Eclipse party

            The tiniest, thinnest sliver of a pre-dawn moon hung low on the horizon when Mike and I left Bend for Ritter Butte, four hours away in the Eastern Oregon desert, where we would join film-maker Greeley Wells and twenty-five other artists, movie-makers, counselors, radio people, even a one-time mayor of Culver City, California, for an eclipse-viewing party. As we drove eastward, the earth turned, giving languid rise to the sun, a single star so powerful it could light half the world.

            Thus was the atmosphere set for three days of celestial wonders.

            We established camp under an enormous haystack. 

The celestial wonder that night was the stars, studding the black fabric of sky above the desert and massed into a white-washed Milky Way lashing the horizons together.

            The next day's excursion to look for a swimming hole wasn't celestial, except in the sense that it was heavenly to be in the water. We found a part of the shallow river that was knee-deep, or almost, where we spread out into a Seurat painting: people sitting on mid-stream rocks with their feet in the water, standing in the water like deer, napping in the grasses on the banks, the kids exploring the river bottom. The river's edge was lined with a dark, jagged wall of rock and, beyond it, the desert. I lay full-length in the water, clutching river-bottom rocks to hold myself against the current, alligator-crawling up and down the river.

            That night I dressed in a long, white, gold-threaded skirt, and a purple pashmina, moon and night colors, for the poetry reading Greeley had asked me to organize. The words of the poets – Thomas Berry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wordsworth, Li Po, Yeats – evoked the celestial wonders of rainbows, stars, the moon, eclipses. The woman reading the poem by Rilke read it in German, then in English. We read Sigurd Olson's passage about ice skating under the Aurora Borealis and David Abrams' description of walking through rice paddies in Bali at night, mesmerized by stars and fireflies above and, reflected, below. Because a vivid sunset threatened to draw attention from the last reading, we moved outside the large shade tarp so people could watch the sun set the sky aflame while I read Annie Dillard's breath-taking description of a total eclipse – a perfect ending to the reading, which was, itself, a perfect preparation for the eclipse.

            Later that night Greeley took us stargazing: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the Crown, Cygnus, the Andromeda galaxy. That I couldn't always draw the imaginary lines that turned disparate stars into constellations was no handicap to enjoyment. The celestial wonders of the night sky were unignorable. All eyes were turned upward.

            The next morning's low clouds had evaporated by the time we walked up the hill to the top of Ritter Butte, past a long line of cars on the road ("more cars than this road has seen for a year"). 

On the butte, clumps of eclipse viewers dotted the hilltop. One young couple sat on a blow-up couch. 

I heard people speaking in German. I heard one couple say they had come from New York. There were ranchers and city folks, families with teenagers and young children. One artist from Greeley's group was hanging an elaborate screen of metal circles, each with a tiny hole in its center, in front of a white board. The circles threw dark, round shadows on the board with pinpoint spots of light. "What's the purpose?" a woman asked, and Kevin answered, tersely, "To get set up before the eclipse starts." During the eclipse, the tiny centers of light inside the dark circular shadows turned into crescents. 

Another artist stretched a white sheet under a pine tree and trained a video camera on the shadows. During the eclipse the shadows became feathery soft. 

            As the eclipse grew, people spoke in low voices: "Dad, where's the shadow?" "It's still over the Pacific." Parents mock-scared their kids: "The rattlesnakes and coyotes will come out! We'll turn into werewolves," and kids had their own impressions: "The world is going to go black," one explained to another.

            One often wonders if, after grand expectations, the event itself will satisfy.
            It did. The eclipse did not disappoint. (See last week's post for details.)

            That night Greeley hosted a post-eclipse party in Bend. Traffic extended the drive well beyond four hours, but no one minded. We were sustained by the experience of a lifetime.

            The food at the party was great. The shower was even better. It was pleasant to sit on the lawn and talk about the eclipse with these new friends, but I was very tired, as though the celestial wonders had sapped my strength. There were no stars in smoky-sky, city-lit Bend. I crawled into my tent early and went to sleep with my head swirling like Van Gogh's Starry Night. The solar eclipse with its constellation of events – the poetry, the swim, the stars, the gathering of extraordinary people – had scooped a nest in my psyche, where it will glow for years to come.

Solar Eclipse, in its Glorious Totality

            I was so excited to be seeing a total solar eclipse! I had read Annie Dillard's essay, watched David Baron's Ted Talk. I knew about the shadow bearing down on the landscape, the corona around the eclipsed sun, the sudden appearance of stars and planets and wind, the weird colors never before seen. I was so looking forward to it all.

            I had come with a group of artists and other friends, joining eighty or so people dispersed

on a high bluff in Eastern Oregon, where the desert stretched for forty, fifty miles in all directions, flat and practically treeless. Only a ripple of distant mountains intersected the horizon. 

            "It's starting!" someone cried. I crammed on my eclipse-safe glasses and looked at the sun. 

(Note the color of the grass in these three pictures.)

It was the size of a full moon and yellow-gold, with a tiny piece broken off in the far upper right of the arc, a broken plate.

            I turned around to look at the desert. Far in the distance, the sky was darkening. I felt the urgency of a mother to call her children into the house before the storm hit. But this wasn't a storm. It wasn't ominous dark clouds. It was a darkening of the sky that came towards me, bright sunlight far in the desert on either side.

            I looked at the sun again. It was no longer like a plate with a chip at the edge. The eclipse of the sun wasn't like the reverse of the moon going through its phases. The sun's crescent wasn't like the moon's crescent but thicker. The moon was sliding over the sun not like a bandit stealing treasure nor like an actor stealing the show but like a partner in a dance. The movement was slow and graceful, a solar-lunar pas de deux.

            We are wrong to use "eclipse" to mean depriving someone of significance or power. A solar eclipse is a mutual motion, an elaborately equal collaboration of movement.

            The grasses turned more darkly tawny, but it wasn't a color I hadn't seen before. The air was more chilly, but the wind didn't pick up. On the other side of the bluff, behind the sun, day was as usual. Here was dusk.

            Only the tiniest, most brilliant crescent was showing on the bottom left of the sun, not in parallel to the chip that was missing as the dance began, but much longer and thinner and very, very beautiful, not yellow-gold but gleaming silver.

            Then the moon slid over that last visible part of the sun. From the family next to me came  dramatic cries of, "It's the end of the world!" and "It's Armageddon!" But it wasn't like that, either. The child was voicing what she had been expected to feel.

            Dark night reigned only directly around the corona. A few stars came out. Beyond us, on Earth, day continued as usual. Here was a circle of night in the midst of day. Here, in this mystical, transcendental circle of dark was the spotlighted climax of the celestial ballet: the bright glow of the out-piercing points of the sun behind the dark of the moon. The partner had picked up the ballerina in her arabesque and was holding her aloft, displaying that beauty of line and form, here also of light and dark, as we gazed and gazed, holding our breaths, knowing he couldn't hold her up forever, mesmerized by this beauty for the hours and hours of the 121 seconds of the eclipse totality, the orchestra all the while holding a murmuring trill, the violins playing pizzicato. 

              Tears filled my eyes.

       For one incredible split second, as the moon continued its elegant glide across the face of the sun, I saw a blinding silver crescent of light, all the gathered force of those points of the crown suddenly sucked into that released light. The dance partner was setting the ballerina on the floor – slowly, silently, "with how sad steps o moon." But it wasn't like that, either. It was simply the de-eclipsing of the sun, the denouement of the dance between light and dark created by two glorious celestial bodies who did a turn, kissed, and parted, playing their role in the larger dance of the universe to which we, infinitesimal specks on Earth, were privileged witnesses.

On the Oregon Coast

            Car-camping isn't my usual recreation, but I thoroughly enjoyed last week's trip (compensation for the scuttled backpacking trip in the high Sierra) that Mike and I took on the Oregon coast: from Bandon up the coast, past the Heceta Bay Lighthouse, 

to Nehalem Bay, then inland for two nights in motels for wine tasting in the Willamette Valley, an afternoon at Oregon Garden (with its amazing conifers-used-like-flowers garden and a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), and a day at beautifully forested and waterfall-rich Silver Falls State Park, where I wanted so badly to swim in those luscious pools! 

We took long walks on extended stretches of white-sand beaches, walked through the coastal forest at Shore Acres to see the newly arrived California sea lions, barking and baying on the rocks; kayaked on the Nehalem River; and stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel,

named not for the beach in Newport, Oregon (that's Nye Beach), but for the American bookseller and publisher who was a major literary figure in Paris between the two World Wars. Its literary-themed rooms – Shakespeare, Kesey, Colette, etc., including the Jane Austen room, where we stayed – made it a place where I could ask people, with complete appropriateness, "What are you reading now?" 

            The Oregon State Parks where we camped were crowded with both RVs and tent campers. For a person used to wilderness camping, the proximity of neighbors was unsettling, but I did appreciate the way so many people were using these parks. Mostly they were families (though I might not have seen the more elderly couples, enclosed in RVs). They didn't seem to be just camping for the night on their way somewhere else, as Mike and I were doing, but staying for a week or two weeks. This was their vacation, and what a wonderful vacation it was. The kids dashed around on their bicycles. Cars carried kayaks on their roofs. Little boats, fishing gear, and beach toys lay about campsites. Fathers and sons threw footballs. People walked the beaches, flew kites, built sand castles. Dogs chased balls or bit at waves. In the campgrounds, people sat under canvas tarps at night, playing cards by lantern light. It did my heart good to see so many people outdoors, eating, sleeping, enjoying themselves without technological devices.

            Besides the numbers of people, I was impressed with their varieties – the predominantly but not entirely Hispanic family that camped next to us at Sunset Beach State Park; the Hispanic wedding party with a couple of white people mixed in that we passed at Silver Falls State Park; the number of mixed-race couples we observed at restaurants and on the streets; the families with dark-skinned and light-skinned children; and that's not even counting the Indians running the motels or the foreign-born visitors we had breakfast with at the Sylvia Beach Hotel: a young Russian woman who taught physics at a community college in California and owned fourteen horses (there with her American-born security-guard husband, who wrote crime novels); a woman from England; an Irishman who had been living in Milan for many years. There was the tediously voluble owner of the Tsunami Gallery in Gardiner, who maybe talked so much because, in a tiny town so diminished from its glory days as a bustling port, he had someone new to talk to; the attendant at Prehistoric, a fabulous store in Lincoln City with fossils of fish, petrified wood, thunder egg rocks, trilobites, ammonites, and similar marvels, who spoke with such enthusiasm about the archeological process of finding and cleaning fossils that I thought to share one's passion with people who are interested must be the best thing in the world; the four-year-old boy hiking up the hill from Winter Falls at Silver Falls State Park, with his tiny back-pack and hiking stick, and he was so-o-o tired already, and his mother said, "What do you do when you face something difficult? Do you give up?" He sullenly didn't answer, but then, with a burst of speed, even running a couple of steps, hiked strongly to the top of the hill and waited, breathing hard, for his mother to catch up.

            With only one exception (the surly young man who rented us a kayak, and why should he be so unpleasant, with such a job on the lovely Nehalem River?), everyone we met or even observed was pleasant, friendly, and good-natured. The varieties of people foreshadowed a more happily mixed nation in years to come, and the children having a good time with their families in the outdoors foretold happy generations in the future. My car-camping and motel-staying vacation reconfirmed in me that (since I couldn't imagine that people so much enjoying life and being so pleasant were Trump voters) there is hope for our nation.

Waterfall Magic in the Hottest Days of Summer

          It has been hot, hot, hot all week, over 100º in the valley. Monday afternoon I started to drive to Ashland for yoga class, then abruptly changed my mind. It was too hot to leave the mountain. For the first time since I joined this yoga class, I played hooky.  

          Nonetheless, I was in town yesterday, in spite of the predicted 116º, but that was because I was driving through the valley on my way home after a perfectly delicious night under the stars, tucked away in the forest at a 4000-foot altitude, listening to the musical tinkle of a waterfall after an evening swim that washed away all the day's heat.

            It was my friend Mike who took me there. We arrived, up a bumpy dirt road and down a mountain path, late in the evening, well after dinner. No one else was there. We gazed from the rim of a canyon onto a round pool at the bottom of a long, late-summer-thin, splayed-out waterfall.

We immediately set our sleeping bags on the ground and started the hike to the pool. The trail crossed the creek at the top of the waterfall, then turned treacherously slippery with loose dirt as it descended steeply into the canyon. Only exposed roots gave footholds. At the creek itself we clambered over logs and rocks till we came to a vertical rock wall holding up the waterfall's pool. Here we had to do a short spurt of real rock-climbing before we stood at the lip of the pool with the waterfall on the far side, forty feet high.

            The water was brackish and dark, pooled in a perfectly circular bowl in the rock. The top of the canyon rose vertically above us, its rounded opening thirty feet across. Some people in Ashland lead a "secret waterfall vortex tour" to this place, which they call a "vortex field and dimensional doorway. …Standing next to the waterfall pool," they say, "you will feel the full and majestic power of this amazingly powerful positive energy Vortex."

            Maybe. I mean, maybe there's a vortex and maybe a dimensional doorway, but certainly, no matter how you word it (I favor words like "magical" and "naiads"), it's a beautiful and special place, even in late summer, when the aquatic energy is diminished into quietude. 

             But I am not one for just standing next to a pool of water and appreciating its spiritual power. Although it was 8:00 at night, although the water temperature intimated origins in snow-melt, although the air temperatures at this elevation were cooler than in town, I didn't hesitate to think about dimensional doorways or fairy dust before taking a dip.

I swam across the pool to the waterfall itself, at the base of the moss-covered rock wall that was ceaselessly dripping, with long streams of water flowing through the mosses and silver drops splashing off rock surfaces. The water was deliciously cold. I was utterly enchanted.

            We climbed back to the top of the canyon in slow-falling twilight. The wine in Mike's pack was still cold. The under-full moon was glowing white as it slipped behind trees on the far side of the canyon. One by one, stars pricked their way into the darkening sky. The bear we had seen on the way in, dashing lickety-split up the mountain, lingered in essence, a fairy-tale bear. Deep in the night, when everything was still, I woke up to hear the musical tinkle of the raindrop waterfall. I fell asleep again under its spell.

            The next morning we hiked back down to the pool. I had an even longer (and colder!) swim, exploring the entire little round hole of the canyon from the water. Then we climbed back to our campsite, had a bite of breakfast, packed up our sleeping bags, and walked out before the sun became unbearable. It was unbearable by the time I was doing errands in Medford, but not to me. My bones were still carrying the cold of the waterfall long after I came home to the mountain again.

A Parliament of Owls

     I know you’ve seen a flock of geese and a litter of kittens, and you’ve probably also seen a herd of deer, a swarm of bees, and a murmuration of starlings, but I doubt that you’ve ever seen a parliament of owls. I can tell you it’s a beautiful thing. Strictly speaking, of course, I didn’t see the parliament of owls outside my bedroom window last week, but I did hear it, and it was one of the most wonderful things I have witnessed in nature, even though I was in my own bed in my own house in the dark at the time.
    Seven summers ago, when I moved into my new house, I would hear an owl calling night after night from somewhere near the house, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, but always in the vicinity. One evening, in the fade of twilight, he suddenly swooped close above the floor of the deck, grazing my vision with a dazzling white underlayer of feathers and startling me with his immense size.
    I kept trying to find him in the binoculars when I heard him calling, but he was always too hidden in the trees until one night, before the fade of twilight, I heard him in a tree ten yards or so from the deck. Immediately retrieving my binoculars from the house, I raised them to my eyes, searched to orient myself in the larger landscape, found where I thought the owl was – and there he was, clearly focused in my enlarged vision. He was startlingly beautiful, with black bars across a white chest and gorgeous big eyes. But those eyes were staring straight at me! Disconcerted, I lowered the binoculars, feeling vaguely ashamed, as though I had been caught spying. But now I could identify him as a barred owl. I was supposed not to like barred owls because they drive out the more rare spotted owl, but he was so beautiful I couldn’t dislike him. I loved my owl.
    I paid a heavy price for capturing him in my binoculars, though: that was the last time he came to my house. For years afterward I heard him in the woods, sometimes closer, sometimes far up the mountain, but never in the woods immediately around my house. I always recognized his beautiful four-syllable hoot with a slight waver at the end. A few years ago I started hearing two owls, a male and a female, according to the timbre of their voices, one higher, one (my owl), in a lower register. One would give a call: “I’m over here!” The other would answer, ”And I’m here.” “I love you-ou-ou.” “I love you, too-oo-oo.” Maybe that’s not what they were saying – I don’t know their language – but they were definitely communicating. I felt in a community of beings with my owls, knowing they were there, knowing they knew I was here. I felt privileged to be included in their woods.
    Last week I woke up to hear the owls in the very trees just outside my bedroom window. The first owl, my owl, the one I have known since I moved into the house, had convened a parliament of owls. His voice was the leader’s; I knew it well. I could distinguish at least four, probably six, different voices, all from the same small clump of trees. They had different calls – one with more of a waver, one with a caw-like hoot, one clearly my owl, another clearly the mate I had heard him talking with. The voices were different and the words were different, but the owls were all speaking the same language.
    It was a strange parliament. My owl would begin things, bringing the meeting to order. Then everyone else would join in with his or her own words. There would be a jumble of voices, everyone talking on top of everyone else, all those various calls distinguishable one from another. Then they would all fall silent. After a bit, my owl would ask another question, and there would be another mishmash of responses. I’m not sure that anything got accomplished. I’m not sure what was supposed to be accomplished. Maybe it was more of a choir than a parliament, the conductor laying down, then raising again his baton. It went on for about an hour, all that various hooting and cooing and calling. It wasn’t territorial – they were all in one place. It didn’t sound angry; it sounded conversational. It sounded like a parliament of owls taking care of owl business, to which I was a privileged listener.

Birthday post

    It’s my birthday today. It’s also the birthday of a dear friend, and because it’s her 60th, she is having a party, and because it’s my 73rd, an insignificant number, I’ll give up a celebration of my birthday to join her for hers. She did the same for me when I turned 70. I did the same for her when she turned 40.
    Nonetheless, the day should not go by unremarked, so I’ll remark on it with a poem from a series of poems I’m working on about aging.


    I Always Thought I Would Grow Old Gracefully

I always thought I would grow old gracefully
    graying graciously as I knitted by the stove
    smiling sweetly as conversation wafted
        unheard over my head
    setting aside my tennis racket with just a tiny sigh
        when arthritis-riddled hands
        lost their grip.
I always thought
    I would use my cane with dignified acceptance
    and be an example to young people
    that growing old
        is not the horror
        they think it is.

But now that I am here
    growing old and graying
I see the fallacies of my fantasies.
I am fighting tooth and nail
    (thank goodness I still have tooth and nail)
    against the signs of old age coming.

I swear at the tennis ball that knocks the racket from my hand.
I rant without cease over hot flashes and night sweats.
I curse the knees that creak and moan
    as I stoop to wipe
    a spill from the floor
I weep over the thinning of my once-luscious, thick hair.

For all the good it does.

It would be better to ease gracefully
into old age
better for me and better
for those around me,
because, after all,
what is there to get so worked up over?
It's just a little bit of gray,
an ache and a pain here and there,
and if it's a sign of what lies ahead,
isn't it better to bend to the inevitable,
smile and say, "You win,"
than to be a poor loser
with the temper of a child?

Graduations

            Though I wasn't particularly looking forward to attending a high school graduation last June, I wanted to honor a young friend who was graduating, in this case from the International High School in Eugene, so I went. Being with her and with her family, good friends I don't see nearly enough; remembering what she was like when I met her, a nine-year-old child swinging from a tree; contrasting that memory with the confident, joyful young woman walking down the aisle to receive her diploma; hearing the kind words said about her at the ceremony – I was so glad I could be there.

            Beyond that was the graduation itself, in the Holt Center auditorium. The graduates sat on the stage in tiered seats with an aisle down the center. On each side of the stage were lecterns where the faculty spoke, alternating sides to give two or three sentences that particularized each student and told what that student would be doing after graduation. It was briskly done, and the achievements and plans were impressive. This one was a soccer player and a runner, that one won a literary prize, another spoke three languages, another excelled in music. Many were going to impressive universities: Brown, Boston, MIT. Almost all were going on to college. Maybe in a few cases the teachers had a hard time coming up with complimentary things to say ("He will be remembered for his bright smile"), but listening to the list of accomplishments and future plans, I could only marvel at these fine young people preparing to be leaders in our world tomorrow. Public school, parents, teachers – we have done a fine job.

            Graduations are one of the most meaningful rituals in today's society. It's no wonder we have started including graduation ceremonies for each school students leave, from kindergarten to elementary school, from elementary school to high school, from high school to college, from a community college to a four-year college, from college at the B.A., M.A., or Ph.D. level. Each step is an achievement worth celebrating. At my son's graduation from the Atlanta College of Art, I remember the rousing cheers given a young black man as he received his diploma, and suddenly I saw what an achievement this moment marked. He graduated from college. Maybe they never thought he would do it. Maybe they had pulled and pushed him through it. Whatever the background was, whatever his grade average, here was a man who had achieved a terrific accomplishment. My respect ran high.

            My granddaughter also graduated this year, moving into fourth grade at a school different from the one she had attended since kindergarten, which only goes through third grade. By now, in her eyes, it was a school for children, and she has grown up and moved on. Time to graduate. So there was a ceremony. The graduates didn't wear gowns, but they did wear caps, and they threw their caps into the air. There were no speeches but there were games and presentations to the teachers who had meant so much to the children. There was lots of singing and lots of laughing. The pictures were wonderful. What a good time they had! What a special occasion for those children. 

            Do you want to keep kids in school? Make it exciting to be moving to the next stage.

            One of the best graduation traditions I know takes place at Central Point Elementary School here in the Rogue Valley. Graduating high school seniors who had gone to Central Point Elementary came back to the school, in their caps and gowns, to make a procession through the outdoor hallways between lines of current elementary school students and their teachers. Teachers high-fived the graduates as they walked through the school courtyard, reached out to shake their hands or give a special one a hug, the little kids clapping for them and high-fiving them, too. The graduates looked grand. They looked excited and proud. They were being highly honored. And those little kids? They were in awe. You could just feel them thinking, "That could be me. I could get there, too."

            It's a big thing to graduate. It's an accomplishment to be proud of. At any level.