An Impressive Show of Siskiyou Wildflowers for My Sister from Georgia

    My sister Laura, who lives in Atlanta, is a wildflower enthusiast, a botanical artist, and, though she's not a scientist (she repeatedly said she wasn't), she's also not an amateur (she bristled when I called her that), but certainly she's an astute and knowledgeable botanical observer. When she planned a visit here in mid-May to see the wildflowers I have been raving about for years, I set out to prove I had not been exaggerating.

    For weeks I was checking out the trails for the best wildflowers. I chose a different hike for each day she would be here—Bolt Mountain at the south end of the Applegate Valley; Lower Table Rock outside of Medford; the East Applegate Ridge Trail in the center of the Applegate; and Baldy Peak, in the southern part. The displays were amazing. Fingers crossed they would not have faded before Laura got here.

   They did not disappoint. We saw 98 species on the four trails. Forty-one of those species were unique to a particular trail. We marveled everywhere we hiked.

    We called flowers by name as we hiked—an astonishing 35, 40, up to 50 species on each trail. Some of the Siskiyou flowers were familiar to Laura from their East Coast relatives (Indian paintbrush, vetch, columbine, etc.), but many were completely new to her (rough eyelash, tarweed, mission bells, fritillaria recurva, among others). She was a quick learner, recognizing flowers on one hike she had only learned the previous day. She hunkered over flowers with her magnifying glass. She carefully pulled apart partial blossoms to examine their parts. ("I feel like a gynecologist," she said.) 

    We saw the very unusual woolly Oregon sunshine on the Baldy Peak trail. I jumped up and down in excitement to recognize on that trail a rough eyelash, which I had never seen before. Laura especially loved the Siskiyou iris, with its creamy petals and purple veins. When she took a picture of a fritillary (recurva) from underneath, with the sun shining behind it, we discovered a phenomenon I had never known: the petals are transparent, like stained glass. When the sun shines through them, they glow yellow, as opposed to the opaque red they present when viewed from the top. It was extraordinary.

    The spreads were spectacular—lupine and mule's ears on Baldy Peak; sea blush interspersed with goldfields on Bolt Mountain; tall blue-eyed Mary and bi-colored vetch on Lower Table Rock, where wildflowers stretched to the horizon on the flat the top of the mountain. 

    Each day, we returned to my house with my list of identified flowers and photos of the unknowns, then opened books and websites to find the names of the latter. We identified the flower Laura had called a DYC (damn yellow composite) that was so widespread on Bolt Mountain I was embarrassed not to know it—nodding microseris. We identified the unusual Hooker's Indian pink on Bolt Mountain and the singularly distinctive summer snow (leptosiphon parviflorus). We learned to distinguish between blue dicks and ookow (count the stamens; six on blue dicks; three on ookow) and between mule's ears and balsam (by the leaf structure). We made guesses, dug deeper, changed our minds, narrowed down the possibilities, consulted with Siskiyou wildflower experts, finally made indisputable identifications. We worked late into the night, then got up the next morning for another hike and more new flowers. 

    The Siskiyou wildflowers put on an A+ performance. 

    Laura said she didn't know anyone else she could "geek out with" over wildflowers as we were doing. It was a sisterly thing and lots of fun.

    Laura enjoyed everything during her visit: the massage; the yoga class; brunch at the Jacksonville Inn; dinner at the Lindsay Lodge; buying wine from an Applegate winery to give as gifts back home; working the jigsaw puzzle she had brought to me; buying dresses together at a shop in Jacksonville; hiking with my friends—but nothing could equal the impressive show of the Siskiyous' wildflowers. 

    I was so pleased.
    Next time, I told her, she should come in July, for the high-country flowers. What a good time we will have geeking out over even more Siskiyou wildflowers. I can't wait.

Memories of Mike, on the Anniversary of His Death

     A few days ago, on May 7, Dignity Memorial sent me an email, reminding me that May 7 was the day Mike died, four years ago. Following their suggestion, I am sharing some memories of my dear late husband on this blog because I loved him and miss him.

(1) Mike greeting me as I landed in the canoe at my wedding site, joyously gathering me into his arms, his face aglow with happiness. (Mine, too.)

(2) Dancing to Alice DiMicele's rendition of "Dance Me to the End of Love," our chosen wedding song, later that day. I hadn't known Mike could dance until we started practicing in his living room, and then I thought how much fun we would have going out dancing in the Rogue Valley. That never happened, making the wedding dance even more poignant a memory for me. 

(3) The car-camping trip Mike dreamed up and planned for us the summer I hurt my knee and couldn't hike. Car-camping? But I'm a backpacker! But Mike knew what he was doing. It was so much fun!

(4) Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestra concerts. It seemed such a bonus that Mike liked the same kind of music I liked—besides the hiking and cross-country skiing, besides reading books together and sharing political views and enjoying good food and wine. After he died, I couldn't listen to classical music without crying. I didn't return to the symphony concerts until this past season.

(5) Just about any moment on any trail and especially any moment in the Dolomites, but specifically, from the Dolomites: I had broken down in tears for the pain in my heel, which we doctored with an ace bandage and Tylenol, then continued to the top of the pass, where a crucified Christ hung on a cross. Mike suggested I prostrate myself before it and ask forgiveness and maybe Jesus would heal my foot. Funny-Mike.

(6) I loved looking back at Mike on the trail, hiking or skiing, his eyes sparkling with joy.

Gems from My Life

Diamond

Some jeweler somewhere

long ago fashioned a featureless rock

into a diamond's tiny facets

from which the sun strikes fire,

Fourth-of-July sparklers

over Crater Lake's lapis

as I swim.

Ruby

No rubies gleamed among the rocks

Along the shore of Ruby Lake,

Nor did the water splash red as I dove in.

But if rubies are the gemstones of the sun

(As Hindus would have it)

Or the king of all gemstones

(As jewelers' ads would have it),

Then, with mountain peaks clasping Ruby

Like prongs gripping the stone of a ring,

The lake was a genuine gem.

Emerald

I have swum in Emerald Lake in the Trinity Alps

in Emerald Lake in the Sierra Nevada

in Emerald Lake in the Rocky Mountains

and could no doubt swim

in an Emerald Lake on many mountains

because a lake as green as those

could not but be named Emerald.

Garnet

They're called garnet yams

Though the rich orange mash

Merges not with our vision

Of the shiny red gleam of garnet gems.

And though the rough red skins

Might resemble unpolished garnets,

We never really see garnets in the rough

So can hardly identify the yam with the gem.

But give anything the name of a gem

And it will sell.

Turquoise

Once, while I wandered lost in psychic hinterlands,

God told me Satan had thwarted all efforts

to give me the ring that would prove

my initiation into the hermetic circle.

I wound in its place a string on my finger.

Later, wandering in mental peregrinations

around the grounds of the mental hospital,

I sat for a spell at a picnic table,

catatonically uncommunicative

even with the man who joined me there.

Years later, I looked often at the turquoise ring I wore

and wondered what had made him give it to me.

Opal

My mother, an October child,

wore opal earrings

which, I was pleased to know,

when we opened her will after she died,

she had opted to leave to me

But, alas!

She had bestowed those opal earrings

long ago on her granddaughter

who had not the will

to offer them then

back to me.

Pearl

I wish you to be an oyster

And turn these grits of irritation

Into gifts for appreciation

Pearls to love

Along with the other gems

Of my personality.

About Those 800 Miles

     I dreamed the other night that I was following my father up a very steep hill. He was hurrying fast, carrying two very heavy suitcases, the sweat streaming off his face as he huffed and puffed, walking fast, struggling, and suddenly he keeled over backward and slid, head first, down the hill. I ran after him and picked him up—he was, then, like a four-inch piece of cardboard—and set him on my knee and said, mournfully, "Dad! Oh, Dad. Dad. You didn't have to work so hard."

    Now, my father died at the age of 98 1/2, in the puttering days of old age and retirement. He certainly did not die of overwork. 

    The dream, I think, was about me.

    I suppose it's possible I could keel over and die on a hike, but I don't think the danger is great. In the first place, I don't huff and puff. I measure my energy carefully and climb hills still breathing through my nose. In the second place, all doctors have proclaimed my heart strong, and, in the third place, I am not hiking 800 miles in ten months from point zero. I have been hiking for years.

    In the fourth place, I am well aware that my goal wouldn't be all that ambitious for some people. My friend who is a year older and lives in Colorado, for instance, hikes 1500 miles a year (but he says, "There are all those Colorado Mountains that need to be climbed"). My friend in California, several years younger, easily hikes 20 miles a week. 

    Anyway, hiking is not a competitive sport, and the hike itself is not a race. I'm not trying to beat anyone. I am just setting a goal and striving to meet it. If it's harder or easier for me than it would be for someone else, if someone else gets to the top of the mountain before me, so what? 

    Nonetheless, the dream affected me enough that I took a few days off from strenuous hiking. 

    Then, feeling well rested, as my yoga instructor used to say, I put on a 22-pound pack and hiked up Stein Butte. That was a tough one. At the top, sweating but not huffing, I thought, "Diana, you don't have to work so hard." 

    But there is something satisfying in working so hard. As long as I'm not in danger of keeling over and ending up flat as a piece of cardboard, I think I'll keep on doing it.

Walking 800 miles

     During the year before my 75th birthday, I did 75 things of 75 repetitions each. (See post on July 26, 2018, and following.) That was five years ago. What significant thing, I wondered after my 79th birthday last July, could I do to mark turning 80?

    Well, I thought. I could hike 800 miles before July 20, 2024. And I could hike on 80 different trails, to boot. Skiing would count.

    Goal set

    At first I didn't pay much attention to the mileage. By the end of July I had hiked 35.5 miles. September's backpacking trip in the Wallowa Mountains doubled that number. By November I had hiked 250 miles. Then I had foot surgery. Then I went to Georgia for a siblings reunion. Then I caught bronchitis. I lost two months of hiking.

    By the time I started hiking again, on December 25, I had hiked 263.5 miles. I was halfway through the year but hadn't hiked nearly half the required distance. I started calculating. To make my goal, I would have to hike approximately 20 miles a week in the next seven months. That might be easily doable if all I was doing was hiking, but things interfere: board meetings, articles to write, a journalism workshop to teach, garden work, and the myriad other things of daily life. But I was doggedly persistent.

    Mileage accumulates slowly. Five miles up one mountain, seven up another, only time for frour miles another day. In the face of 800 miles, a jump from 364 to 368 doesn't seem like much. 10-miles hikes are better.

    I have become fanatical. I no longer take walks; I only take hikes. Every empty day I fill with a hike. I love the strenuous exercise, the fresh air, the glories of nature. I have hiked through gorgeous autumn colors and in bracing winter cold. I have skied in deep white snow. Now I walk through spreads of wildflowers carpeting the woods. I am in seventh heaven day after day.

        I indulge in a massage after every 80 miles.

    Thirty-six friends have joined me on hikes. Nine others have scheduled hikes with me. A friend from California came up to hike with me, adding 23.5 miles in three days. My sister Laura is coming from Georgia to do some wildflower hikes with me. In May I'll do an 80-mile backpacking trip with three friends, staying in a lodge at the mid-point. In June I'll be hiking in the Swiss Alps with my sister Sharon. 

    My son will come down from Washington to hike the last of the 800 miles with me (or whatever the number is; I won't stop hiking if I reach 800 before July 20). We'll do that hike on my birthday, walking right from the Jacksonville Woodlands into the Jacksonville Inn, where my birthday guests—anyone who has hiked any of the 800 miles with me—will be waiting to greet me with a glass of champagne. 

    And that, I think, should be a fitting way to celebrate my 80th birthday.

    

Hiking in Jacksonville's Forest Park

Reminder to readers in the Rogue Valley: Poetry recitation Saturday, April 6, 3:00, at the Applegate Library.

    A few weeks ago I was hiking in Jacksonville's Forest Park on trails that would take me to the top of the mountain. 

    Pretty soon I started hearing chain saws. The woods suddenly gave out, and I was hiking through bare hills with lots of stumps.

    The view and the noise told the story. To my left were two hills sloping down to the valley, rounded and green with manzanita. 

Manzanita hillside in the Applegate, not in
Forest Park—just to give you an idea

The hill I was standing on and the ones I had hiked through were denuded. Slash piles of manzanita were waiting to be burned. Chainsaws buzzed in the distance. Soon the green hillsides would be as bare as these. 

    Ninety-nine percent of the manzanitas, which were ninety-nine percent of the vegetation on these hills, had been cut.

   I understood, of course. The danger of fire—and manzanitas, they say, are particularly oily—caused panic in the park managers. They said, "Cut 'em all down!"

    ("My teeth hurt." "Pull 'em out.")

    ("I have a pain in my belly." "Give her a hysterectomy.")

    Looking at those scraped-bare hills. I couldn't imagine that that destruction made good ecological sense. Surely there was a better solution.

    I turned my back on the sight and headed back towards the trailhead, hiking on a trail called Manzanita Tunnel. It will have to be renamed. The large, old manzanitas with their smooth, mahogany-red trunks no longer arch over the trail, making a delightful, magical tunnel. Now the trail goes over barren hills. We could call it Dead Souls Trail.

    When I expressed my dismay at this destruction to another hiker, she pointed out that manzanitas reseed quickly, and, yes, that's true. But earlier this month I was in another area where the manzanitas had been cut at least ten years ago. Baby manzanitas were all over the place. But they were still babies. How old were the ten-foot-high, eight-inch-thick, dense trunks of the old manzanitas that had been cut? 

I love those old manzanitas!
Here I'm hugging one on the Stein Butte trail.

Manzanitas may reseed readily, but they grow slowly. It will take untold decades for the beautiful manzanita forests to return to Forest Park's hills. If they are allowed to return.

    I haven't, myself, returned to Forest Park since that hike through scraped-bare hills. It's too painful to hike there now.

                Beautiful manzanita blossoms.      Photo by Larry Francis.

Poetry Recitations

    Hearing poems recited is to hearing them read aloud as hearing them read aloud is to reading them silently. Better.

    Maybe that's why memorizing poetry has been a life-long hobby of mine. I memorized my first poem in the third grade. I recited a poem for the high school variety show. As a child, I memorized poetry as I did chores, the poetry book propped on the ironing board or the handlebars of the lawn mower. During COVID I gave a half-hour poetry recitation on Facebook Live. 

    Now I'm taking poetry recitation to a live audience. A week from Saturday, on April 6, I will recite 15 poems at the Applegate library.

    I am a little nervous. I know the poems thoroughly, but saying them as I'm driving or hiking or even in front of a mirror is not the same as saying them in front of a live audience. I hope I can do this.

    My favorite kind of poem to recite is a dramatic monologue, such as Robert Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Chruch" and T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," because with those poems I get to play a character. Against Prufrock's vexation at his midlife crisis, I will juxtapose Ulysses's defiance of old age in Tennyson's dramatic monologue "Ulysses." Then I'll take on the persona of a young woman telling a tale about hanging suspended in a birch tree with wild grapes when she was five years old in a Robert Frost poem. Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man" is a dialogue rather than a monologue, but it is just as dramatic as those others. I first memorized that poem when I was a teen-ager, just for fun. Now I will recite it "on stage," as it were.

    I'll recite some of Mary Oliver's plain-language, image-rich poems and contrast them with one of Gerard Manley Hopkins's syntactically complex poems. I'll recite well-known poems like Robert Frost's "Birches" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and esoteric, rhyme-rich poems like Wallace Stevens's "Bantams in Pine Woods." I'll end with Christopher Smart's delightful 18-century poem, "My Cat Jeoffrey," in which Smart absolutely nails the characteristics of a cat.

    The poems take 50 minutes to recite. At first I was just going hand out a program with the dates of each poet's life and the titles of the poems and let that be adequate for background, but now I'm thinking the audience will enjoy the poems better if they know something about them before I recite them. It might be better to have a more casual hour-and-a-half program that a squeezed-to-fit hour program. 

    But who knows? I've never done this exact thing before. I just hope to give my audience the pleasure of hearing some great poems. 

    But, just in case, I will also offer some great refreshments.

Recitations by Diana Coogle

Saturday, April 6, 3:00-4:30

Applegate library