A Fantasy of Canoeing down the Susquehanna River in 2022

The new year is a canoe embarking, say, on the Susquehanna River
early in the new year.
    (The Susquehanna because I like its sound

    and because its newness-to-me matches a new-to-me year.)

I paddle eagerly.

When I pass the Halls of Congress (which are not on the Susquehanna, but never mind),

I hear harmonious strains of murmuring voices working towards a common goal of public good.

In the cities I see hospitals with enough beds to care for the ill—

    no COVID cases, no sufferers of mass shootings.

I pass people of all tones of the human-skin rainbow picnicking at riverside parks.

I hear in the cafes such a chatter of multiple languages it rumbles like the river.

Around one bend I glimpse a pack of wolves,

    around another a cougar, then a herd of elk

    passing through wildlife corridors on their expanded ranges.

When the Susquehanna winds through forests, I am welcomed by birdsong, not chased away by

    chainsaws' roar.

When it passes through meadows, where dragonflies flitter across the bow,

    I witness a mass migration of monarchs, headed for Mexico.

The sky is so clear I can see, when I look behind me, condors in California skies.

When I turn my binoculars towards Asia, I see herds of elephants, prowling tigers, and unicorned

    rhinoceroses in flourishing populations.

I navigate with skill the rough-and-tumble rapids the canoe takes me through.

When the river runs calm, I slip into its silky clean water and swim.

Inevitably, I pass through hurricanes, fires, and snowstorms, patterns of nature brought back to scale by

     common-sense responses to climate change.

Rain falls on the canoe in the Susquehanna year, but the river doesn't flood.

When the sun shines, it is not a ferocious, moisture-sucking fiend but a gentle embrace.

When I come to a mountain near year's end, I stop to ski on an abundance of perfect snow.

One more bend in the river, and the canoe noses onto shore.

I disembark, thinking not how much I liked the new year

but how much like years ago

I'd like the new year to be.

  

Hiking by the Light of the Full Moon

    I was coming off the East ART trail late Saturday afternoon when I passed two people just starting their hike. "It's awfully late," I thought, "to be starting a hike." Then, in a flash, I understood. They were going to do a moonlight hike.

    What a brilliant idea.

    As soon as I got home, I called the two people who had planned to hike the Mule Mountain trail with me the next day. What about if we started our hike at 2:00 pm instead of 9:30 am, I suggested, which would put us on Baldy Peak around 5:00, and we could hike back to the trailhead under the full moon? 

    They thought it was a brilliant idea.

    As we started on the trail, the late-afternoon, waning sunshine cast a lovely light for hiking. Farther up the trail, we stopped to watch a hawk circle and soar in the canyon below us, then climb, circling, into the sky. As we watched, I recited Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, "The Windhobver": "...dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his riding/ of the rolling, level, underneath-him-steady air/and striding, high there/ how he wrung upon the rein of a wimpling wing." Hopkins's words and rhythms matched the soaring hawk before us. 

    We got to Baldy just as the sun was going down over the still-snowy points of the Siskiyou Crest.

The golden globe poised full over the peaks, then sank, spreading pink into a few wisps of clouds over Grayback Mountain and a deepening yellow all along the Crest. Turning around, we caught the moon just rising above the nose of Baldy, full, large, already silver-brilliant.

    In the suddenly chilled air, we put on wool hats and warmer jackets, then sat on the hillside to eat our snacks, reveling in the wild beauty of our surroundings. (Wordsworth: "'Tis a beauteous evening, calm and free/…The broad sun is sinking down in its tranquility.") It was close to 6:00 when we started back down the trail.

    At first we had both the vestiges of sunlight from the afterglow on the horizon and the ever sharpening white light of the moon, enough for us to make out the rocks and rough spots on the trail. As the sky darkened, Orion twinkled over the Siskiyou Crest. Long striated clouds began to accumulate from the east, glowing in the moonlight. The moon behind the bare branches of oak trees threw grotesque shadows on the hillside. The tops of one clump of bushes glowed so whitely in the moonshine they looked like blossoms. When we left the open hillside and entered the deep forest, we were plunged into darkness and reluctantly turned on our headlamps, sacrificing the magic of walking in moonlight for the safety of better vision. 

    We stopped frequently to marvel at the beauty of the mountains in the full moon. I thought how rare this was, to be so deep in the mountains in winter moonlight. We heard a barred owl far across the canyon. We watched the glittering stars, the clouds moving in, the mountain ridges hulking dark under the bright lights in the sky. Once Margaret, who was in front, stopped, perplexed by two pinpoints of light ahead. Were they animal eyes, reflected from our headlamps? The eyes stared, disappeared, came back, went away, reappeared lower—owls turning their heads, looking over their shoulders, then back at us. We passed respectfully under their tree.

    It was after eight when we got back to our cars. There was frost on the trail. We said quick good-byes and drove off. As soon as I got home, I took a long Epsom salts bath, had a beer, went to bed, and slept dreamlessly for many hours, as I had already been traveling a magical, moonlight dream in the Siskiyous.

Was That All the Winter I'll Get?

     I know it's just the middle of January, but already I am thinking past tense: "We had a wonderful winter this year—two and a half feet of snow on the ground at my house, skiing for three days from my back door, another weekend of superb backcountry skiing with the Grants Pass Nordic Club in the Cascades between Medford and Klamath Falls."

The snow was deep and cold enough to stick heavy on the trees.

    It was over in two weeks. Already, it feels like the end of March. Every day clouds amass, then dissipate in a blue sky. Day after day the temperatures hover in the forties or above, and no precipitation falls. The next time I skied with the Nordic Club, the following weekend from the great ski just mentioned, the warmer weather had already set in, there had been no new snow, and skiing conditions were terrible. After good skiing up the open road,

On the road, just before heading downhill on a narrow trail

we entered the woods for the downhill return. The trail was narrow, with hidden ice clumps under the snow and treacherous icy stretches under the trees. Skiers were falling, one after another. In one place, we took off our skis to get down the incline, but stepping thigh-deep in the snow wasn't easy, either. One skier called it the worst ski ever. Another said that to call it technical was an understatement. (I did kind of like the challenge to my skills, though, and was pleased that I was one of the two who didn't fall.)

    Since then—no snow, no rain. I expect any day that trees will start blooming and birds returning. It all feels wacky.

    Many years ago, I heard an interview with an Aleut woman who talked about how the warming weather was affecting the migration patterns of the caribou herds her people depend on. "Global warming for you," she said, "means you have to go farther to find a place to ski. For us, it's our livelihood."

    If the winter of '21-'22 has passed already, we in southern Oregon are in as much trouble as the Aleuts. Snow is, yes, the skiing I enjoy so much, but it is also our livelihood. Lack of snow means a lack of water in the summer. It means drought. It means fire. 

    And yet the same weather pattern continues as far into the future as the weather seers predict: sunny, partly cloudy, sunny. No precipitation. As one day drops off the left side of the spectrum, a new tenth day appears at the right with the same sun and half-sun icons. This is winter only by the calendar.

    I used to enjoy the blue-sky days of early February. After continual rain in November and December, after our one or two heavy snowfalls, it put a lilt in the heart to see the sun. I loved those sunny, crisp-cold days, which are not what we're getting now. We're getting sunny, dry, too-warm days, and the sun doesn't feel like a reward for undergoing the hardship of cold but a bitter told-you-so.

    Am I worried? Yes. Do I despair? Yes. Do I see hope for a return to good weather patterns? Not much. I will do whatever is asked of me to avert the disasters of climate change, or, at this point, to mitigate the damage. But it seems that nothing is asked of me except to give up skiing. 

Taking Care of My Spiritual Self

      Over a cup of coffee at my favorite coffee shop, a let's-get-acquainted friend talked long about the importance of Buddhism in his life. Then he said, "What is your spiritual path?"

    A long pause.

    I hated to admit I didn't have a spiritual path, that I didn't even know what a "spiritual self" is. I shed the  Methodism of my childhood long ago. I flirted with Buddhism while a hippy, but it didn't stick, any more than Methodism had. When I was asked, years ago by a proselytizing evangelist if I were saved, the question struck me as ludicrous. Saved from what? From sin? None of us is saved from sin. We all sin.

    I do know what worship is, though—not necessarily religious, but a sense of reverence, extolment, praise. Worship is what I do—the feeling I have—when I stoop to admire a gentian; when I step under a treetop roof of bird twitters; when I ski through woods with snow-dots on dark trunks and a fire-blue sky patterned through snow-dipped tree tops. When I watch the mist come and go on Humpy Mountain. When the ringtail cat greets me on my back porch or a western tanager flashes red and gold through the woods. When the rain falls long and sweet. When a not-yet-risen sun silvers the long frost-laden tips of a pine tree. 

    Although I cringe when I am told to "have a blessed day," I also know what a blessing is. November blesses me with the brilliant bronze of the Oregon ash just off my deck. This morning I received the blessing of a snow-coat on Humpy. On a hot summer day, I enter the blessing of maple-shade as I walk by the creek. I feel blessed when I have the rare experience of seeing a wolverine in a meadow.

    I know baptism in a high-altitude, cold-water lake. I know ritual in the turn of the seasons. I know hymns in the birds, and the word of God in the bark of the fox. 

    Years ago my sister and brother-in-law came to visit me in my little hand-made house where I lived without electricity for so many years. Bruce was an ordained Methodist minister who taught religion in a Catholic high school in Atlanta. When he returned to Atlanta he told  his students, wanting to expand their idea of religion beyond Christianity, that I lived a religious life. Nature, he said, was my religion.

    I think he was right, but I didn't say as much to my friend at the coffee shop because to say it out loud sounded flippant, and I shied away from a longer explanation. I mumbled something inappropriate, changed the subject, and kept my spiritual self private.