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.