Where are the men?

    I appreciate everyone who works in some volunteer capacity in the Applegate—or in any community. But I find it curious how few of those community leaders are men.

    I have served on the board of the Applegater, a quarterly newsmagazine of the Applegate, for many years. Currently it has six members. Five of them are women. This or a similar ratio has been usual for as long as I have been on the board.

    A Greater Applegate is the only nonprofit I know of in the Applegate that has more men than women on its board (5 men, 3 women). However, the balance shifts when you add the staff, all eight of whom are women.

    Other boards: Williams Community Forest Project: 4 women, 2 men. Applegate Siskiyou Alliance: 4 women, 2 men. Friends of Ruch Library: one man among five or six women. Voices of the Applegate, a local choir: at least one man, sometimes maybe two; women sing tenor.

    Similar ratios hold among nonprofit boards in the Rogue Valley in general.

    Reading the names for the board of the Jackson County Library District, I deduce 3 women, 1 man, plus one name that could refer to either a man or a woman.

    Carpenter Foundation: 5 women, 3 men.

    The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an exception (9 women, 13 men), but it's worth noting that only two of those men live in the area.

     It's true that there are more women than men in the Rogue Valley (95 men to 100 women), which is a larger gap than in either the state (98 men to 100 women) or the nation (97 men to 100 women). Still, the proportions don't work. Proportionately, there should be more men willing to serve on boards in the Applegate.

    Women far outnumber men in yoga classes. My first yoga teacher was male; all but one of the students in the class were female. My current yoga instructor is female; there might be one man among the students each class period—or not. Nationwide, 87% of yoga instructors are women. 75% of practitioners are women. 

    Sixty percent of the students at colleges and universities in the United States are women.

    What happened to the men? 

    My theory is that when women start encroaching on what used to be a man's domain—college, yoga, board positions, whatever—the men disappear from that thing. It's like what happened with names. Shirley and Carol used to be common names for men. Now men think, "I can't name my son Shirley. That's a girl's name." They think, "Yoga is for women." They think, I guess, that boards for nonprofits are women's clubs.

    What a pity.

Back in the Classroom

     Last week I found myself scribbling furiously on the whiteboard in the Ruch library, filling it with important points and diagrams, erasing everything, and writing more, as I used to do, before I retired from teaching in college. I was dashing through the differences between journalism style and essay writing, bouncing on my toes with enthusiasm.

        On behalf of the Applegater, the quarterly newsmagazine of the Applegate, I was teaching a crash course in journalism, free to interested participants. As both a writer and a former journalism instructor, I was certainly qualified to do this, though I wasn't sure how to teach a term's worth of journalism in four hours. I prepped hard, then made brownies for refreshments, figuring food would be as important as instruction. 

    After introductions, I went directly into the basic writing process and the particulars of writing journalism. I emphasized what I called the first rule: "It's not about you." Subdue your personal identification with the subject, I advised. The article is about that subject, not about you.

    After an hour and a half of whiz-bang lecture, I set the students up with an exercise to work with partners. Then they changed partners and repeated the exercise. It was a little complex, but it worked.

    Between the two parts of the exercise, one student said she had been confused. 

    I said, "Oh please, don't sit there confused. That makes me feel bad." 

    "It's not about you!" someone called out. 

    Everyone laughed. It was that kind of class.

    I ended with a half-hour of grammatical tips. One student confessed that she had grimaced when she saw that part of the schedule. But, she said, the grammar part had been fun, too.

    In fact, all the students, as they left, said they had enjoyed the class—and the brownies—and that they were leaving with new knowledge and confidence.

    As for me, I had enjoyed so much being in the classroom again. It was a barrel of fun.

Plastic

    I loathe plastic. It's so unorganic. It lasts forever and clogs up all the ecological systems. I yearn for things I can burn, compost, or recycle—paper bags, glass jars, cotton clothes. I am trying to get rid of plastic in my life.

    It was easy enough with plastic bags. I have a ton of totes, and a friend gave me a box of small waxy paper bags to use instead of sandwich bags. I've pretty much transitioned to doing without plastic bags.

    The rest is not so easy. Because all shampoo comes in convenient plastic bottles, I thought I would buy bulk shampoo at the coop and put it in a glass jar, but the bulk shampoo at the coop has fragrance in it, and I'm allergic to fragrances, so I"m back to shampoo in plastic bottles. I can buy milk in cardboard cartons instead of plastic bottles, but those cartons are plastic-covered and are neither recyclable nor burnable. I have replaced plastic wrap with tinfoil. I never use plastic dishes or tableware, but plastic is ubiquitous in the kitchen: my blender is plastic and those wonderful rubbery spatulas are plastic and the refrigerator is plastic. 

    This very computer is plastic. Even my car is plastic.

    In a book of haiku I was given for Christmas, I read the perfect summation of the problem:

            Plastic red sphere

            Caps a pen. Extra plastic

            For the Mariana.

   Think about it. That tiny ball of plastic you rub off the tip of your new ballpoint pen and maybe throw in the trash or drop without thinking on the floor—even that is a minuscule addition to the accumulation of things that never dissolve or disintegrate or recycle into something else. Every piece of plastic we manufacture eventually ends up in the environment—on the roadside, in the soil, in the ocean. Every tiny, forgettable piece of plastic adds to the problem.

    From plastic we have created an astonishingly convenient but totally unsustainable world. 

    My effort to live without plastic is an exercise in futility. But I feel cleaner doing it. Try it. You'll see what I mean.

On the Elliott Ridge Trail with the Forest Serrvice

    Keeping my eye on my goal to hike 800 miles before my 80th birthday in July, I did the 10-mile hike up Stein Butte the other day. As I climbed I remembered hiking along the Elliott Ridge and down the Stein Butte trail last fall with personnel from the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest, which had proposed some fire protection work along that route. 

    I was suspicious. So were three other Applegate residents who joined me and the six Forest Service employees on the hike.

    Before we set out, the four of us expressed our concerns—loss of botanical variety along the trail, damage to the special communities of plants, and the visual effects of their work on the trail. We were told they had permission to work—i.e., to cut and slash—for a thousand feet, probably meaning five hundred feet on each side of the trail.

Madrone trees along the trail

    I gasped, horrified.

    No, no, they said. That didn't mean that is what they would do. They had no intention of doing anything so drastic. Not to worry.

    At various places along the trail, I stopped and said, "What would you do here? What would it look like after you did your work?"

    They would cut these small trees, they said. They wouldn't touch the lovely big trees. They might trim the ceanothus bushes. 

    It looked reasonable.

    We talked about their plans for a spot of chaparral on the trail. Luke explained that in the past heavy thinning of chaparral in the Applegate watershed has degraded these habitats and spread noxious weeds and highly flammable non-native annual grasses, contributing to the loss of biodiversity, increasing fire risk, and damaging the area's natural beauty. The Forest Service people agreed that they wouldn't take such drastic measures here. 

    And so on.

    All in all, it sounded pretty good. They would do all the work along the trail themselves, by hand. Only the work along the road would be hired out to machines. They would respect the integrity and beauty of the trail while still giving firefighters means to resist a fire in the area. They would work downhill, off-trail, as much as possible. My fears about one of my favorite trails were allayed.

    "It sounds all right," I said. "But how likely is it to actually happen this way?" 

    The long pause before any response was answer enough. They glanced at each other. Theirs was not the final voice. Their plan would be taken up the ladder, from one supervisor to another, further and further from the people walking the trail with us, listening to our concerns and making adjustments in their plans. 

    Confidence crumpled. Who knows what the final instructions will be and what the trail, in the end, will look like?

The Siskiyou Crest from the Stein Butte trail

Was It Cold in Your Part of the Country?

     Last week was a cold week in America, everywhere it seemed, except in southern Oregon. After my six inches of snow and a good ski trip at Lake of the Woods, which was crowded with snowmobilers and children on sleds, suddenly the temperatures were in the fifties and everything was rain—which, of course, is a good thing, but it would be better if it were snow.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the country was having a hard time of it. Eight degrees in Blue Ridge, Georgia, my sister reported.  Minus four, said my friend in Boulder, Colorado. 

    I was so envious.

    But not of conditions just north of me, where the world turned to ice. The phenomenon, my son explained, was that the rain froze when it hit the ground. Chaos ensued.

    My nephew who works for the fire department in Portland said they were getting a thousand calls a day.

    My nephew who lives in Pennsylvania had to bundle up indoors when the heater in his house broke and couldn't be fixed till parts came in. When he built a fire in a long-unused fireplace, the house filled with smoke, necessitating open windows on an in-the-teens day.

    I might envy eight degrees and even four below, and certainly I wish my landscape would look like the pictures of snowshoe trips my Colorado friend sends me, but there are some parts of a hard winter I would just as soon avoid. 

    But I did ski at Crater Lake today, in perfect snow, with a deep blue sky filling the interstices of ink-dark clouds, occasional light snow kissing my cheeks, and snow-burdened firs on the distant mountains glowing in strips of sun. You see why I want more snow?

Words from My Father

    Every day I receive a new word, via email, from Word Daily. Yesterday's word was "obstreperous" (noisy and difficult to control). 

    Obstreperous. When I read this word, I heard it in my father's voice. "You're just obstreperous!" he would say to me, teasingly. I was too young to know what the word meant, but I could tell by his tone that he loved me. 

    He told his children they were "obstreperous," "perspicacious" and "impudent" before they understood "doggie" and "moo," but he spoke these words to us with such affection we glowed under the supposed compliment. He would say, "You're my p-i-double-l pal," and we thought it was grand to be Dad's pal. Only years later, after we learned to spell, did we get the joke.

    He could be serious about words, too. "Enunciate," he would say sternly. "Say 'get' not 'git.' Don't say, 'It's somethin' I'm plannin',' but 'It's something I'm planning.'" He and my mother were both from Kentucky, but he had no patience with poor enunciation. Surely because of that training, I was able to be a radio commentator for twenty years.

    My father had a repertoire of three or four memorized poems. When he was well into his nineties, my son called him on the phone one day and asked if he could still recite "The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe.  Yes, he could, and he did, right there on the phone, and my son recorded that wavery old voice giving one final recitation of my dad's favorite poem.

    My father was famous for telling a story that centered around words. It started with an explanation that the Hottentot language built words by adding words together. "For instance," he would continue, "the Hottentot word for mother is 'muder.' The Hottentot word for children is 'trotter.' If they were stuttering children, the word was 'stridle-trotter.' So a mother of stuttering children was called a 'stridle-trotter-muder.'" And so on, until he got to the climax of the story with "the butel-rotten-lotten-gitter-wetter-cotter-Hotten-totten-stridle-trotter-muder-otten-tater has escaped." It means "the murderer of a Hottentot mother of stuttering children who was kept in a kangaroo cage with a slat cover to keep the rain off" has escaped.      It is a word dear to my heart.

 

Winter Weather Warning

     The winter weather warning was right! It snowed all day yesterday, and I am so happy! What a white and glorious wonderland is framed by my window!

    The firs and pines are bowed down with their white burden. Each limb of the apple tree is outlined with a ribbon of snow. Six inches of snow soften the ground. Humpy Mountain looks frozen in place.

    Everything is so still, hanging in the balance of beauty.

    Here is my

Ode to a Winter Landscape

Nothing is so beautiful as a winter landscape

    When fire-folks of frost in the frozen fields

        Wink rainbows at the morning sun

    When the unity of white undoes dappled things

    When the squeak of skis on snow

        sneaks into the unity of silence

        in the snow-muffled forest

    When the air is so cold it hurts your teeth to smile

        But you can't

                stop

                        smiling

Because 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

    descending like down from overstuffed clouds

    the fire at your back shining like shook foil

Nothing is so beautiful as winter stars

    splintering in the cold air

    of a landscape which—

            winter scene

            sweet, especial winter scene—

                    is charged with grandeur

                                and

                    gathers to a greatness

                                of insuperable cold

                                unsurpassed silence

                                unconditional beauty