A Madcap Summer at Camp Glisson

      When I was having lunch with my siblings in Dahlonega, Georgia, last October (see previous post), I started reminiscing about being a counselor at Camp Glisson, a Methodist Church camp just outside Dahlonega, when I was in high school. I asked our waitress if Camp Glisson still existed.

      "Oh, yes," she said with a bright smile. "It's close by." When I said I had been a counselor there, decades ago, she urged me to go see it. My siblings were willing to indulge my nostalgia, so on our way back to the lake house, we stopped at Camp Glisson.

      I recognized, or thought I recognized, the large log reception building with its porch and pole railings, but I was thrown right back into my Camp Glisson days when we walked to the top of the waterfall. 

Vivid memories returned: swimming in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, dinners in the rustic dining hall, the campers under my wing, and, most of all, the coterie of young people who worked at Camp Glisson that summer.

      The head counselor, older than the rest of us but probably just a recent college graduate, was one of the most ebullient people I've ever known, with an outsized sense of humor and imaginative ways to use it. He name was Charles, I think. His powerful charisma bonded all the counselors in a summer of madcap fun. Without ever being irresponsible to our campers or disrespectful to God and the church, we centered our summer around adventures, games, and play with each other. 

      I wish I could have walked down to the little stone chapel, nestled in the woods, but I was too cognizant of dragging people around a place that held no memories for them. I had loved that chapel. I used to go there alone, more to sit in its serenity than to worship or pray. I was more romantic than religious in my church days, and the sweet little chapel, with its stained glass windows and large cool stone floor, fit my teen-age romanticsm perfectly.

      If I had walked through the rows of cabins, would I have recognized the corner of the cabin where one of my campers was bitten by a copperhead? I remember the girls crowding around me as I took her to Charles, who put her, me and another camp leader in the car and drove us fast to Dahlonega to find the town doctor. At this point the story has become myth to the extent that I don't know if what I remember really happened or was another exaggeration in that exaggerated, bigger-than-life summer. Was the doctor really drunk? That's what I remember we said when we told the story. Did he really use a rusty razor blade to make the X cut over the fang marks? That's what I remember our saying. I doubt the latter, maybe not so much the former. After all, it was north Georgia in the fifties, deep in the Appalachian Mountains, and it was already after dark. At any rate, my camper survived without ill effects and, if I remember right, returned to finish her stay at the camp.

      One weekend, between camp sessions, Charles had one of his innocent-practical-joke ideas: why didn't we catch lightning bugs, he said, put them in a jar, then go to the movies in Dahlonega and let them loose there? Immediately in the spirit of the game, four or five young people were leaping around the yard in front of the cabins, snatching the blinking lights from the air. Fireflies! Lightning bugs, those most magical of all creatures, not only because they light up the night with their cold yellow blinking lights but because they don't bite or sting; they're easy to catch, and they sit on your palm, blinking a few times before flying into the air again, unperturbed by their brief stay on that warm surface. Who could object to seeing them fly around a movie theater?

      When we had a jar full of lightning bugs, we hid it in a bag and took off for town. We filed into the theater quietly, respectfully, but secretly gleeful. I don't remember what movie we saw, but I do remember when Charles opened the jar and let out the lightning bugs. They flew off in all directions, flashing their lantern lights everywhere in the dark theater. I don't know whether the other patrons were annoyed or amused, but the counselors from Camp Glisson were suffused with glee at our harmless and maybe even charming stunt. 

       I was a bit in love with Charles, in my teen-age way. I was mad about him, but not seriously. That a future with him wasn't contemplatable was a good thing in more ways than one. Once, when I served him his dinner, he looked at his plate in dismay and said, "But the peas should be on the other side of the potatoes!" When I told my mother that story, she shook her head and said he would be no man to marry! 

      I could see her point, even then. Nonetheless, he was one of the most brilliant personalities I have known, and he made that summer at Camp Glisson a bright star in my galaxy.

Siblings' Reunion 2018

      After our parents' deaths in 2005 and 2006, my siblings and I promised we would try to get together every year. This year the opportunity came in September, after my cousin-once-removed's wedding in Birmingham. The four of us would spend a few days together – no in-laws, children, or grandchildren – at my sister Laura's house on Lake Lanier, in north Georgia.

      As soon as we arrived, late afternoon, we walked down to the lake and dove in. Sharon and I took a swim while Laura was putting the two paddle boards in the water. Then, while Lee did some quite passably good swan dives off the top of the boathouse, Laura, Sharon, and I did some sometimes passably good paddle-board yoga. The sister without a board would call out poses – "Down dog" "Arta chandrasana" – and the two on the boards would do the pose. Yoga is a skill of balance to begin with. To do poses on a slim piece of hard foam wobbling on a moving surface takes the utmost concentration. The first person to fall in gave the board to the sister waiting her turn.

      As the sun was going down, we pulled the paddle boards off the water and sat on the dock drinking wine as the setting sun sent a flashing brilliance of golds and pinks across the lake. We toasted each other and our reunion. With a glance towards the heavens, we toasted our older sister, who died exactly a year before. We basked in the beauty of the sunset and of each other's company. We laughed a lot.

     That evening Lee showed me pictures of his raft trip down the Colorado River. After dinner on the screened-in porch, he gave each of us an "early Christmas present" – a digitized copy of the home movies from the family trip to Alaska in 1959. We reminisced about that trip, talked about family, our favorite books. We moved inside and worked a jigsaw puzzle to completion.

      The next day we took a hike on the Appalachian Trail at Neel's Gap, just strenuous enough, just long enough, beautiful in the Appalachian woods. 

We had a late lunch at the Bourbon Street restaurant in Dahlonega, where I temporarily forgot where I was and ordered jambalaya because I thought I should have local fare. Back at the lake house, we had time for another swim and more fun with the paddle boards before dinner.

      Then there was more good talk. Laura brought out another puzzle. We worked together on it for a while. Then Laura said good night and went to bed. Shortly thereafter, Lee did the same. Sharon and I worked steadily on. We didn't say much, only the occasional mumbled exclamation of success when a piece slipped into place, or a description of a piece we were looking for, in case the other person spotted it. The silence and the concentration made a cocoon of camaraderie around us. At 1:00 a.m. we put in the last piece we had. Two pieces were missing. We went to bed having done all we could

     The next morning someone found one piece under the table. Sharon found the other one on the kitchen floor. It must have stuck to the sleeve of my sweater when I leaned over the puzzle, then dropped off when I walked to the kitchen. We put the final two pieces in place with a satisfying sense of completion.

      We had breakfast, then tore the puzzles apart and put the pieces back in the boxes. We cleaned the kitchen and remade the beds with clean sheets. We loaded Sharon's paddle board on top of her car, closed up the house, and drove back to Atlanta.

      There we concluded the siblings' reunion with expanded family. The in-laws rejoined us. Laura's daughter and two grandchildren came over, as did my son and granddaughter, who happened to be in Atlanta at the same time as I, though for different reasons. We played croquet in the back yard. (My ten-year-old granddaughter beat the socks off us!) The cousins, close in age, played as though the two years since they had seen each other had left no gap. We had dinner on the patio that night – children, grandchildren, in-laws, siblings.

      The next morning Sharon drove back to north Georgia. Lee flew back to Charlottesville. The children and grandchildren had left for their own places of abode the night before. Laura's husband went to work, leaving her and me alone in the house. Before I left for the airport that evening to return to Oregon, Laura played the piano for me – Schubert, Beethoven, Gershwin.

      Sharing the lake, the meals, the conversation – intimate times with each of my siblings – the easy flow from one to the other: I love my family.

For Those with Colorless Autumns

      When I talk to my East Coast friends, from Boston to Atlanta, they lament the lack of color in their trees this autumn. To boost their spirits, I offer this essay, written one year when the Siskiyous, too, suffered autumn browns.

      What happened to the autumn color? Where are the golden yellows and the flaming oranges, the scarlets and the vermilions? Who dulled the brilliance? Who rubbed the blush from the complexions of the trees? Who sucked the energy away? Who gave us achromatism, pallor, wanness in our autumn this year?

     Brown, brown, brown – everywhere it's brown. On a road I drive frequently, a long row of incense cedars, interspersed tree by tree with broad-leaf maples, is usually an autumn checkerboard of green and yellow. This year the maples between the cedars are lifeless brown. Yellow turned buff, red turned russet scarlet turned chestnut. Far from being vibrant and exciting, the woods have become dull: spiritless, wearisome, prosaic, lackluster, humdrum, drab, and monotonous. The woods this year are brown.

      Is this lack of color a depiction of weather past? Or a prediction of weather to come? Does it mean we had a hot summer? A dry year? A late fall? Or does it mean it will be an early winter? A dry winter? A hard winter? It must mean something. What kind of energy is sucking at the roots of the trees, drawing their color right out of their skins?

      Things are bad if I had rather look at my calendar picture than at the mountains themselves. How can I accept brown? Well, first I should stop pining for gold. Once I stopped looking for Renoir, I found Rembrandt. In a reversal of art history, we have gone from large areas of pulsating color to a soft, retreating chiaroscuro. Brown is not just brown. If it were, the Mona Lisa and The Night Watch would be dull pictures: prosaic, lackluster, humdrum, and monotonous.

      Brown is a vast spectrum of variations. Brown in one tree is Sudan brown, in another Arabian brown, in another Vassar tan, a real term for a real color, a trim derived, in reality, from Vassar College, but my dictionary doesn't say whether it originated from the color of the New England trees around Vassar College or from the tan the girls returned to school with after their Christmas vacations in Florida. Some trees are chestnut brown, some pearl-brown, some sand brown. Some are somber umber; others burnt Sienna, Sienna brown, or Sienna drab. Are the trees this autumn Sienna drab? It's a real color, a "light grayish brown to reddish brown that is duller than sandstone and paler than wood rose." Sandstone? Wood rose? What beautiful colors! Some trees seep with sepia: "a dark grayish yellowish brown that is stronger and slightly yellower than seal and stronger and slightly yellower and lighter than otter." Seal and otter, too? Other trees are only ocher, "a moderate orange that is yellower and deeper than honeydew, yellower and darker than Persian orange, and duller than mikado orange." Honeydew? Persian orange? Midado orange? All that in the autumn woods? Wood rose, seal, otter, honeydew, mikado? How could I ever have thought this a dull autumn?

(This essay is found in my book, Fire from the Dragon's Tongue: Essays about Living with Nature in the Siskiyou Mountains.)

An Autumn to Fulfill Dreams

       This is. The most. Beautiful autumn.

     I couldn't wait to get on the Cameron Meadows trail this fall. I have hiked it often in late spring, when the dogwoods are in bloom and the bear grass waves silver in the sun. I've hiked it in early summer, when pink clusters of rhododendron blossoms crowd the trail, and later, when tiger lilies rise orange among masses of yarrow, Oregon sunshine, Indian paintbrush, and dozens of other wildflowers. I generally leave the trails to the hunters in October, so I had never hiked this trail in the autumn, but this year I couldn't bear not to do it. 

       I know the trees on the Cameron Meadows trail – broad-leaf maples, viney maples, black and white oaks, and dogwoods among the big-trunked evergreens: Douglas firs, Ponderosa pines, and incense cedars. I have always thought it would be an artist's showroom in autumn, and this year promised more than usual. I imagined walking up the steep trail through masses of scarlet-red viney maples. I envisioned the woods on fire with color. I was a-twitter with excitement, but as the car neared the trailhead, I tried to let go of my expectations. I told myself it would be what it would be. Resolutely unanticipatory, I put my poles in my hands and started up one of the steepest trails in the Applegate, one I knew at other times of the year as one of the most beautiful. In autumn, it would be what it would be.

        The trail did not disappoint.

      The woods were dark under the forest canopy, but when the sun hit a particular broad-leaf maple, the color burst from it in gleaming butter-gold. 

The dogwoods were more subtle but no less beautiful in their pinks and salmon. One dogwood was such a pale lime-green it was almost ghostly. The viney maples were sometimes the flaming scarlet I was expecting, but even more often, they came out in softer yellows and, even better, in leaves ranging, each one, from yellow to orange to red. The oaks wore russet and orange. In his pumpkin-yellow hunter-deterring sweatshirt, Mike fit right in. 

Low bushes wrapped leafy yellow arms around the dark trunks of pines and firs. We were walking through a painter's paradise. A writer's paradise. A hiker's paradise. Anyone's paradise who would make the effort to climb up there.

      I was ecstatic. I stopped again and again, to take pictures, to hug trees (see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com.), and just to gape at the beauty around me.

      At the top, Mike and I sat under an immense incense cedar at the edge of the meadow for a bite of lunch. We didn't have much time to linger because we were going to town that evening for a postcard writing session to get out the vote. But even with that time squeeze and even walking on a trail I had just come up, I couldn't just hurry through. Walking down the steep trail was like diving into yellow, like diving in and swimming  through color, the variations in shades of yellow like swimming through shallow water into deeper water, the yellow in the trees varying from champagne to lemon to goldenrod like the blues of water varying from turquoise to lapis. The orange-tipped trees were like white-caps on the ocean. Everywhere there was new beauty. 

      This was. The most. Beautiful autumn hike. I came home color-saturated and soul-satisfied.

Dogwood leaves

      

Crash!

      I screamed the whole long, extended, slow-motion moment before my Toyota Yaris hit the BMW SUV that pulled out in front of it.

      Mike, who was driving my car, cried in alarm, "Are you all right?" but I wasn't sure what "all right" meant in this case, and I said, "I don't know," as I struggled to unbuckle the life-saving seat belt. What I did know was that my door wouldn't open. Mike appeared instantly on the outside of the door and with superhuman force wrenched it open. Then we stood in the road, looking at my Yaris strewn in parts on the road, our weekly hike up Table Rock Mountain at daybreak also in shatters

      The woman in the BMW who had slid through the stop sign without caution was full of apologies and concern for us. I was alarmed to see she had a baby, but the baby had been in a car seat in the back and I think didn't even know anything out of the ordinary had happened or why so many people – cops, emergency workers, strangers, her grandparents, who had raced immediately to the site – were milling around. She was fine. As was everyone else, more or less.

      The driver who had caused the accident took immediate responsibility and was only concerned about everyone's well-being. When the policeman asked me if I wanted him to issue her a citation for running the stop sign, I said, no, she didn't need that on top of everything else. The policeman, the emergency vehicle drivers, and a witness to the accident who left his name and contact information with me all said the accident was clearly her fault. I was doing the young woman a favor not to issue her a citation, so I was a little annoyed when, later, she insisted on placing partial blame on Mike with the insurance company.

      When I tell people I was in a "little accident," they often look askance, as though there were no such thing. My massage therapist, Haley May, with May Massage Arts, told me that such an impact is always hard on the body. Nonetheless, it was, in fact, a little accident. I know enough to be grateful. The tow truck driver, who had lost a daughter in an automobile accident years ago, kept saying, "It's just a bunch of metal. You're alive; that's what counts." But he didn't need to remind me. It really was a little accident.

      Mike and I both have pain from ligaments that got strained by the pull of the seat belt across our chests. I have a big round bruise on my left breast, at first black and blue, now green and yellow, and one long, across-the-belly bruise where the seat belt stretched across my lap. It looks like a forest fire: striated vertically, black, with streaks of red and green.

      The day after the accident, I left for Georgia and sat for hours on an airplane, then more hours in a car. When I returned to the Rogue Valley, Haley told me she had a cancellation and could get me in for a massage two days later. As soon as she started working on me, I thought, "I really need this." 

      The bruises are healing. Sore muscles are relaxing. I can breathe deeply and turn over in bed without pain. The Yaris is in the wrecking yard. Fortunately, I had had two cars, so I could drive my RAV4 while I was looking for a replacement for the Yaris. I need a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get up my driveway in winter, but the RAV4 is 20 years old and has about 300,000 miles on it, so I needed the Yaris for ordinary driving. Now I decided to replace two cars with one, which would be an all-wheel-drive but more like a car than a truck, a description a Subaru fits better than any other make.

      Therefore, behold now the Subaru Crosstrek in my carport.

How I Knew I Wasn't in Oregon Any More

      Songbirds? Now? It's October! 

      Yes, it was the first week of October, but it was also not Oregon. In Oregon, all the songbirds have long since flown south. Last week I was in the South they might have flown to, but hearing them sing in October was still an oxymoronic experience. It wasn't the way things are supposed to be, to my half-century-determined Oregon sensibilities.

      Birdsong wasn't the only oxymoronic experience I had in Birmingham, where I had come for a family wedding. On the same walk, through a neighborhood in Birmingham, I saw trees and bushes in bloom. How could one tree be pink with blossoms while just up the street another tree was just turning pink in its foliage? Isn't it supposed to be that nature colors its trees with blossoms in spring, with foliage in autumn, as it does in Oregon? What kind of place was this that mixed up spring and autumn in such a way?

      During the hours before the wedding, my family (sisters, brother, in-laws, nieces) and I walked through Birmingham's botanical gardens. The tropical greenhouse was like any tropical greenhouse in any botanical garden, never the way things are supposed to grow in that particular climate, but the walk through the woods took me back so thoroughly to the woods of my childhood that I felt like long-leaf pines, swamp magnolias, and pawpaws

This is me in a swamp magnolia tree.

were as much the way woods are supposed to be as the sugar pines, Jeffrey pines, Ponderosa pines, madrone trees, and Douglas firs of my own woods. 

      The wedding itself was the way it was supposed to be, West Coast or East Coast, with a bride beautiful in white and the groom ecstatically happy. Watching the late afternoon sun break through the clouds and highlight the bride just as she walked down the aisle between the rows of chairs set on the long sloping lawn above the river was certainly the way weddings should be, in Alabama or in Oregon, and even the smattering of rain before the ceremony wasn't any more unusual in an Alabama October than in an Oregon October. It didn't last long enough to affect the ceremony, but it was enough to send the violinist scurrying under the cover of the porch roof and to wet the seats of our chairs, which the men in my party gallantly wiped dry with their handkerchiefs. They would have done the same in Oregon.

      The suddenness of being now in Oregon and then, in only a few hours, in Alabama or Georgia – and then, a week later, doing the same in reverse – emphasized these oxymoron. Jet lag is the indication that, according to our bodies, that's not the way things are supposed to be. 

Baking Lessons

      My friend Tracy asked if I would like to give her granddaughter, Mataya, a lesson in making pies when she came down for some cooking lessons last summer. I, of course, was delighted. I thought I had learned enough since the first pie I baked, in the kitchen of my boyfriend's house in Cambridge fifty years ago, to teach an eleven-year-old child something useful. 

       We decided to cook at my house and to make one savory pie and one sweet one. I sent Mataya some recipe choices. She picked chicken pot pie and strawberry lime mousse tartlets. She and Tracy would come over mid-morning, and we would eat what we cooked for lunch.

      "Pie crusts are tricky.," I told Mataya as we began. "Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't." She was not intimidated.

      I explained that it was important to keep the butter cold, to work the butter-and-flour mixture to a uniform consistency, to add very cold (iced) water to the butter-and-flour mixture, and not to overwork the dough.

      Mataya moved quickly and with confidence. It wasn't that she didn't listen to me but that she didn't seem to need to know what I was telling her. She whizzed through the process, moving from one step to another without hesitation. The dough was made, divided into four parts, and refrigerated. 

       While the dough was chilling, we made the crust for the chicken pot pie, then turned to the lime mousse filling for the tartlets. I started to instruct again, talking about the importance of timing and so forth. That's when Mataya told me about the cooking camps she has been to and what she learned there and the variety of things she cooked and how well she had done. I began to think I had nothing at all to teach Mataya. I never took a cooking class. She probably knew stuff I didn't know. I began to see that my role wasn't to teach Mataya anything about baking but simply to give her an opportunity to make some pies. 

      I knew that Mataya had also taken skiing lessons and had done some rigorous bicycle camp. She told me about going to a computer coding camp earlier in the summer. When I asked which activity she preferred, she said cooking (though maybe now, after another even more exciting bicycle camp, she might have changed her preferences).

      While Mataya and I were making the lime mousse filling, Tracy realized we weren't going to get around to cooking the chicken, so she took over that part of the project, chopping celery and carrots and stewing the chicken in its vegetable broth.

      I spread my pastry mat on the kitchen counter, anchored it with tape, and brought out the chilled dough, then, unable to leave the teaching mode, started instructing Mataya on how to roll out a pie dough. Full of confidence, she wielded the rolling pin briskly. "Don't push so hard," I suggested. "If you work it too hard, the dough will be tough." Four pastry rounds were cut out and pushed into the tart shells, filled with beans, and put into the oven.

      Mataya admitted that she was the kind of cook who made a mess in the kitchen, but she impressed me by being the kind of cook who also immediately cleaned that mess, readying the kitchen for the next step, which, in this case, was to fill the cooled tart shells with the lime mousse, then to decorate the tarts. Mataya cut the strawberries into quarters and stuck them jauntily in a quadrant pattern. The bold red strawberries looked cute on the lime green filling.

      The tarts went into the refrigerator and the chicken pot pie into the oven. Tracy, Mataya, and I gave the kitchen a final cleaning and set the table for lunch. 

      Mataya's pie crusts were excellent. They were not tough. The crust for the chicken pot pie did not turn soggy. The crusts for the tartlets were flaky and perfectly complementary to the sharp citrus flavor of the filling. Mataya talked about how she would adjust the recipe, what she would do different next time. She talked liked a judge on the British Baking Show. 

      I was impressed with what Mataya had done. In not too many years, I think, I'll have to go to her house for baking lessons.