in culprit. So let this be a lesson to me: always, always, double-check that the doors are locked.

      

Hospice at Its Most Beautiful

      There is nothing more true about the life of each of us than that it will end in our death. Some of us will be fortunate enough to plan that death day. In Oregon we can write an advanced directive, with instructions about resuscitation (or none), at what point in an illness we wish not to undergo further invasive treatments, and, to a certain extent, where we will die.

      The ideal, of course, is to die at home (that's my plan), but in the Rogue Valley the Southern Oregon Friends of Hospice have provided a beautiful alternative for people who either live alone or need more care than they can be given in their homes. Instead of dying in the hospital, with its sterile atmosphere and attempts to keep life going at all costs, some of which are disproportionately high, both financially and emotionally, there is the Holmes Park House. I was invited there last week to see where I might fit into its literary component.

      A literary component? In a place where people have come to die, where residents are admitted with, by estimate, two weeks yet to live? 

      It's a beautiful idea. The library is a pleasant room, with comfortable chairs, soft colors, views onto the gardens, and books on the shelves lining the walls.

Sitting in that room to talk about how I as a writer would fit into the philosophy and care of this hospice house, I thought, yes. I would like, at the end of my life, to sit here for an hour or so, surrounded by books. Books have been a part of my entire life. At home I would be among them. What a pleasure it would be to sit among them still.

      And that is the attitude of the Holmes Park House. What would make a person most comfortable at the end of her life? What would he most enjoy? What would she like to look at from her bed as she lay dying – the Siskiyou Mountains? The gardens? What is his favorite food? The cook will prepare it. Would she like a small group of singers to come to her room? Would he like me to read to him? Would she like the swimming therapist to take her in his arms and float her gently in the water? (Oh, yes!) And while she is floating in the water, would she like him, a former opera singer, to sing to her? 

      The Holmes Park House was the mansion of Harry Holmes, of Medford's Harry and David. In 1939 Harry hired Paul R. Williams, a prominent African-American architect from L.A., to build a 5500-square-foot house with five bedrooms and 6 1/2 bathrooms on South Modoc Drive in Medford.

      When the Southern Oregon Friends of Hospice bought the house, they had an architecturally compatible addition built, adding 5,723 square feet with eight private rooms, each with a patio or small balcony. Today the Holmes Park House is a 12-bed, stand-alone, residential care facility dedicated to hospice and comfort care.

      It is a beautiful place to die. The house and grounds are beautiful, with the soothing atmosphere of grass and trees, the uplifting colors of flowers, the views over the park and into the distant mountains. Residents are treated with respect. To the staff, who move with the smoothness and grace of the not-overworked, each is an individual with a particular personality, with the same kinds of desires he or she had during life. Being there, I wanted to be a part of that important and beautiful aspect of life, the easing into death. I decided to be a volunteer at the Holmes Park House, to read to residents in their rooms, if they like, or to give readings to the more mobile residents and their families or to staff and volunteers. It will be my pleasure to provide a moment of happiness through books with a person at the far end of life and those who care so gently and lovingly for them.

The Last Days on the GR20

     When Mike and I arrived at the end point of the GR20, after seven days of hiking and many strenuous miles on rocky trails,

through narrow rock passes, up spine-sharp ridges and down steep stony paths, we walked through a small village to La Tonnelle, a large restaurant where we could wait for a shuttle to the nearest town. Already sitting on the porch with backpacks set aside and beers in hand were a number of people we recognized – the young man with a topknot; the enormously boring, endlessly chatting man from the dinner table the night before; the young woman hiking with her white-haired father; the young couple and older man hiking together with whom we had leap-frogged for the last several days on the trail. The older man and I would recognize each other with a nod.

      When Mike and I walked up, everyone broke into applause.

      I liked being honored for my accomplishment, but I also wanted to protest: "Oh, but we only did the last half!" Immediately, though, I realized two things. One was that many of these hikers would have known that we joined the trail at Vizzavona, and they still thought we deserved congratulations. The other was that what I had just done was difficult enough, that it had taken strength, courage, and stamina, and that I had displayed all three. I accepted the applause with an exhausted smile. The best tribute came from the man who had exchanged nods of recognition with me when we passed on the trail. He kissed his fingertips and tossed them towards me, with a smile and a nod.

      Mike and I sat at a table and ordered a beer for Mike and an ice cream for me. Mike downed one beer and immediately ordered another. We had a good lunch (not charcuterie; not Corsican cheese), and I had a second ice cream. Our backpacks were on the floor, my boots under the table.

      We had hiked fifty-four miles, an average of eight or nine miles a day. Much of the trail took us steeply up to a razor-edge ridge. I had to pull myself up rock steps too high for my step, then to hop down the same kind of rock step on the other side, leaning hard on my hiking poles to keep the weight off my feet as I landed. We hiked through stunning scenery – pastoral views of grassy hillsides with a sparkling river running through them; passes set so tight in jagged peaks you couldn't imagine how to get down the other side; mountaintops from which I could see the Mediterranean on both sides of the island, sparkling blue in the distance; beech forests and pine forests and large, rushing rivers we had to ford on foot.

 At noon on the last day, a sweaty day, we came to a river with a series of large pools stair-stepping up the mountain. Every hiker who came by took a dip. One young man walked in, turned around, and fell back-first into the water. "Done with style," Mike commented. My style was to swim, so I soon left the bottom pool that everyone else was in and climbed to the next pool up, where only two men sat on the rocks at its edge. There I swam laps (six or seven strokes each). Later at La Tonnelle, they recognized me and called me "la femme dans l'eau."

      There were the people we met, the refuges where we had dinner and the tents we slept in. There were the stunning views, the hard climbs, the mountains and the sea. There was the French language, the Corsican culture, the food (some good, some not). There was rain. There was sun. There were clouds, churning black and shining white. There was the full moon rising big and round, thin and insubstantial over the mountain at Refuge Matalza. There were the rivers I soaked my feet in, wild boars (feral pigs, really) snorting in the ferns,

clusters of red-roofed villages, like beads tossed into the mountains, in the valleys below us. There were wildflower displays to sweeten any day. And there was always the trail, rocky, steep, twisty, drawing us on, day by day,  to its end at La Tonelle.

      It was the GR20 that merited applause.