A Teacher's Reward

    In early August I got a phone call from a former student, Karina, whom I had taught not in my college classes but in a multi-age class at an alternative school in the Applegate in the 1980s.

Karina (center) and me in clothes we had made and with 
masks and cloths we had printed for a unit on Africa.

Now she is a grown woman, of course, with her own marriage and children and a home in Trinidad, California.

    Karina had read my book of poems about Mike (From Friend to Wife to Widow: Six Brief Years) and liked it so much she just picked up the phone and called me, regardless of our not having been in touch for decades. I was so glad to hear from her! We talked for a long time, about Mike and about her son, who had died earlier that same year. Karina urged me to visit her in Trinidad.

    So I did.

    I met her daughter, Olivia, who is my granddaughter's age. (Her husband wasn't home.) We did some hikes together and she cooked some great meals and we talked and shared stories and laughed about the past, and it was all so much fun she called her sister, Laurel, after I had left to tell her about it. 

    Laurel had been my student, too.

Laurel is in the center. 1981

She had been in many of the plays I wrote and produced with the Applegate Youth Theater. She lives in Portland now. She was enchanted with Karina's tales of our time together and told Karina she would love for me to visit her, too.

    So, last week, I did.

    Laurel met me at the door with a big smile. She looked beautiful in a dark print dress. I would have known her anywhere—that same gorgeous black hair, that beautiful dimple in the right cheek, those bright eyes, that bubbly smile. She offered me tea and fresh-from-the-oven banana bread. Her husband, Brandon, and teen-age daughter, Ursula, sat with us at the table. Stories flew back and forth—about the plays Laurel was in with the Applegate Youth Theater, about their travels in France, about my graduate school days. All three of them made me feel completely welcomed and loved. I was charmed and touched and warmed all over again by how much I loved Laurel.

    If Karina had made that connection for me, the other person from those days, whom I hadn't seen for thirty years, made the connection on her own. Kelly, the same age as my son, Ela, had grown up on this same isolated mountainside I live on still. She was often at my house during those times, and if she was something of a surrogate daughter to me, I was a fill-in mother when she needed me, too.

Kelly, is second from the left, bottom row. Ela is to her right.
I am behind her, to her left. Horizon School. 1981.

    It was a wonderful reunion with Kelly. I met her husband and two sons, and she urged me to visit her on her farm near Portland. She invited me to the grape-crush party they have every year at harvest season.

    So while I was in Portland to visit Laurel and other friends, I visited Kelly, too, at her beautiful farm outside of Portland. She, too, made me feel loved and welcomed, and, as with Laurel and Karina, I loved seeing her as a mature woman—her competence, the tastefulness with which she decorated her house, the hospitality with which she served her guests, who all went home with jars of grape juice. I loved being in her gardens and in her charming guest house.

    The care with which Karina, Kelly, and Laurel welcomed me into their adult lives touched me to the core. Karina showing me special places on the coast, Kelly loading me with gifts, Laurel's beautiful dress and banana bread and wanting her husband and daughter to know me, too—I was deeply touched by these gestures. Teachers like to think they have had an influence on their students, but, of course, we rarely get to know whether that's true. Here were three instances of reconnecting with students whom I had loved when they were children and whom I loved all over again, knowing them as adults. In those reunions, in the enthusiasm these women expressed for seeing me again, in our tales of our shared pasts, I felt that our teacher-student relationship had been as meaningful to them as it had been to me, a relationship that has now matured into a lasting friendship between adults.

    

Building Arguments

     In Writing 122 classes at Rogue Community College and the University of Oregon, I taught how to write an argumentative paper: how to build an argument for a position on a controversial issue. One of the important aspects of building that argument is to understand the point of view of the opposite side from the one you've taken. You can't just argue for your position. You have to answer the arguments of the opposite position.

    Yesterday I listened to an interview with Liza Wiemer on the NPR program "Think," about her new young adult novel, The Assignment. In this book, a high school teacher, teaching a unit on World War II, gives his students an assignment to argue for the Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews. In the novel, two students, both seniors, take a stand against the assignment itself, finding it reprehensible to build an argument in favor of such a position that cannot be morally justified.

    I haven't read the book, but apparently the point is how heroic those two students, Cade and Logan, were in defying the assignment, the teacher, the principal, and everyone else who thought it was a fair assignment. The interviewer didn't ask Wiemer the question that nagged at me throughout the program: What was wrong with the assignment? I know what is wrong with the Final Solution, but what was wrong in asking students to look squarely at it? Wiemer spoke about similar real-life assignments she felt just as strongly were inappropriate.

    But what's wrong with asking students to look closely at bad arguments? Is there any justification for genocide? No, of course not. Is there any benefit in trying to understand how people try to justify it or other acts of evil? Of course there is! Otherwise, we're just saying, "I'm right, and you're wrong" without any examination of arguments and evidence or any attempt to understand why people act as they do. 

    What would I have done if a student had wanted to write a WR 122 paper arguing that the Final Solution was a good idea? I think I would have helped that student look at the proposed arguments and see where they didn't stand up to reasonable examination. I did this sometimes with students: helped them see that to write a paper upholding a certain point of view might not result in a good paper (and a good grade) because the evidence wouldn't support their thesis. Isn't that what the teacher in Wiemer's novel would be doing with his assignment—helping students see by their own research and critical thinking that the Final Solution had no good arguments in its favor? The summary of the novel on Amazon.com calls the assignment a "school debate." Why wouldn't it have been better for Cade and Logan, instead of trying to get the assignment erased, to dig into the ideas behind the Final Solution and expose their falsity, cruelty, and reprehensibility? 

    I think we must not be afraid to look at bad ideas and see them for what they are. Maybe the assignment was a bad idea, but the interview with Wiemer didn't present reasons to prove it. Both Wiemer and the interviewer assumed the assignment was the wrong one.  I'm not so sure. Wiemer is Jewish. Would that have been a factor in her position? Yes, it was a terrible thing to murder the Jews. That doesn't mean it is a terrible thing to try to understand how people came to think it was a good idea. 

    Mike, my husband, who died in 2020, was also Jewish. I wish he were still alive so I could discuss these ideas with him.

Carberry Creek swimming hole

    While my son was growing up, I used to go with him to a nearby swimming hole. The water was deep and green, the rocks smooth for picnicking on or high for jumping from. It was a jewel of a place. The only people I ever saw there were the friends who lived on its creek. I once took a class of kids I was teaching in a multi-age classroom for an outing at that swimming hole. The sight of children swarming over the rocks and jumping into the water under the looming cliff of the mountain—it was a picture from a children's book, a scene of the paradise of nature and innocence.

    The swimming hole is large enough for a real swim, round and round. It is deep enough for the daring to dive off the high rock at its edge. I did the last high dive of my life from that rock. I wrenched my neck when I hit the water and decided my high-diving career was over. 

    Then "city folks" discovered my swimming hole. It began to be trashed—plastic bags on the rocks, broken glass in the crevices, toilet paper in the woods. Once my son and his stepbrother were carefully picking up the broken glass when two macho guys who were there, drinking beer, looked at the two good-deed teen-agers and deliberately tossed their bottles onto the rocks, scattering broken glass. People like that were invading my paradise.

    Now, all summer, every summer, I see cars parked at the top of the road to the swimming hole. I never go there any more.

    The last time I wanted to go there, many years ago, I parked on the main, gravel road and started walking down the steep, deeply rutted road to the creek. I was alone; it was early evening. Although there were no cars parked on the gravel road, the access road can be navigated in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. I began getting weird vibes. Was I sensing something dangerous? Or was I just jumpy? I'll never know because I decided to trust my instincts and forego my swim. I turned around and went home and never went back to my favorite swimming hole again. It had been ruined.

    A few days ago I was on the road that goes by the swimming hole and suddenly yearned to see it again. How would it have changed? Was it still idyllic? There were no cars parked on the road. It was too late in the season for anyone to want to be there. I parked on the gravel road and started down the trail. I got no freaky vibes. I walked the ten-minute trail to the creek. 

    And there I entered Eden again. It was as beautiful as ever. No time had passed since I had been there with my son. It was as it used to be. There was no trash, no broken glass. The water was pristine, deep, and green. The little waterfall was as full as it ever was; no drought was affecting this creek. It was the idyll I used to know.

    I took off my clothes and went for swim. The water was as bracingly cold as I remembered. 

Water in the Midst of Drought

    I know we're in a drought here in southern Oregon. I know it when I see maple leaves turning brown, not yellow and way too soon, looking tired and dry with crumbly edges. I know it when I look at madrone trees, whose blossoms made me so ecstatic this spring (see blog post on May 20) but whose berries are not the abundant bright red bundles I had expected. Instead, they are shriveled hard knobs hanging on twigs before they drop. The trees look stressed and unhappy.

    Nevertheless.

    I was on two trails close to my house last week, while the Rogue Valley was socked in with smoke and my side of the mountain enjoyed blue skies. First I went up the O'Brien Creek trail to the Boundary trail, which starts on Windy Gap, to my right, and stretches south through the Siskiyous for 15 1/2 miles. I usually turn here towards Windy Gap and Grayback Mountain, but this time, for a change, I turned left, to hike as close to the junction with the Oregon Caves trail as I had time for. 

    A few days after I hiked O'Brien Creek, I climbed up the Sturgis Fork trail to meet the same Boundary trail, further south. From there I could have turned right, as I usually do, to hike to the top of Mt. Elijah and on to Oregon Caves, meeting, this time, the ghost of myself from a few days earlier. Instead, though, I turned left, on a part of the trail I had never done before. I was curious to see what it was like.

    What I discovered on both hikes was (1) views in both directions of a lot of smoke in the mountains and valleys, which made me grateful for the blue sky over my head, 

Gone-to-seed but still beautiful fireweed

 on the Boundary Trail south of Sturgis Fork

and (2) a lot of water flowing down the mountain. Both trails cross numerous small creeks. None of these becks flowed sluggishly. All were lined with thick riparian vegetation, the greenery hanging low over the gurgling streams. All sang their songs as they tumbled down the steep hillside. All looked as they always have when I hike the O'Brien Creek and Sturgis Fork trails. There was no sign of drought.

    The O'Brien Creek trail crosses a couple of steep meadows, where the big-tree forest, with its open understory, gives way to the rampant low-growing greenery of wide wet areas streaking down the mountain, a swath of color through the dark trunks of the forest. At one place on the trail, I noticed that though greenery was tumbling downhill to my left, the ecosystem on the uphill side of the trail provided only the drier soils in which the big trees thrive. There had to be a spring just below the trail. 

    Listening carefully, I could hear it bubbling on the hillside below me.

    I wanted to see that spring. 

    I climbed down the hillside, picking my way carefully through the plants, watching for holes in the spongey ground, following the sound of quietly bubbling water until, parting the leaves with my hiking pole, I found the spring, a deep dark hole out of which poured water, enough to keep a wide track of soil wet enough for a veritable cloak of wetlands vegetation, following the spring's small streamlet all the way down the mountain. 

    What a blessing: water pouring out of the ground. I paused there for a long moment of worship and thanksgiving before continuing along the trail.

The Influence of Poetry

    I memorized my first poem in third grade, a poem that so influenced me—those rhymes and rhythms, those images!— I still remember it, though I'll admit it took some hard work to dredge it from that ancient memory. I didn't look for it on the internet because I thought that would spoil the fun, but after I recalled the whole thing, I did look it up, so I can tell you that it's called "Indian Children" and is by Annette Wynne. It influenced me towards a life-long love of poetry, and of memorizing poetry, too, but also, more unconsciously, it influenced me by its "message": the recognition of other ways, the nonjudgemental tone, the emphasis on nature (of the Indian ways). 

      Later, when I was a teenager, struggling, like all teenagers, with what kind of person I wanted to be, I owned a thin volume of poems called 101 Famous Poems. (I still have the book.) I read the poems in this anthology again and again. Many of them I memorized. Some of the poems influenced me with their exhortations about how to live, such as Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"—

 

        "Tell me not in mournful numbers

        Life is but an empty dream

        For the soul is dead that slumbers,

        And things are not what they seem.

        Life is real! Life is earnest!

        And the grave is not its goal.

        To dust thou art, to dust returnest

        Was not said of the soul,

and Rudyard Kipling's "If"—"If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you," which continues with similar two-line conditional clauses that eventually end, I'm sorry to say, with "[If you can do all this] you'll be a man, my son." The gender reference grated, but I managed to ignore it in order to apply the advice to my own life. 

    My romantic, and searching, teen-age soul relished this kind of poetry I found in this book, whether at the poetic level of Shakespeare (Hamlet's soliloquy) and Emily Dickinson ("If I can stop one heart from breaking,/I shall not live in vain") or of Frank L. Stanton, who gave similar advice in worse poetry ("If you strike a thorn or a rose/Keep a-goin'/If it rains or if it snows/Keep a-goin'). In trying to understand life, I delved into the poems of death, such as William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis," with its love of nature, to which, the poem says, we return when we die.  I memorized poem after poem of this ilk, and if I didn't end up understanding life, at least these poems influenced me to think about life and what it meant and what I should make of mine. You can't say such words to yourself over and over without their having an influence on you. Poetry does that.

    Being a teenager and therefore between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, I was as influenced by the book's poems that taught their lessons with a lighter touch—"The Spider and the Fly," by Mary Howitt, for instance—as by poems of the gravity of "Thanatopsis." One of the wonderful things about reading this book at that age was that I responded entirely to the poem itself, regardless of the poet, who might have been as famous as Shakespeare or as unknown as Mary Howitt. I was also unsophisticated enough to not know whether the poem was good or bad—maudlin, sappy, sing-song, as some of them are—none of it mattered. If I liked the poem, I read it over and over and often memorized it just so I could say those lines— that beautiful language, that wisdom—whenever they occurred to me. Even today lines from those poems float through my mind from time to time. Isn't that what influence is?

    Besides the poems with life lessons, I was influenced, in the same anthology, by poems that played with language, such as Edgar Allen Poe's monotonously melodic poem "The Bells." I liked the poems that used a vernacular ("It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home/A heap of sun an' shadder, and ye sometimes have t' roam…"). I recited one of those vernacular poems, "Knee-Deep in June," by James Whitcomb Riley, in the high school variety show, dressed in overalls and straw hat, in keeping with the narrator of the poem. 

    "Knee-Deep in June" like "Indian Children," also illustrates a third influence from poetry: a relationship with nature. Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us" and "Daffodils," Bryant's "Thanatopsis," Sidney Lanier's "Song of the Chattahoochee," among others in 101 Famous Poems. Later in my literary studies and grown-up world the exhortative life-is-real-life-is-earnest poems fell out of favor with me, but the influence of nature poems has been a constant. 

    Nature poems and language-conscious poems have had the biggest influence not only in my life but in my writing. Gerard Manley Hopkins—huge influence. Wordsworth. Robinson Jeffers. At the same time, I am still, as I was as a teen-ager, influenced by poems that deal with life's depths: Kenneth Patchen's heartbreakingly beautiful and deeply despondent prose-poem "I Have No Place to Take Thee"; Wordworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us"; Hopkins's "Binsley Poplars," about the felling of a grove of his favorite trees, in which he says, "Oh, if we but knew what we do/When we delve and hew/Hack and rack the growing green." I can see the influence of such poems in how I write and what I write about, as I strive and strive to reach such beauty and such depth.

    Finally, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, of the fourteenth century, and Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene, of the sixteenth, both of which I studied thoroughly in college and graduate school, influenced me in the same way "Indian Children" did—by showing me, in the language of poetry, different ways of living and being. These two book-length poems touch on all aspects of life—the good and the evil, our struggles to live good lives, our loves and loyalties and fallacies, all in a beautiful poetry (oh, that vernacular!) with characters and plot and everything else that makes good literature influence how we live. 

    I love these great poems, as I still love a lot (but not all) of those earlier poems that influenced me. But this isn't a list of my favorite poems, although, of course, some of these are also some of my favorites, but a list of poems that have made a difference in my life. For them I am grateful.