Taking to the River on a Hot Day

    It has been beastly hot. Over 100º in town, I heard. It's not as hot here on the mountain, by maybe ten degrees, but that leaves a whole lot of hot to deal with. Mostly I like to stay indoors with the south windows closed, the north windows open to catch a possible breeze, the fan turning its loyal head from side to side, and a glass of ice water by my side. To get into a car, even to drive to a swimming hole, sounds unbearable.

    But a day's float down the river? That's different! When I was invited, at last-minute notice, to join a one-day, two-raft float trip down the Rogue River "tomorrow," I didn't hesitate. The occasion was a birthday party with people I didn't know who had contacted a rafter they knew who asked a friend I know to row the second raft. With an extra place on that raft, my friend invited me to join them. Whatever I was supposed to do "tomorrow" would have to wait. I was going down the river!

    Could there be a better way to spend a hot day, especially if your friend does the rowing, giving you an entirely relaxed day? Greg scoffed when I commiserated for his hard work. "This is vacation," he said, pulling easily at the oars. 

    Certainly it was for me. All day my feet dangling over the raft in the water kept me cool. I let my eyes wander along the slowly passing shore, catching sight of merganser ducks swimming in a perfectly straight line and geese floating in gaggles. I watched rocks slide under the raft with smooth somnolence and white-tailed eagles soar like distant kites aloft in the wind. Occasionally a great blue heron would glide upriver and land with a silent, graceful fold of its wings at the river's edge. Now and again a kingfisher darted across the river.  Though I was watching closely, I never saw a turtle, but we did see an osprey land in a snag-top nest, from which came the eeping cry of baby ospreys, and the sleek head of an otter gliding through the water. The steep mountains rose on both sides of the river, the quintessential Rogue River sight—sometimes with a skirt of flat land: the willows, then the alders, then the hill-climbing firs, cedars, and madrones. Oaks covered other hills. Some shores were sprinkled with purple sweet peas. Occasionally I slipped into the river to swim alongside the raft.

    A feared afternoon wind never materialized. Greg rowed us serenely through the slow-moving waters, swept us expertly through the rougher waters. The Wild and Scenic Rogue, a four- or five-day float that begins where we disembarked, has a lot of Class III rapids ("medium"), two Class IV rapids ("difficult"), and one Class V ("very difficult"), but our section, from Indian Mary Park to Argo, one stop before the Wild and Scenic embarkation point, has one Class III riffle and eight very fun Class II riffles, which demanded some neat navigating from our captain and pull-in-the-feet action from me, and a bunch of lesser riffles, where the river giggled a bit before slowing down again.

    Both rafts pulled to shore at Jump Rock, where all the young guys and the over-seventy owner of the two rafts climbed the thirty-foot rock to jump off it into the river. The over-seventy-year-old didn't jump. He did a back flip. I made a couple of dives off a low rock. My days of high dives are behind me, but I still love the sudden head-first plunge into cool water.

    It was late afternoon when we ran through the Class III Almeda Riffle just before Argo. Before Greg rowed us to shore, I turned to him. "Can't we keep on going?" I asked. "Can't we go on down the Wild and Scenic Rogue, stay on the river another four days, camp on the shore, go through the canyons, run the big rapids, follow the ospreys and the eagles and swim with the otters? Do we have to go home?"

    He grinned and pulled us ashore.

    Earlier in the day, at Indian Mary Park, where I mostly stood in the river while our captains readied the rafts and ran the shuttle, I watched another group of rafters organizing gear. When I inquired of a man standing next to me, he said they were taking the five-day trip down the Wild and Scenic Rogue. 

    "Oh, you are so lucky!" I said, obviously envious.

    "Come with us!" he said.

    I wish I had said yes. 

    

     

Virginia Visit

     At the end of March my brother was riding his bicycle down a winding mountain road in Virginia, near his home, when his front wheel veered into a ditch and he was thrown over the handlebars, landed on his helmeted head, then lay over a log for half an hour, conscious but unable to move, until someone stopped to help.  (His was the fourth car to pass.)

    Fortunately, no bones were broken, but Lee was paralyzed from the neck down with traumatic spinal injury. I don't know the medical terminology, but the way I put it is that the impact severed the connection between brain and muscle. He was told that some amount of recovery was possible in the first eighteen months, but no one would predict how much. After that, further recovery would be unlikely. No one was talking 100% recovery in those eighteen months. 

    He couldn't even scratch his nose. When he was able to raise his arm, he couldn't aim a fork into his mouth. Brushing his teeth was impossible. Walking? Learn to stand, first. Then learn to shuffle one foot sideways and bring the next one to it. Slow, incremental progress.

    But Lee has a phenomenal support system in his wife and three daughters. He was in good physical shape before the accident and is athletic by inclination. And maybe most important, he has a fierce determination and a willingness to work hard for recovery. He loved his physical, occupational, and recreational therapists and gives them the part of the credit they deserve for his astonishingly rapid improvements.

    I wanted to visit him immediately after the accident, but he said to wait till he could interact with me better. My two sisters also wanted to visit, so we decided to have our "annual" siblings' reunion at Lee's house in Virginia the first week of June. (We missed a year because of COVID)

    By then Lee had been home for almost a month, having been released from ICU after three days ("unhead-of," said his doctors) and from the wonderful rehabilitation center he had been in after that, also sooner than expected. He had been walking for weeks and performing all normal activities. The doctors were now mumbling things about "97-98% recovery," given his rapid improvement in the first two months. 

    Lee himself picked us up at the airport. He was driving the Tesla he had bought before the accident. He looked great. He walked with a hitch in the right hip, but at pretty much a normal pace, and he picked up our bags and threw them in the trunk. He took us to his beautiful house near Charlottesville, and so began a wonderful time with him and his wife, Linda.

Left to right: Diana, Linda, Lee, Sharon, Laura

    We went to the Charlottesville food and crafts market, newly opened after COVID. We ate wonderful meals that Linda, amazing homemaker, had prepared. Lee walked with Sharon, Laura and me around his property: down the wooded hill to the large pasture, across the pasture to the river, along the river and back up to the house, where he demonstrated his hopping: a two-footed leap as far as he can hop. (The trick, with a spinal cord injury, is to land without falling over backwards.) We ate at some of Lee and Linda's favorite restaurants. We walked along the mall and talked about the Charlottesville demonstrations there while Trump was president. Lee hiked with us on an up-and-down, through-the-woods trail at the Ivy Creek Nature Center. Linda, Sharon, Laura, and I hiked twice in Walnut Creek Park, extending one hike longer than anticipated by getting slightly lost among the branching trails. I drove the Tesla. We had a siblings lunch at the beautiful Pippin Hill Winery with its grand vista of Appalachian Mountains.

One evening we sat around the table with Lee and Linda's neighbors, drinking margaritas and having a raucous discussion about books. (It takers a special kind of person to make a discussion about books raucous—or maybe just good margaritas.) It took several days, but Lee, Sharon, Laura, and I finished a jigsaw puzzle. We played anagrams, and the day before my sisters left, we had a very competitive game of canasta, which, I'm sorry to say, Lee and I lost, but barely. Lee could shuffle cards and pick up tiny puzzle pieces and bananagram tiles and put them in place.

The puzzle

    My sisters left on Monday; my plane flew out on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday morning I asked Lee if he could take me to a beautiful place where I could strew some of Mike's ashes. He said he knew just the spot. We could get there in the Tesla.

    What a beautiful ride we had through the Virginia hills. A road closure because of a rockslide took us on smaller, winding, interesting roads. Grand homes sat atop green-spreading fields. Vineyards curved with the contours of the hills. Occasional tight nooks of hills reminded me of my year in Eastern Kentucky, true Appalachia. And then at the top of a hill, just before the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway, was the vista Lee had promised, across a wide valley with tiny buildings and farms and green fields and pastures, and then to the blue ridges of the Appalachians in the distance. I did my ashes ceremony there: reading a poem, saying a few words to Mike; Lee also said some farewell words, and, at a lull in the wind, I threw the ashes onto that scene: another beautiful place where Mike's ashes lie.

Spreading ashes

    After that Lee and I took a hike along the Rivanna River. People were floating down the river in inner tubes. Kids were swinging on a rope swing and dropping into the river while their mothers talked on the shore. The trail was level and hard-surfaced, and Lee was hiking strongly. We walked to a put-in place for rafts, then turned and walked back to the car, three miles in all. About half a mile before the end, Lee was tiring and beginning to waver as though he were off balance. But his balance, centered in the inner ear, is fine. He stumbles and wavers because his muscles in one leg aren't strong enough, yet, to catch him when he wavers. 

    Lee has made such an amazing recovery in so short a time it's easy to forget how much he still needs to regain, how hard he still is working, how important the therapy sessions are, how difficult it is to keep going. He admitted, while I was there, that being injured, not being able to do everything he used to do, all the difficulty walking, the tiredness during the day—it's getting old. He is ready for it to be over, for him to be recovered already. But he doesn't flag in his determination.

    During the hard days of the first stages of recovery, Lee was writing a blog. (His daughter Christine did the typing until he was able to do it himself.) The blog is called "I Can't Yet." It's that "yet" that drives him on. He is already talking about bicycling the Nachez Trace in another year or so. He can do a lot already, but there's still a lot he can't do—yet. Rewatching the videos on his blog, I am amazed to see what a struggle he had, a month ago, just to stand up, with an aide on each side of him, and then to think that I walked three miles with him two weeks ago. (You can access his blog on leecoogle.wixsite.com. It is beautifully written.)

    Much love to and admiration for my brother. He is made of good stuff.

Hiking Mule Creek Canyon

    After being lost among the large trees and ferns of Vashon Island at the end of May (see blog post on June 3) and among the thickly-leaved deciduous trees of the Virginia mountains three weeks later, it was distinctly uncanny to find myself lost last week in the dense vegetation—ashes, firs, maples—in a canyon of the Siskiyou Mountains. If in the first case I was alone and in the second case a follower, this time it was I who was taking a friend on a trail I thought I knew, where another friend had taken me years before, following Mule Creek to Baldy Peak. 

    The weather was perfect and the trail, though long unused, was clear enough. The Mule Creek canyon was lovely—thick with greenery along the creek, dense with undergrowth, and shaded by tall trees from which birds threw out their songs. 

We had to draw ourselves thin in places to get through overbearing poison oak, and, once, a large rattlesnake shook an angry warning as it scooted off the trail into the greens. In one clearing by the creek, where an enormous white Douglas fir log was criss-crossed by dark red trunks of more recently fallen madrone trees, butterflies flittered like prismacolor snowflakes—sisters, blues, tiger swallowtails. Salmon-colored colomia and purple mint bloomed at our feet, and osage orange and ocean spray bloomed white along the creek, which trickled and tinkled and twinkled among moss-covered rocks.

    It was all very good until the trail forked, and I couldn't remember which fork was the right one. A cut log on the uphill side indicated a deliberate trail, so we took that fork.

    Shortly we came upon a broken toilet seat under a makeshift latrine and, just beyond, a fire ring, a left-behind camp chair, and a strange structure with a pole roof and a bundle of stovepipe pieces tied together and attached to a supporting tree. All very strange. And how did the campers get there? The trail we were on continued through the camp, but another possible trail, on what looked like an old road, would take us uphill, though in what seemed like the wrong direction. We decided to stay on the trail we were on

    Soon that trail forked. Then that fork forked. By this time we were marking each turn with limbs on the ground, in case we had to find our way back When the trail we were on finally petered out, we gave up on getting to Baldy and turned to retrace our steps to the trailhead. 

    Immediately we were finding forks we hadn't noticed before. Trails were appearing by magic, animal trails, no doubt, but more distinctly trail-like than most deer trails I have been fooled into taking. Did we come from this trail or that one? Did we really come down this steep hill? We chose slightly wrongly in one place, but, thanks to the limbs we had placed trail junctions, we made our way back to the camp.

    If the campers (hunters, I assume) had not come into their camp this way, they must have come down the road-like trail we didn't follow the first time, so now we took that trail. (Curiosity? Or dogged determination?) We walked on it uphill into drier land and sunshine, a startlingly different ecosystem from the shaded, moist creekside canyon. Oregon sunshine flowered brightly in large clumps along the road, which, we saw now, could not have been the way the hunters came in because two good-sized manzanita trees were blocking access.                 

    But here, at last, we had a vista, and what we were looking at was Baldy Peak. 

Looking through binoculars at Baldy Peak

    Over there?! Couldn't be! Could it? But of course it was Baldy. I recognized the lone pine tree halfway to the top of the butte and the wide, steep slope across which was the Mule Mountain trail. So if that was Baldy, way over there, and we were way over here, we were definitely lost because I had no idea how to get there from where we were.

    From that point on, there was no more indecision, no more trying one trail and then another. We were just going back the way we had come, back through the poison oak, back through the butterfly clearing, back up the hill out of the canyon, back to the trailhead, five and a half hours after we started.

    We had not achieved our goal of hiking to Baldy Peak, but we had had a good time and a great adventure. Margaret held no grudge against me for getting us lost. She hugged me warmly as we parted and said, "We'll inquire about the right path and come back another day."

Hiking on Vashon, II

    Because I have a poor sense of direction, getting lost has always been a nagging fear when I'm in the wilderness. If I have a hiking partner, I'll rely on that person's directions, no matter how strongly my body is telling me to go the other way, because my body is wrong about 98 percent of the time. If I hike alone, I stay on the trails, and if I'm in a place where a multitude of trails cross, I have a map. Hiking partners are always amazed at how easily I get confused. My internal compass is broken. 

    Last week, while I was on Vashon Island, Washington, visiting my son, Ela, and family, Ela was meeting a friend for a mountain bike ride in Dockton Forest and suggested I do a hike while they do a ride. I would have time to do a more extensive hike than I had done before. (See last week's post.) He pulled up a map of the trail system on my phone and drew a red line on it with his finger, indicating my route. We would meet again at the car in two hours.

    I set out well enough, but soon I found it difficult to figure out where I was in relation to the map. Not all the trails were marked on it, and the red line was imprecise. At one unclear intersection after staring at my phone, wondering if the trail before me was this trail on the map or that one, I finally made what seemed like a good guess and headed uphill. Shortly Ela and his friend rode past me. Ela said I had taken the wrong turn at the questionable intersection, but it didn't matter because I would get to the gravel pit the way I was going. Then he and Scott rode off one way, and I walked on up the trail.

A view of Mt. Rainier and the Puget Sound
just before the gravel pit.

    When I got to the gravel pit, which is large and open to the sea, I headed down into it. It was awesome to be so far below the rim, to look up at the forest, and then to walk to the sea. I contemplated taking my boots off and wading in the water, but when I looked at the time, I saw that I only had half an hour to get back to the car, so from the water's edge, I hiked fast up the hill, following Ela's red line and steaming past three hikers and their two dogs.

    I was not returning the way I had come, but I was following the map. There were another couple of dubious turns, but I was pretty sure I was where I was supposed to be when Ela texted me for an ETA. "About ten minutes," I texted back confidently. I would be back at the car at just about the agreed time.

    And then, suddenly, I was lost. Nothing looked on the ground the way it was supposed to on the map. The forest contained a warren of trails. At every intersection, I tried to make my surroundings match my map, but nothing was making sense. My trail was going parallel to the road, but I didn't know how to get to where the car was in relation to where I thought I was. Fifteen minutes, twenty. Ela texted to know where I was, but I could hardly tell. He suggested I send him the GPS of the map with the dot of my position on it. I texted back, "How do I do that?" He texted me directions. I sent him the map. He texted back: "You're going the wrong direction." I turned around and went the other way.

        I was genuinely lost, in that I didn't know where I was or how to get where I wanted to be, but I knew I wasn't far from the road and that I would eventually wind my way out of the forest onto the road, where I would be able to tell Ela where I was. Frequent texting with Ela kept me cheerful.

    It took me another hour to get to the road, and even then I wasn't at the car. But at least I could text Ela that I was at such and such an intersection. He said, "Wait there," and in five minutes he drove up in the car.

    It was an hour past our agreed meeting time, and I had added probably four extra miles to my hike. I was sorry to have made Ela wait. But he said he didn't mind. He had just kept making loops with his bicycle, and he loves to ride his bike, especially on the Dockton Forest trails.

    I love those trails, too. Next time, I think, I'll be able to find my way around.

Hiking on Vashon Island, I

    When the weather is good, no place is more beautiful than the Puget Sound, and last week while I was on Vashon Island visiting my son, Ela, and family, the weather was perfect: warm air that settled gently on the skin, a slight breeze that lifted a smile to the face, a blue sky that absolutely sang. And then, of course, there were the birds with their own songs ringing through the air, and the madrone blossoms perfuming it.

    It was perfect weather for hiking, which I like to do, and mountain biking, which Ela likes to do. The first day I was there, we drove across the isthmus Vashon shares with Maury Island to Dockton Forest, twenty-three acres, mostly woodlands, with twelve miles of trails for mountain biking, hiking, and horseback riding. Ela gave me trail directions for my hike: go straight, take the first right, etc., to the overlook, then etc. back to the car. Meanwhile he would be on his bicycle on a different trail.

    The woods of the Dockton Forest flow from one micro-ecosystem to another: an overstory of Douglas fir, with sword ferns underneath; an overstory of madrones with their long red trunks rising from a rising skirt of huckleberry; alders and salal; maples and salmonberry. The combinations vary, but the enchantment is unending. 

    The trails wind through the forest, intersecting, running parallel, up and around, but if you keep going uphill you'll eventually arrive at an old road around a deep gravel pit, far below you, at sea level. The history is complicated, but essentially this is an old gravel pit that was bought a number of years ago by Glacier Northwest, who wanted to revitalize it for extraction of gravel again. But the inhabitants of Dockton, Maury Island, and Vashon, including hikers and mountain bikers, raised a ruckus of a protest. The issue went to court, and the judge eventually decided in favor of the preservationists, and Dockton Forest, including the gravel pit, was protected from environmental destruction and extraction of both gravel and timber. Now the gravel pit and its large rusted steel trestle, a bridge to nowhere, are historical artifacts. The steep hills rising out of the former gravel operation are green with vegetation. 

  

   From the top of the gravel pit and, a short hike farther up the road, from the overlook at the highest point of the park, the view is stunning: snow-blanketed Mt. Rainier shimmering over the dark blue water of the Puget Sound and dominating the Cascade peaks below it and, below them, the buildings of Tacoma made beautiful by distance. A few sailboats and fishing boats dotted the water. I sat on the bench at the overlook, absorbing the beauty of the scene, until time to hike back through the forest to meet Ela at the car.

    The next day Ela and I returned to Dockton Forest. This time Ela walked with me so he could show me the mountain biking trails he had built. They were beautiful. One was called "Eee-la-la!" for its exciting up and down route, the interesting natural features it passed—a large rock formation here, a beautiful tree there—its perilous ride along the top of a cliff, the sudden awesome view of Mt. Rainier over the sound, the steep descent. Even walking it was beautiful, and I could imagine the fun of testing your riding skill on it. 

    There was, however, one test of skill that Ela had not counted on. Earlier in the spring he discovered that the bare vines he had built the trail through on one section last winter had leafed into poison oak that now overhung the trail with a treacherous reach. To eliminate that danger, he had brought loppers, clippers, heavy gloves, and a small saw with him on this hike. We worked cutting back the poison oak until we had a trail safe for riders. 

    It was another beautiful day on the island, and another beautiful walk in Dockton Park. The next day we would return, Ela to ride with a friend and I to walk more trails. For this adventure, see next week's post.

Madrones

     Every spring as I walk through the mountains and drive through the valley, I find myself repeating the first line of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. "Nothing is so beautiful as spring," he said. It's a line that occurs again and again as the daffodils amass and the maples take to leaf and the birds sing to each other from the tree tops. 

    This year the line has been amended. "Nothing is so beautiful this spring as the Pacific madrone," I say to myself, again and again, as I walk through the mountains or contemplate Humpy Mountain from my deck.  Never have the madrones been so beautiful as they are this spring, with their masses of showy white blossoms. "The tribe gathers," Rumi says. "Who has a chance against such an elegant assemblage?"

    I've lived on this mountain almost fifty years, and I've never seen the madrones bloom so profusely. It's a once-in-fifty-years phenomenon, or, as far as I know, once-in-a-hundred-years. It's as though that rose bush you love suddenly put out three times as many roses as you've ever seen on it. It's like the burned-over hillside I saw in the Marble Mountains, made pink with masses of pussy-toes. The madrones this spring are like the richest cream whipped into peaks, the frilliest organza ball gown, the thickest patch of stars in the Milky Way.

    Only the female madrone puts out flowers, but this spring I'm wondering if every tree could be male one year and female the next because not only are there more blossoms on each tree than ever before but more trees with blossoms, too. The flowering trees are so many and so dense with blossoms they make splotches, lines, and patches of white on the distant mountains. Even from my house I can distinguish individual madrones on the evergreen-forested hillside of Humpy.

    During the day the trees absorb the heat of the sun into those blossoms, hoarding it for an alchemical reaction that they release in the evening and early morning—as far as I know, throughout the night—in the sweetest, most intoxicating scent in the mountains. I lift my nose like a bear. I can't get enough of madrone perfume, which, usually given in stingy whiffs, this spring saturates the air.

    I realize that not everyone appreciates this abundance of madrone fragrance.  One woman agreed to the observation but not to the exultation. "Yes," she said, "my sinuses have never been so stopped up!" My deepest sympathies to those who cannot enjoy the wonderful gift of this year's madrone sweetness permeating the air.

    The birds take that sweetness and turn it into music, threading it with the needles of their beaks through the fabric of the air.

    It cannot last, of course. "Nothing gold can stay," Robert Frost reminds us. "So Eden sank to grief./So dawn goes down to day./Nothing gold can stay." Already the golden white madrone blossoms are fading, turning dull, dropping their tiny buds like hailstone beads on the trails. Already their lovely scent is growing faint, becoming memory. The sensual wealth is giving way to the maturity of summer. 

    And then—ah! Already I anticipate the abundance of bright red berries on each madrone tree next fall, brightening the woods with autumn's bounty, the fruits of spring's beauty.

Anniversaries

     Friday, May 7, marks one year since Mike died. (See post, "Last Days," on May 14, 2020.)  My heart is heavy to think about this past year without him, but, of course, those are the kinds of thoughts the date educes—the year without him, our six years together, and the tenderness and sorrow of the last three weeks of his life. To read the posts about those last days brings tears to my eyes.

    The anniversary of his death comes only eleven days before the anniversary of our wedding, which would be our second, so memories of that wonderful occasion pile on top of all the others. Yesterday, since I am fully vaccinated, I had my hair cut at last, and in a fit of sentimentality thought maybe I would dye my hair purple, the way it was at our wedding, as a way to honor Mike and recall  those good times. I wasn't sure about doing it—it could also make me too sad—but in a burst of courage I asked the hairdresser to do it.

Mike meeting me after my canoe ride down the
Applegate River. Note the purple hair.

    Unfortunately this wasn't the same hairdresser who had dyed my hair for the wedding. That was Dianne Knapp, who had been cutting my hair for years and was a good friend and knew exactly what I wanted and what looked best on me. I was sad to lose her last summer when she died of breast cancer. I had lost a friend, but I had also lost a very good hairdresser.

    To find a new hairdresser, I just looked online, read reviews, and picked one blindly.

    The haircut is all right. Not stunning, but it'll do, I guess, and I am very glad not to be looking so shaggy any more and to get the hair out of my eyes. (Dianne could do better.) I told the beautician I wanted purple in my hair as it had been at my wedding. I showed her a picture, like the one above, and told her I wanted that color, applied like that. 

    What I got has knocked all the sentimentality out of me. The color is all wrong. What Dianne did was draw a dark lavender through the front strands of my hair. What the new hairdresser did is pink-purple: too bright, too pink, and too broadly applied.

Intolerable. I should be scowling.

 I dislike it intensely. Mike would laugh, and that would make me laugh, too. I smile to think about it. The hair is all wrong, but it is what it is, as with Mike's passing. The little things, like the big, must be accepted. 

Trying to make it acceptable