A Great Five Days of Skiing

    Last week I was skiing at Crater Lake National Park with a Sierra Club national outing. Such good company! (Sierra Club outings attract the most interesting people.) Such good food! (Mark Chang, trip leader, was also the trip's cook.) Such good leadership (Scott Mattoon and Jeannie Sivertsen in addition to Mark) and such good accommodations (at Union Creek Resort). As for the skiing, the snow was old and not at Crater Lake's usual depths, but nonetheless—such good skiing!

    This is what it all looked like:

    Day 0 (pre-trip scouting excursion, Scott and me). North entrance, 2 miles, 250-foot elevation gain. Conditions were not ideal. We had to manipulate skis over pick-up-stick tangles of downed logs and around saplings with treacherous hollows in the snow. But, we thought, we could maybe ski alongside the road instead of in the forest for the planned excursion to the north entrance two days later.

Skiing through the pick-up sticks

        This evening was the first official group activity: dinner, introductions, and orientation. 

    Dinner: Stir-fried dried tofu with Thai peanut sauce over rice linguine. 

    Day 1. West Rim Drive. 5 miles, 500-foot elevation gain. We skied past stunning views of Crater Lake and Wizard Island.

Me, Kate, Hope, Debra, Terri

We skied to Watchman, where we sat on the snow for lunch. On the return, four of us detoured onto the Lightning Spring trail, down gorgeous wide slopes with graceful turns. And then the long climb back up. The turns were worth the climb.

    Dinner, Italian: cheese and spinach ravioli with tomato pesto. 

    Day 2. East Rim Drive. 8 miles, 600-foot elevation gain. At a road junction we passed a sign with familiar words: Applegate (my address) and Grayback (the mountain I live on).

When we got to that spot on the way back, some of us turned down that road for another beautiful glide down a snow-covered road, again worth every bit of the climb back up. My good friend Kate Williams, a seasonal ranger at Crater Lake National Park, joined us for dinner and to talk about issues facing the Park (decline in newt populations, warming water temperatures, dictates from the Trump administration, etc.). Everyone loved Kate.

Bottom row, l-r: Scott, assistant leader; Kate Williams, guest speaker; me
Top row, l-r: Hope, Kate, Peter, Debra, Mark Chang (trip leader), Diane, Terri
Photographer: Jeannie Sivertsen, assistant leader

    Dinner, Japanese: Mabo tofu over brown rice. 

    Day 3. North entrance. 7 miles, 500-foot elevation gain. To avoid the logs and the saplings, we skied alongside the road, which was great,

I'm in front here.

then onto a small rise where we could look down onto the pumice desert,

Me, Hope, Mark, Terri, Kate

then across the road to the Pacific Crest Trail, where we skied through beautiful woods of large hemlocks  and lodgepole pines, rollingly up and down, back to the cars. It was serene and beautiful.

I am skiing behind Kate

        Dinner, Indian: Aloo Gobi (curry potato and cauliflower) over basmati rice. 

    Day 4, phase 1. One and a half miles down the Pacific Crest Trail (Union Peak trail), starting south from Highway 62, descending on icy, bumpy, twig-and-needle-strewn, narrow ski trails until we admitted that it was difficult and not much fun, so we all skied back to the cars, where one group opted to drive up to the rim and ski or snowshoe there (or sit happily and comfortably in the cafe and contemplate the lake). I joined the other group: Scott and two other skiers (by far the best skiers on the trip, which was intimidating, but I thought I could do it) to ski from the road up the Pacific Crest Trail to the Dutton Creek trail and on up to the rim. Therefore:

    Day 4, phase 2. 4 1/2 miles, 800-foot elevation gain. This was OMG skiing. We climbed and descended a bit and climbed some more. We crossed creeks.

Hope, crossing Dutton Creek

We side-stepped up steep hills.

I'm doing the side-stepping here.

We manipulated too-fast, narrow downhills. We skied through big trees, past glimpses of snow-capped peaks, onto small patches of open ground, up knolls and down. We did a lot of trail-finding and not a small amount of trail-losing. It was so beautiful to be there in the quiet beauty of the snowy forest, testing our skills and our stamina, experiencing the oneness with such beauty that only comes with skiing. It was difficult, challenging, and beautiful. When I stepped off the trail onto the West Rim Road, I thought, "By gum, I did it!" 

Kate and Hope approach the rim at last.

Day 4, evening. Two guest speakers from Umpqua Watersheds joined us for dinner and to talk about enrionmental issues they work on. (The Umpqua River, like the Rogue and Klamath rivers, originates in Crater Lake National Park.)

    Dinner, Vietnamese: Pho with sweet chili sauce over salmon (my favorite dinner).

    Day 5. Everyone left for the airport or home or further aventures in Oregon. I drove home to wartm the house, tend to the raw blisters on my heels, and dream, every night for four nights, about skiing. In my dreams, I never fell.

My Latest Reading

     I have bought a new book. 

    Isn't it beautiful?

    

    My sister Sharon told me that when she was in college and had to develop a project for an academic paper, she suggested to her advisor that she read the dictionary.

    What a fabulous project! 

    But, she went on, her advisor frowned on the idea. He wanted a plan. Sharon said, "I want to know what would happen if I read the dictionary. Let's just start the project and see where it goes."

    Just imagine where it would go! Obviously it would lead to an improved vocabulary, even if she remembered only a small fraction of the new words she learned. Think of the many languages she would discover had contributed to English. And the fascinating etymologies she would learn—the vagaries of English pronunciations—the proportion of technical terms to everyday words—the obsolete words that were really too good to have been lost. The beauty of language. How long it would take to read the dictionary. Which letters had the most beautiful or unusual or obsolete words. And no telling what else. That was the beauty of the project.

    He would have none of it. She had to come up with another topic.

    What an opportunity lost. I've half a mind to do it myself. As it is, I've been challenged by a friend to write a poem based on a new word every day. So far the poems aren't very good, but the words elicit a lot of fun. Here is an example.

A Family of Artists

(Daedal: artistic, skillful. From Daedalus, Greek artificer of mythology)

 

My brother is good with wood.

My son is daedal with metal.

My mother was smart with art.

One sister paints like a saint

the power of flowers.

The other, a quainter painter,

is better with letters

adored and adorned.

I am absurd with words.

I make mazes with phrases

that leap or creep

all twisty and cvrispy

or steep into sleep.

But, however clever,

in the end I pen

a verse. Terse.

Bringing in the New Year

   Two days after Christmas I put up a Christmas tree?
  The day after New Year's Eve I have a party?

    Isn't that all kind of late?

    But by now, this being the third year of the event, a New Year's Day party at my house is an annual tradition. This year, I spent Christmas week with my son on Vashon Island, Washington. When I got home and turned my attention to the upcoming party, I realized that the house needed decorating, so I took my bow saw into the woods, cut down a little fir tree I had been keeping my eye on, set it up in the house, and decorated it with all my beloved ornaments. 

 

Then I made cookies.

Stained-glass-window cookies

Date bars

Hazelnut financiers

Eggwhite brownies

   Because eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day is, according to Southern lore, good luck for the coming year, I set two large pots of black-eyed peas on the stove, one vegetarian, one with ham hock.

 I made two double batches of buttermilk cornbread. 

I set two bottles of red wine on the kitchen counter along with a corkscrew. I put white wine, sparkling water, and beer in a cooler nearby. I put every wine glass I had on the counter, along with water glasses.

    It was a drop-in-anytime affair. As guests arrived, I told them to help themselves.

    It was all a great success, because, really, for a good party all you need is good food and drink and great people, which I had in spades. 

    A parlor game might help, too. For this party, I suggested that guests bring three words or phrases for the new year, riffing on T. S. Eliot's lines: 

            For last year's words belong to last year's language

            And next year's words await another voice

            And to make an end is to make a beginning.

We put the words in a bowl, from which everyone drew a paper; then, in turn, we read the words. Sometimes the word wasn't comprehensible until the person who chose it explained it. "Maybe"? Well, yes, Margaret explained. It helps her take a step back and look at possibilities. "Autotelic"? "It means 'complete in itself,'" the guest explained, and comes from a history of Superman. My favorite word to come out of the game was ourobos, the end-in-the-beginning image, as of a snake with its tail in its mouth. (Last year's favorite was orophile, a lover of mountains.)

    My own three phrases played with past, present, future:

            A return to the wintry winters of the past. (Oh, I wish!)

            A future with a dependable democracy.

            All my loves and friendships always present in my life.

    That last phrase was fulfilled this holiday season, from Christmas with my son to a house full of friends on New Year's Day. As for the other two, I can only hope.

    

Winter Solstice

     Today is Winter Solstice, and to my great delight, it's raining at last.

It's a good hard, steady rain

an honest-to-goodness, how-it-used-to-be, Oregon rain.

It's a stay-in-the-house, knit-by-the-stove rain

or, if you prefer, an umbrella rain

a music-in-the-gutters rain

a beautiful, replenishing 

thank-the-gods 

rain.

Some people rejoice at Winter Solstice because they see it as the beginning of the end of winter dark, but I like even the dark of winter, which isn't really all that dark, anyway:

They say that winter is dark

But look!

The bright gleam of sun-struck silver under glowering dark clouds

Translucent icicles hanging from eaves

Noctilucent clouds on full-moon frigid nights

Waves of bright cloud-drifts in a dark rainstorm

The brilliant scintillations of star-spreads

Jack Frost's overcoat, glittering on fields as the sun comes up

Christmas lights, candlelight, luminous flames in the stove

Even on the darkest day of the year

Winter delights.

And, most of all, there's the hope, maybe even the promise, of snow:

Nothing is so beautiful]

    As snow-laden fir boughs against a cobalt sky

    The descending blue rushing towards whipped-cream peaks.

Nothing is so beautiful as the kiss of snowflakes

    whisper-soft from steel-gray clouds.

Nothing more magical than the inaudible fall of snow outside the window

    floating like down from overstuffed clouds

    the fire in the stove at your back shining like shook foil

Nothing is so beautiful as a winter landscape 

    charged with grandeur

    and gathered to a greatness

        of insuperable cold

        unsurpassable silence

        unconditional beauty.

A Toast to Joan Peterson, 1940-2025

Me (L) with Joan Peterson, July 2024
                                                photo by Beate Foit

    One of the poems in Joan Peterson's book of poetry, Looking for a Place to Write, is about getting a massage from her granddaughter, Haley. In the poem Joan talks about holding Haley when she was a baby, and now she, Joan, is in Haley's arms. The last lines read, 

            My daughter's daughter, you rock 

            me in your arms like a tiny child.

            You may carry me to the end of my life

            as I learn to let go.

    Last week Joan had a massage from Haley, then walked down the steps and let go of her life. She died before she got to her car.

        She was 84 years old.

    So I have, again, lost my best friend (Mike, Maren, …). For almost the whole of the 50 years I have lived in the Applegate, Joan has been my friend and closest good-friend neighbor. She was whom I would call to come up and have lunch,

Joan (L) with her granddaughter and my friend Maren,
at my house for lunch, 2010

to go to a concert, to ride with me to a meeting, or to meet the Tea Ladies for tea.  

Joan (L) with me (R) and the other tea ladies. 2019

    For ten years, Joan; her husband, Chris; three other friends, and I met monthly to share lunch and read poetry together. We called ourselves the Grayback Salon.

The Grayback Salon at my house, 2015
L-R: Me, Tracy Lamblin, Joan, Chris, Dan Lamblin
(Greeley Wells, is taking the picture)

    Joan started the Applegate Poets and urged me to join. She started the Friends of the Applegate Library and pulled me in, too. She offered me a membership in the Sierra Club if I would join the board, starting my ten years of service there. She started Voices of the Applegate, a singing group in the Applegate (which, no, she never talked me into joining). She was a beautiful singer; she and Chris, sang together at many gatherings. And she was a very good poet. When I am missing Joan now, I can go to her poems, where she is as alive as ever.

Joan reading her poetry at Britt Gardens,
in Jacksonville, Oregon, 2021

    Joan was magic with the animals on her farm—dogs, cats, chickens, sheep, goats, and, especially, the horses. When my son, Ela, was small, we had a horse, Baby Dee, whom we boarded at Joan's farm in exchange for stall-cleaning. 

    Once when Ela was little and while I didn't have a car, we walked the five miles down the road to Joan's house on Christmas Day for a drop-in visit, the way people in the country used to do. The house was full of merriment—people, food, drink, and song. We added poetry and puppets. It is a memory I have cherished for years. 

    Joan and I both taught in the English Department at Rogue Community College. We hiked together and skied together. We talked about books and poetry, about family and students, about teaching class and making cookies, about rough times and happy times. We were with each other in sympathy when our respective husbands died.

    Joan was such a close friend for so many years. She was a wonderful person and an important community member, and she had a talent for making many people—certainly I was one—think they were her best friend.  And for our particular friendship, that was true.

    

    

Whale Bones

    Last weekend I fell to my knees before the bones of a gray whale. They were white and clean and hard, laid out in categories: here were the ribs, here the enormous skull, here the finger-like bones of the flippers, here the pelvis bones which, having long ago lost their purpose, now float unattached in the body of the whale, evolutionary left-overs from the whale's ancestors who roamed the earth instead of the ocean. 

    I embraced the bones. It is not too much to say I was in a state of worship.

    The whale has been named Singer. He died of starvation, which is one of the saddest comments on the state of the world I have ever heard. Some of his bones showed the effects of osteoporosis. 

    The bones were in the studio of my son, Ela Lamblin, a metal sculptor who lives on Vashon Island, in the Puget Sound. It is his job now—his commission as an artist—to create a metal framework of curving tubes and twining rods to cradle the whale's bones, shaping a 40-foot-long whale sculpture that will hang from the ceiling in the atrium of the Vashon Center for the Arts. 

3-D computer rendering of the actual bones, correctly articulated

    Singer's body was found on a beach on Vashon in April 2024. Since gray whales are protected by the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Vashon Nature Center applied for and received permission from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to let the body decompose naturally and to then collect the bones. They consulted with local tribes so they could understand and honor indigenous relationships with whales. The following spring they returned with community volunteers and students from the high school to gather the bones and transport them to the school, where the students drew, 3D-scanned, and documented the skeleton, weighing, identifying, and labeling each bone.

Some of the bones in the high school lab.  Some green labels are visible.
                                                                        photo by Roketkar Studios

    Then the bones were transported to Ela's studio. 

Three students carry one of the bones out of the lab.
                                            photo by Roketkar Studios

    When they were assembled there, Ela sprayed them with the scientifically appropriate substance to prevent further deterioration. 

Ela spraying the skull.
                                                            photo by Roketkar Studios

    I have always liked bones. I have a small collection I have found while hiking—a bear's jaw and claws, a goat's horn, a mountain sheep's vertebra, a tiny bird's skull, among others.

A part of my collection of bones.

I'm not sure why I want these bones around me. Maybe because bones are the archetypal symbol of the indestructible soul-spirit. Maybe because they remind me of the life-death cycle. Maybe I'm following the advice of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, who said, "You want psychoanalytic advice? Go gather bones." 

    Or maybe because singing over the bones brings the wild creature alive again.

    That's what it was like to sit among Singer's bones, to stroke the long ribs, to lay my hand on the huge skull and look into the concave roundness where the eyes would have been—it was to sing the life back into the bones. How much more so it will be, then, when the skeleton sits inside a sculpted metal framework that outlines the body, when the whale can move through the air, via a crank turned by a visitor, as it once moved through the water.  

    Singer once sent his echoing song through the deep, once broke through the surface of the sea to grab a lungful of air, once cavorted with friends and family. Now his bones lie white and beautiful in careful groupings, ready to take on a new life and inspire awe and, perhaps, a sense of worship, too, in those who will sense in them the spirit of the living whale. In this new incarnation, Singer will sing again. 

    I'm sure of it. I've seen the bones.

    

    

Banned Books

    Last week was Banned Book Week. 

    Just the idea of banning books is anathema to me, even though I kind of get it. Words are powerful. Sometimes I think my life might have been different if I hadn't read Wuthering Heights. Was I looking for Heathcliff all those years? Bad idea, as Catherine knew, too.

    As far as I know, Wuthering Heights has never been banned, which just goes to show you that (1) you can't ban all the dangerous books, and (2) the people who ban books don't know what they're doing. I understand the objections to The Handmaid's Tale. It's a dangerous book. It'll make you think, and thinking is dangerous. 

    But Huckleberry Finn? Harry Potter? Where the Wild Things Are and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble? Reading a list of banned books can be as hilarious as it is dismaying.

    Florida banned more books in 2024-25 than any other state (2,304 instances). Texas comes in second (1,781 instances), Tennessee third (1,622). The Grants Pass School District banned All Boys Aren't Blue for LGBTQ content and Lucky for discussions of rape. Sex and gender seem to be the most frightening content for people who are frightened by books.

    Many banned books were National Book Award winners, like Sherman Alexie's young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. That's a terrific book. I recommended it to my pre-teen granddaughter, but now I see that it has been banned for dealing with "sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, and offensive language." As though young readers don't know about those things already. As though reading about how one very bright boy deals with them isn't a way for young readers to understand their own relationship to those things. As though the empathy stirred by the book isn't part of the experience.

    It goes both ways, though. A friend was recently suggesting we have a silent-film festival at the Holly Theater in Medford, including The Birth of A Nation. Whoa! That's a detestable film! Is it a good idea to show a blatantly racist, pro-Ku Klux Klan movie in today's political climate? If I were on the committee I would vote against it. But I'm not a film scholar. Another committee member might vote for it because it is a technically brilliant work. It's like someone saying I shouldn't teach Lolita for its horrific theme of pedophilia. But I am a literature scholar, and I know what a brilliant novel Lolita is. Both works of art are technical masterpieces that make us think about important issues. (The difference is that Griffith was on the side of the racist ideas, whereas Nabokov was in no way advocating Humbert Humbert's horrifying treatment of Lolita.)

    Don't read this, don't read that. This book is dangerous; that book is dangerous. Ban it, ban the next one, and the next. 

    But it's impossible to ban all the books that stimulate thinking, understanding, and empathy. Whack-a-mole.