On marrying into a small town

We had a car to sell so we posted it to Craig's List. A couple people came to look at it. They all seemed vaguely familiar, in the way that Bend people often do, but we only unraveled our relationship with the woman who ultimately bought the car. Turns out she's the sister of my mother-in-law's ex-husband's fifth wife.

Generation Z

The family room being suspiciously quiet, I peeked downstairs to see what my seven-year-old was doing. "Sasha? Everything ok?"

Great! she exclaimed, and showed me the iPad screen. The pillow pets commercial, she said, had mentioned that she could browse their full selection online, and look! Look at them all! She'd spent at least 1/2 hour deciding which pillow pets she liked the best, adding one to the shopping cart* and then deleting it and adding another.**

That happened about a week ago. Since then she's noticed that all the toy catalogs arriving in the mail have URLs at the bottom of each page, and she's been going to all their web sites. She likes to search for an item from the catalog (her typing is vastly improving!) in order to "view larger" and to read longer descriptions.***  Right now she's looking at the Pottery Barn catalog online! having admired the snowflake ornaments in their most recent catalog.



*She didn't know it was a shopping cart. She thought it was a game. Please do not tell her what online shopping carts are, thanks.

**I'm sure she blew their November stats. Some ecommerce manager will have a lot of explaining to do!

***Some of them have wish lists, which is a pretty good idea for Generation Z but if any of those companies would like to hire me, I can suggest many usability improvements. Also y'all need an "email this to your grandmother and aunts" widget -- or, better yet, text this to your grandmother.

At the bus stop

Indoor things

I always write about the outdoors but I spend as much time indoors as any other American. I sit at a computer for eight hours, as a matter of fact, five days a week, pulling information about products out of various databases and displaying it through a browser in an accurate and, let's assume, compelling way. (Actually, most of what I do is systems analysis and project management: arranging for information to be put into databases and done so in a way that I can retrieve it, uh, systematically.) So despite all the deer, quail and mountains you find here, I do often think about indoor things.

Like dessert.

When you invite another family over for dinner, do you serve dessert? I always think I should because they're guests and that I shouldn't because – well, children spend 10-15 rowdy minutes at the dinner table and then disappear back into their toys, leaving the adults free to talk. Why invite the children back for dessert? But then, you know, they're guests. But then, all my friends are psychotic about what they feed their children; I couldn't begin to guess what kind of dessert they would consider acceptable.

Ice cream is for birthdays. Cookies and cakes are too sweet. Pies are too much work. Grapes and cheese we serve as appetizers. What's left?

Advice, please. What do you do?

(You want me to go back to the deer and quail, don't you?)

Quail: a primer

Quail are ground birds. (Tracy from Adelaide asked me about them.) They're little and fat with a funny twiggy thing on their heads. They can fly but they prefer to walk, and I see them most often sprinting headlong across the road. They hang out together in a flock, but they're so skittery that some members of the flock can get really spread out, and then the look-out (there's always a designated look-out) starts to shout. Actually he talks pretty much continually while the others eat -- I imagine he's saying, "We are here! Follow my voice!" -- but if the stragglers get too far away he makes a louder, sharper call which means, "Catch up!" And they do.

When startled the whole flock (stragglers and all) will flush – they fly up into the trees in a way wikipedia calls "short and explosive" – and their voices and wings together make a distinctive sound that I find cheerful, but which to them is probably something like, "Aaaaaaaaaaaa!"

I have a lot of affection for quail. The sound they make is very soothing, and I like the way they look out for each other. Sasha believes that quail are my totem but I think not; I think that if I were a quail, I'd hate the way the look-out is always insisting that the group stay together, and I'd hide in a tree out of stubbornness!

My daughter took this photo. It totally cracks me up. Headless and nearly out of the frame: do you think that's how she sees me?

But also, she exactly captured the way I stand.

H/t to Alejna of the gray and black.

Sparks

Sasha had an awful cough so we kept her in the back of the truck, bundled in a coat and hat and sleeping bag and wrapped all 'round with packing blankets; she had peppermint tea, too, and some chocolate chip cookies and her favorite snow leopard. My husband threw snowballs at her to make her laugh, and then Blake threw snowballs at him so I tackled Blake and put snow down his shirt, and then the three of us and my brother-in-law sprinted out into the meadow.

First snowfall in the mountains!

All week my husband had been watching the weather, telling us It's coming! It's coming! And so it did. We'd intended to check out Mt. Bachelor, where locals sometimes spontaneously gather for a party at the first snowfall, but the resort had closed their road so we drove instead to the meadow at Sparks Lake.

The sky hung low and white, hiding Mt. Bachelor and South Sister. Snow fell lightly. The meadow grasses had all turned brown, their seedheads bowing in the wind. In early summer this meadow is shot through with rivulets that have melted off the surrounding mountains, but this time of year the water is gone; and the gullies had instead collected snow. It was beautiful. It felt beautiful. I felt large and full of breath.

Winter range

Walking to the bus stop in the morning we encounter deer. Sometimes we meet them at the house diagonal to ours, which was unoccupied for awhile. It has a crabapple tree and soft, level grass and a thick juniper hedge separating it from the street. Other times we see them in the yard of the house down the way, which is full of hearty, deciduous bushes and trees that the deer are always eating.

When we walk past they look up at us. We stop to say hello. It's a great joy to see them. We ought to be used to them by now, but we always startle and cry Oh! and coo at them. They're beautiful creatures.

The other morning we met a doe right at the street's edge. Sasha talked to her softly, admiringly. Did you come to see us? Hello, hello, pretty thing... The doe looked wary, but she didn't back away. Sasha talked to her for a few minutes, and the doe stayed. Then when we walked away, the doe backed away, and we realized she had a broken shoulder. Her leg collapsed under her in this strange way. I felt badly then, realizing that she'd stood up to us only because she had to.

I told my sister-in-law this story yesterday. She said Hey, I know that deer! For many years my sister-in-law lived in a house about a half mile from here, and it's entirely likely that the deer I saw also walks past that house – but wait, said my sister-in-law; it couldn't be the same deer; it was too long ago.

How long do deer live? My sister-in-law left that house about seven years ago. Do you think it could've been the same one? She described the way the deer's shoulder collapsed pretty exactly.

*

According to the local newspaper, the mule deer have been coming down from the mountains into their winter ranges. That means we have more deer in Bend, since, historically (said the paper), this is their winter range. The deer we see stay here, though, year-round.

Does your local newspaper print stories about deer?

Maple

In scanning through unpublished posts I found this story my daughter had written last year, when she was six. Charming, isn't it?


Once wen I was littl I was a tinye maplseed. A prson pict me up and plantid me in his backyord. Evry day he would wottr me. Ovr and ovr. I grow and grow. One day I was a littl sprowt! The child cept wottring me. A nuthr day I was a littl maple tree! Oh isnt that icsiting! One yer latre I was a maple tree. I felt tall. That house was no longgr a house it was a reshtront war pepl had brecfist. The pepl who workt thar yosd my maple serup to put on the pancakes that they made thar. I stil stand thar. I like it thar. Good by.

Mind/Body*

So much depends upon
A pet rock sitting there doing nothing

So much depends upon
A good book sitting there waiting to be read

So much depends upon
A fat guinea pig sitting there being cute

So much depends upon
A red hang glider flying through the air

So much depends upon
Skiing down the mountain at extremely high speeds

So much depends upon
Writing poems
Having fun

By Blake

*My title, not his

Only the Great Chrismas Icicle can save Paws now!

Line from the movie "Santa Paws". Dude. What the heck.

"A Spooky Life"

Once upon a time there was a baby dragon and I will tell you his life. He lived in a darck scary cave that 100 bats lived in. When he was 16 a mean nasty pousin dragon flue rate into his cave. Then it shot 20 pousin darts all over the cave!!! The dragon was ok. He'd never fellt so scard. Ever sins he's never come out of his cave. Most people say he's dead. Other people say he's a zombi eating every singl pousin dragon in the world and sometimes mistakes people as pousin dragons.

By Sasha

On a Saturday

1. Sort broken crayon bits by color.
2. Melt similarly-colored crayon bits in an clean, tin soup can. On the stove. (Turn on fan.) This should take 5-10 minutes.
3. Pour liquid into molds.
4. Cool in freezer 20 minutes.
5. Pop out of mold.
6. Photograph results for the blog.

The molds came with one of those magic sand kit thingies that Sasha's aunt gave her for Christmas one year; I found them Saturday as I was cleaning out a closet.

Aren't they cool? I love them. On popping the dinos from their molds, I immediately called my sisters to tell them what they'll be getting for Christmas this year.

Remains

Upstream from Benham Falls, 15 miles from Bend.

This ponderosa tree grows beside a trail which is actually wider than the Forest Service road that leads to it. The trail used to be a railroad track. Back in the day – in the 1930s, I'd guess – one of the logging companies built and maintained it. A sign explains that once a year the company hauled its 2000 employees out here on the train and they threw a huge party, a company picnic. That's why, says the sign, you still see stands of old-growth in these parts. The company left them deliberately – for atmosphere, you might call it.

This particular tree, however, probably got left because it grows crooked. I wonder if children played here 80 years ago? Or 280 years ago?

The Freakish Deschutes River*

I found this sign about 1/2 mile upstream from Benham Falls, near the footbridge, along a historical interpretive trail built by the Boy Scouts. A person could say a lot about this sign, but let's focus on what it's trying to tell us.

Jane Austen died 17 years before Wyeth stopped by the Deschutes River.

My mother will appreciate this:
In 1834 Wyeth was traveling with John Kirk Townsend, a Pennsylvanian ornithologist; after this expedition (and one to Hawaii) Townsend returned home with many, many specimens, some of which he sold to John Audubon. Townsend's species comprise 15% of all the birds described in Audubon's book Birds of America.


*Title taken from a pamphlet for sale on eBay.

Central Oregon playground

Near Benham Falls, 15 miles from Bend.

As my husband was parking the truck rather precariously against an embankment, we spotted a coyote loping down the road. It's a Forest Service road – that is, a one-lane dirt road – in an area heavily logged 50-70 years ago, so the trees are small and dense and so is the undergrowth. It's poorly managed, some would say. The coyote looked to be doing all right, though. He was pacing something, a squirrel maybe.

Look look look! I cried. OOO! replied my kids; and then they leapt from the truck and scrambled up those rocks you see there, and then picked up some sticks to combat each other with.

Rocket

At Ecola the only parking lot is on a cliff above the beach. So we deposited the truck there, grabbed as much of our stuff as we could carry, then walked down through a tunnel in thick vegetation. At the base of the cliff is a swath of tumbled, rounded lava rock; we picked our way across that to the sand, where Artist Sister-in-law and her husband had set up camp. A lot of their friends were there, and also siblings and parents and also my sibling: my youngest sister, with her husband and son.

Her son – my little nephew Rocket – spotted us as soon as we reached the beach. He's three. He ran to us the way exuberant three-year-olds will: fast, headlong and shouting. I dropped everything and scooped him up in a giant embrace.

He wriggled out of my arms. Run with me, Jen! he cried. So he and I sprinted along the beach the way joyful people will: fast, headlong and shouting.

"Shadow of my former self"

My husband's older sister and her husband threw a party at the coast to celebrate their 30th anniversary. My husband's older brother used this as an opportunity to teach Blake to surf.

Blake and his uncle are so alike. When his uncle was nine, he looked a lot like Blake does now (so they say): same hair, same scrawny frame. Even now they think alike. They approach problems the same way. They approach life the same way. And they both find joy engaging with the earth's unleashed energy – like a pilot singing as he flies through a storm.

My husband and his older sister love that too, come to think of it.

Light

After the sun set most of the adults clustered around the fire, sitting in chairs or on logs or just right in the sand, while the children (among whom my son was the oldest) raced around the long, wet stretch of beach exposed by the low tide. One parent had brought glow sticks which the children wore as necklaces, and in the darkness that's how we kept our eye on them: on guard against these circles of light receding too far.

Ekwerkwe

I got stuck in the little house the other day. It was 5:15; I'd finished my last conference call, sent my last email and changed my status on Lync; I'd unplugged my computer and gathered up the dirty dishes.

But I couldn't leave. The backyard was full of quail.

Several coveys of quail, maybe 100 birds altogether, use the area where I live. I suspect they bed by the river, then come up the cliff to forage in our yards during the day. I see them as I drive through the neighborhood, and they often cluster under my arctic willow, near the street. In early fall, though, they fly right into the backyard – and the other day at least twenty of them clucked through the grass, with more on the roof and in the spruce beside the little house.

How could I disturb them? I stood in the open door of little house, watching and listening. They make such a peaceful sound, those quail.

After awhile, though, I realized I was also hearing my children laughing in the main house. I walked along the garden path, slowly, slowly, slowly. The quail skittered a bit but they didn't flush. They stayed. Talking amongst themselves.

**

While reading Jane Eyre last night, I was suddenly struck by all the references to nightingales. We don't have nightingales in the Americas. I've never seen one nor heard one.

This, my friends, hints at why I find this book so fascinating. Jane Eyre is part of my canon – as a white-skinned, English-speaking American, it's part of my heritage – and yet so much of it is alien to me. Nightingales are alien... I keep thinking of this book as science fiction.

Anyway, if you've never heard a nightingale either, you can listen online. I imagine it's a pale reproduction of the original.

Hello, Broken Top

Disorienting

What's on my nightstand

"Half an hour later Jennifer and the two pirates were through the turnstiles and inside the circus itself. The pirate with an accordion pretty quickly began to feel more like the pirate who was a gooseberry, so he wandered off to look at an exhibit that claimed to be 'the dog that wore sunglasses,' and left Jennifer and the scarf-wearing pirate to their own devices."

Defoe, Gideon. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists. New York: Vintage Books, 2006, p.57.


For Jennifers everywhere. Some day this sentence is going to be true

Wednesday Wondering

My seven-year-old daughter, speaking to me: People call a house a home, but people sell their houses.* So a house isn't a home.

Me: That's true, Sasha.
Me: I think home is where the family is.

Sasha: I think the whole earth is our home.

Said she. Spreading her arms wide.


* At Christmas my Artist Sister-in-law sold her house and moved to Portland, and this spring my parents-in-law put their Camp Sherman place on the market. Also Sasha's best friend recently moved to Portland, and one of her classmates moved to North Carolina**. Sasha's been thinking on that for awhile. She keeps asking me why people sell their houses, unsatisfied with the financial answer.

** I had thought that by enabling my kids to spend their childhood in one town, they wouldn't feel loss in the way that I did. (I attended three different elementary schools and two junior highs.) In fact I think they feel it more keenly. The person who moves has a whole new life; the one who stays behind has a hole in her life.***

*** I'm not saying we ought to move.**** There are other advantages to staying in one place. And Central Oregon, as you know! is in my heart.

**** This post inspired by the Penguin family's travels.

My whole body sings

When I'm content and sort of absent-mindedly going about my day, I sing to myself. I don't usually notice that I'm singing until someone comments on it – or until I realize I'm singing this, as I often am (!) "And when I laugh out loud, my whole body sings! ha ha, ha ha ha haaa, ha ha, ha ha ha haaaaaaa!"



in my brother-in-law's presence. Then I ask, self-consciously, whether it's strange to hear other people absent-mindedly singing songs that he wrote.

*

Was that a great segway or what? Yes, my baby sister's husband's band has released their second album of children's songs. Go have a listen. (That link goes to my other favorite song, which is very wise; I wish he'd written it when my own children were babies.) The CD is for sale, or you can buy digital downloads.

The first song, by the way, is a re-telling of the incident which made Radiolab in 2009.

Work is the last thing on my mind

Well, right. I did spend time this weekend folding clothes, cooking dinner, washing dishes, sweeping the floor, coercing recalcitrant children to brush their teeth and all that – all the daily maintenance that's part of a parent's life.

I meant to say that when I close my laptop on Friday nights, I don't feel like I'm going home to a second job; I don't feel overwhelmed by all the housework that needs doing. And we've spent at least one day of every weekend adventuring, so for 48 hours I completely forget there's such a thing as a computer!

Building sandcastles on a black sand beach, aka the First Street Rapids. The one on the far left is mine.


[Title explanation: This morning my kids were playing this song. I was all, have some sympathy, little dudes.]

Time on, time off

Itty bitty girlie in the Big Obsidian Flow, Oregon's most recent lava flow. (It's 1500 years old.) Thirty miles south of Bend. 

At work I've been critical path; it's required from me 40-50 very stressful hours a week for the past month. My husband (who laughs at me every time I use that term) has picked up the slack at home, enabling me to be free on the weekends – and so my weekends have been tiny, delightful vacations.

If it's a phase, I should document it

The water balloons were too hard to tie, so Sasha used them to make other things.

A bracelet. She made a necklace, too, but it itched.

"Balloon toys." They're intended to be thrown like a frisbee. (The X in balloon ends is just a pattern I made.)

An octopus.

Makers

My daughter's been busy today. She just now finished sewing together two pieces of purple fabric she had found at the High Desert Museum; it's a blankey for her snow leopard. Earlier today she decorated my room for a snow leopard party. (I bribed her brother to attend.) And before that – this morning – she made these little purses with paper and electrical tape. They're a kind of Advent Calendar; each person in the family gets two, and every day, she says, someone will get a surprise in theirs!

She's like this every day; she has been like this every day for at least two years now. She draws, she colors, she makes gifts for people and for stuffed animals. She designs games for us all to play. She made paper dolls -- except they were dinosaurs: one of every kind plus a tree and a volcano and a little carrying bag for them all. (One of my co-workers bought it for $1.) At my mom's house the other day she made intricate designs from colored ribbons, these amazing little bits of engineering.

My son used to be busy like that, too. And now he's not. He's just not. He doesn't invent things the way he used to.

It must be a phase, this uber creativity.

Growing up is so sad!

Ponderosa tree as seen through a water droplet. Sunset.

What I learned from Alejna's Project 365.

Quote of the Week

My daughter, commenting on an explosion at the end of the movie The Wild: "Now that's high viscosity!"

High Desert Museum Camp, you rock.

When the cat's away

With the children away my husband and I get vast amounts of time together, which is sort of lonely, you know, and quiet -- and the height of luxury. Excepting the time we're at work, we get to do what we want when we want without worrying the children will interrupt us.

It's the height of luxury, I tell you.

Wednesday evening we canoed at Sparks Lake, where I took this picture for you. I call it Hail to the V.

Grandpa Camp

My husband came out to the little house with his cellphone in his hand and a big smile on his face. I looked up from the computer. "Here," he said. "Look."

My dad had texted us a picture of our kids. They sat outside near some long grasses; Blake had lain his head on Sasha's shoulder; Sasha was laughing. "Love B&S," my dad had written.

I grinned at my husband and said, "Awww," and then noted that the kids must be obeying our injunction NOT TO FIGHT! while they're with their grandparents. Then he and I put our heads together and snapped a picture: one of those goofy cellphone self-portraits. "Love M&D," we wrote. My dad wrote back, "Sasha says u look cute."

For the last few summers – since I paled over the cost of summer camps, which must be booked for a solid week regardless of the number of hours a parent actually needs daycare coverage – my kids have spent a week or so at Camp Grandpa Harry. My dad has the same level of energy and enthusiasm as the children despite being nearly 70, so he makes a perfect camp counselor. (My calm, quiet mom is the Den Mother.) For a week the kids eat chicken nuggets and pizza every day and stay up late and sleep in late and swim in hotel pools and generally run around like wild people. My parents have taken them to every corner of Oregon, just about. This week they’re in southern Oregon, tromping through caves and Houses of Mystery and jet boating on the Rogue.

I always expect both the grandparents and the children to return exhausted, glad to be home, glad to separate, but that's never the case. They're happy. They giggle. Last year when they returned my husband and I fed them dinner and Blake sat in my dad’s lap while Sasha and my mom put their heads together, examining some small thing. My husband and I looked at each other. Huh. How about that. It’s like they’re the parents!

Snooooooooooooooooooooow!

Each summer my dad and I climb together. We've been up Broken Top, Mt. Washington, South Sister, Tam MacArthur and a couple times we've hiked up Black Butte. Usually we go up in August but this year my peripatetic parents are traveling in August. This year we had to hike in July instead.

And we were stopped by snow.

It's such an odd year! Snow fell and fell and fell throughout winter, and then it fell and fell through spring, and spring stayed so late – until last week, basically – that the snow is still up there. My dad and I tried to climb Black Crater, which is only 7000 feet high (Mt. Bachelor is 9000); but about 2/3 of the way to the summit we had to turn around. Snow completely obscured the trail.

*

I took a picture for you but it's on my dad's phone, and my dad is now at Crater Lake with my children. Crater Lake, by the way, just opened today.

(When I grow up, I want to be my parents.)

Like mother like son

The trail to Alder Springs starts on a ridge above the south bank of Whychus Creek, where one will find a rock comfortable enough for a few stolen moments of reading.

Flying

On the ridge between Fremont and McKenzie Canyons, not far (as the hawk flies) from my parents' place. Saturday.

What an odd, odd year

Friday we harassed the children into bathing suits, sunscreen and bug spray and my husband drove them to Todd Lake to look for pollywogs.

There weren't any.

Three miles away at Sparks Lake, on the same day, Sasha caught 14 frogs.

I'd rather be a marsupial than a mammal, but I'd rather be a mammal than an oviparid

Immediately after my son was born, I wished I were a marsupial.

Marsupials have a short pregnancy, then give birth to itty bitty teeny weeny creatures – the size of a jelly bean – which hang out in a pouch as they grow. They say placental mammals like me have the advantage, evolutionarily speaking, because a jelly bean in a pouch is more vulnerable than a jelly bean in amniotic fluid: but! After nine months of pregnancy and a painful, traumatic labor, I sure envied kangaroos.

Right now I'm just glad I'm not oviparous. Through the door of the little house I've been watching a pair of robins, a mother and her baby. The baby isn't really a baby; he has all his feathers and he can fly and he's just as big as she is. He's a juvenile, I guess. He has the breast markings of a juvenile. But lord almighty he acts like a baby. He follows immediately behind his mother and chirps nonstop. He's the noisiest thing I ever saw. His mom makes three hops and he makes three hops and hey! hey! hey! he says. Every so often she'll turn to feed him and he'll be silent for a moment and then hey! hey! hey! he says again. Once the mother turned on him and shouted S Q U A W K ! and I laughed, because although I'm not oviparous I'm sure I've said the exact same thing to my children.

I am from

I did this once before but I didn't know, at that time, that there was a template. Maggie just pointed it out. So I tried it again. I think that in my original version, where I'm from sounds like a happy, interesting place, while this updated version just sounds lonely.

I am from card games played around the kitchen table, from Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit.

I am from houses chosen with active children in mind yet full of books and the space to be alone, from gnats and grass and unassigned land that may be, at least temporarily, claimed.

I am from flowering annuals.

I am from a table set for five, fork on the left knife spoon and paper napkin on the right, and dishes washed immediately after dinner. I am from Harry and Donna.

I am from independence and self-reliance, criticism and laughter.

From "You're smart; you can figure it out" and "I can't make that decision for you."

I am from an unspoken belief system.

I'm from a birthplace I wouldn't recognize and can't reliably spell, from ancestral American towns visited on occasional summer vacations. I am from steak and potatoes.

I am from stories that begin, "Remember when we went to..."

I'm from a place very far away, greener and wetter and more humid and full of bugs than where I now make my home; but I from people who often come by.

The view from here

The view from the Little House, 4:45pm Tuesday.

When my kids returned from camp they sat beside me in the Little House awhile, exclaiming over their day; but since I still had an hour of work to do, and since Tuesday is No Screens Day*, I helped them find something to do.

Water + bubbles = happiness all around.


*On our bi-weekly No Screens Days we turn off all mobile devices, computers and the television (except as needed for work). To my surprise, the children always abide by it. It's harder for me!

You can run but you can't hide! Well, ok, you can hide

What does she see?



A family of lizards. She spooked them and they slid into this space. You can just barely see a tail in this picture.

Look closely

In the end we hadn't time to see Meek's Cutoff (thanks for indulging my pique, by the way), but we did spend an overcast Sunday in the Badlands, where the terrain is similar to what those settlers encountered. Wildflowers are blooming. I took pictures.*

We also saw lizards, one snake, a pair of Clark's Nutcrackers – who were very upset at our presence – ravens, a hawk and several rabbits. Oh, and gazillions of red ants. We had to eat lunch on a boulder to keep them from climbing our legs.

Tidy tips blooming, cheatgrass in seed

Sand lily

Death camas

I'm not sure if this is a penstemon or
a larkspur. (My mother would be
horrified that I don't know!)

*The internet boasts much lovelier pictures of the wildflowers in the Badlands, but these are representative enough of what we saw yesterday: dirt, mostly, with a few flowers here and there.

Meek's Cutoff

I hope to see "Meek's Cutoff" this weekend. The NYT review makes the movie seem promising – all of it except for this paragraph, which is the sort of thing that drives me completely nuts.

Yet as with a western, the [movie's] greatest eloquence can come from the silent expanses of virgin territory that confront the pioneers at every turn: undiscovered country that presents a glorious but unyielding vision of what’s to come. 

Ursula LeGuin writes a lot about a frontier's two sides: the yin side, the side which calls itself the frontier, "in which you boldly go where no one has gone before," where nothing is real but is instead full of promise; and the yang side, the side on which you live, on which you have always lived.

Americans nearly always speak from the yin side, subconsciously or at least without acknowledgement, just like in this article.

People have lived in Central Oregon for 13,000 years. It's hardly "virgin territory." It's true it was settled by Americans quite recently; but there's a difference between a place being populated by people you distrust (and who distrust you) and it being untouched. I mean, according to the review itself, the would-be settlers in the movie keep seeing a Native American from whom the women want to ask directions.

(That's funny, isn't it? The women want to stop that guy and ask directions, but the men are all, oh, dears, we can figure it out...)

So let's rewrite that paragraph.

Yet as with a western, the [movie's] greatest eloquence can come from the panorama that confronts the pioneers over every ridge: a vast, glorious, alien landscape which fills them with fear and hope.

Wordless Wednesday

Twilight

Boy in a tree

My son was so hungry after mountain biking club that I served dinner early, leaving plenty of time for a walk along the river. My daughter kept posing ("Make a movie of me, Mom!") but I could only get action shots of the boy.

Little House in the Backyard

Now that daytime temps are consistently over 50 degrees, I've moved my home office into the backyard.

In the backyard we have a little house – a converted one-car garage, I think – with electricity but no plumbing. People have suggested we use it as a kids' playroom, a yoga studio, a guest bedroom or a rented bedroom. My mother-in-law thought she might use it as a painting studio.

For the first three years we lived here, though, we never did anything with the little house. The kids didn't want to play in it; I don't teach yoga; and when people visit they'd rather stay in the main house, even if it means they have to sleep on the floor. We left the little house closed up: not mildewing, since it's dry here, but definitely moldering. Finally last month, however, a straw broke. I decided I needed a fixed office – not a spot at the dining room table or in my bedroom, which needs to be cleaned up every day, but a place of my own.

And so: since it is now consistently over 50 degrees during the day, I'm working from the little house .. with all the doors and windows open and a fan running. After three years it's so dusty and cobwebby it makes me sneeze! Opened like this it's more a pavilion than a house; it's just like being in the backyard. I can hear the birds and my neighbors and the train whistle and, in the morning, the parkway buzz. Today the neighbors' cat came by and licked my lunch plate.

Gathering

Every few years my parents gather their daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren from hither and yon for a grand family vacation. They rent a house big enough to hold us all; the house is usually on a beach where we can swim and hunt for critters and roast marshmallows over bonfires. My dad likes to do things so he usually plans expeditions during the day – fishing, sailing, snorkeling: whatever there is to do in this place – and we kids & grandkids join or don't. In the evenings we gather for dinner and then play games or just, you know, hang out. My sister Joie and I fight at least once, and our little sister diffuses a fight a least once, and each grandchild melts down a number of times in inverse relation to his or her age.

It is always absolutely lovely.

This year we stayed in a house in Haena, on Kauai's north shore. Two years ago we went to Orcas Island, in the San Juans. Three years before that we stayed in a house a little ways from Cancun, Mexico. Ten years ago, when I was pregnant for the first time and my littlest sister engaged, we also went to Mexico.

After each of these trips there's a flurry of email and phone calls and, this year, text messages: continuing the laughing and joking that began on the beach when we were all, for a little while, together.

You say three hours, he says three days

We flew from Kauai to Honolulu to Portland, spent the night in a hotel and then began the three hour drive back to Bend.

Just this side of Mt. Hood, when alpine trees cede to ponderosas, we passed Lee the Horselogger. (Go on, click through. His rig looks exactly like that. I couldn't take my own picture because I was too busy gawking, and also wondering how he keeps his wagon from running away on those steep declines. My husband says the wagon has brakes. STILL.)

Welcome back to Oregon!

Ooooooooooo

One of our guinea pigs died last week* and has been reincarnated as a mouse.

Sweetie – the former-guinea-pig-now-mouse – lives in the wall that divides the stairwell from the dining room. For three days I heard her scrabbling about while I worked. The wall is about 10 feet from where Sweetie's sister sits in a cage; I imagine Raincloud can hear her, too, but Raincloud always has been quiet (Sweetie was the squeaky one) so I can't tell if she recognizes the sounds for what they are.

On the other hand: Sasha says that it's not a mouse, but Sweetie's ghost. She might be right; I haven't heard the scrabbling in a day or so. Maybe Sweetie just wanted to say good-bye.

Oooooooooooooooo!




*She died while we were on vacation. One of my daughter's school friends was babysitting her. I waffle between blaming him for Sweetie's death** and feeling horrified for that poor seven-year-old, who had his friend's dead guinea pig in his room for a day.

**We don't know why she died. She was four, which is I believe late middle age for a guinea pig.

Wordless Wednesday

Last Wednesday: my son in foreground, local kiteboarder in background. Near Haena, Kauai.

1/4 of the way to the sun: in the middle of nowhere

Thomas Sieverts quoted by Matthew Stadler in the Spring 2011 issue of Oregon Humanities:

"Where we live lies between the singular, particular site as geographical-historical event and the sameness of all space in the global economy; between space as a field of immediate experience and space as a distance measured solely by time[.]"

I've been thinking about this all day. It brought to mind a conversation I had at Baldface Lodge. A man trying to understand where Bend is located asked me how far it is from Portland. "Three hours," I said. Then he asked how far it is from Eugene. "Two hours," I replied, and added, to forestall further questioning, "It's six hours from Boise." Ah, said he. "So it's in the middle of nowhere!"

Bend lies in the space between two cities, Portland and Boise; it is also my field of immediate experience. For me, therefore, it's the center of the universe.

*

If Bend is three hours from Portland – speaking of distance in terms of time – then at age 40 (speaking of time in terms of distance traveled by car) I am about 1/4 of the way from Earth to the sun.

How about that.

The monstrous music that runs through our mind

Adam Gopnik writing in The New Yorker about the Internet. 

"What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own. ...Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.

"A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1KYMdSL5p

Anisoptera

My daughter is studying dragonflies for school. We've been reading about them nearly every night (the Deschutes County library has a lot of books on dragonflies, turns out); after the reading, she writes or illustrates a page in "My Insect Report." One day last week she wrote this:

Interesting facts about my insect

It can't fly in cold wether.
It livs most of it's life in water.
It can fly baqurds.

The best fact of all!

It evolvd 300 million years ago – be for dinosaurs! It was as big as a crow!

She's been telling everybody about this. Before dinosaurs! As big as a crow! People are always exactly as amazed as she; they act out being dive-bombed by a giant dragonfly, covering their heads with their arms and ducking. And then they'll say (if they know anything about dragonflies at all): Imagine how big mosquitoes must have been back then!

So. As part of the report, she and I are making a crow-sized dragonfly. It has old socks stuffed with plastic bags for its abdomen and head, pipe cleaners for legs and – well, we're not sure yet how to make the wings. She thinks we should cut them out of cardboard, but I thought we could reshape wire hangers and stretch cheesecloth over them. The wire is heavy, though.

Ideas?

---

There is such a creature as the Himalayan Relict Dragonfly. It is not as streamlined a flier as the dragonflies we know; it's slow and rather uncoordinated, they say. It is more nymph than dragonfly, in fact, living for up to nine years as an aquatic insect before making its final transformation.

Scientists originally theorized that this Relict Dragonfly was a predecessor of the dragonflies we know, but now they say that the two have a common ancestor; the Relict and our dragonflies began to separate around the time the Himalayas uplifted.

Around the time the Himalayas* uplifted**! 

That makes me feel young, as a species.

(If I had to do a report, I'd call that the best fact of all.)



*About the Himalayas, Wikipedia says, "Topographically, the belt has many superlatives." I love that.
**Beginning roughly 55 million years ago.

Apparently the cougar is not in my neighborhood

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deer. Easy pickin's for a cougar.

Ten things

Ten things I admire about my mother (in honor of her 40th Mother's Day):

1. She is such a private person that she'll hate this list.

2. She can make a lovely, fulfilling meal in an empty kitchen. She's like Westley on the balustrade, exclaiming, "Why didn't you list that among our assets?" when she's cooking at my house and discovers that I also have a tablespoon of peanut butter and half a chicken leg.

3. She does what needs doing.

4. She has been married to the same man for over 40 years.

5. If I see a bird that interests me and describe it to her in even the most general terms, she can tell me its name and how it behaves.

6. She can kill a rattlesnake with a shovel.

7. She's determined to eradicate the cheatgrass around her cabin here in Oregon, Sisyphean task that it is!

8. She is still in touch with the family that were our neighbors 25 years ago, when I was in high school – three moves ago.

9. She always gives the perfect present: not what she wants, and not what she wants the receiver to want, but what the receiver actually wants.

10. She listens.

10 things

Ten things I learned from my dad (in honor of his bajillionth birthday):

1. If you make a mistake, analyze why it happened and change the way you work/live/behave so it never happens again. Then move on.
2. If you can't change the circumstances which caused you to make the mistake, accept the fact that it will occur again and mitigate it. Then move on.
3. Science fiction rocks.
4. If you want something, go get it. Don't steal it – but go get it. 
5. You can't have everything. You can have that one thing you really want, though, if you work hard.
6. Illini! Illini!
7. Schrodinger's cat is the one that's both alive and dead until you open the box, at which point it is either alive or dead.
8. People are interesting. And weird. They follow a pattern, though. They're worth analyzing.
9. Trust. 
10. My kids are totally normal.

Making puddings and knitting stockings

In the latest film version of "Jane Eyre" there's just one real character: Jane herself. No one else is on the screen long enough to give us a sense of who they are, not even Mr. Rochester. In the movie Jane is often alone – on the moor, pacing the corridors of Thornfield Hall, staring by the fire in that drafty barn of a house; when other people appear, they behave cruelly towards her (in this film even the Rivers sisters are inadvertently cruel), and then disappear. She is always being left. Jane is sent away; Jane runs away; Jane's only friend dies in her arms. The one time that Jane returns, she finds Thornfield Hall burnt, its occupants scattered. When she finally says "I am come back," she's speaking to a broken, silent, weeping Mr. Rochester sitting alone in a field; they embrace, and poof: the film ends.

*

In the movie Jane stands by a big picture window in Thornfield Hall on a quiet winter day, looking out at its grounds and the hills beyond the grounds, and she says she wishes she were a man so that she might go out into the world. Mrs. Fairfax (who does understand) tells her she just needs exercise and asks her to mail a letter. It's on the walk to the post office that Jane first meets Mr. Rochester.

This is like the book but also not like. In the book Jane does rant about the lot of women, saying, "Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings." But she also explains that it's not so much action that she wants as passion and intellectual challenge. She doesn't want to be wrapped in cotton, safe and dull. "Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it; restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to ... open my inward ear to a tale ... my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence."

In the book Jane says over and over how madly she loves Mr. Rochester but the movie is more ambiguous. He loves her; that's obvious; but she's so wary and stoic and young, and he's the first man she's ever met! Who can say how she feels? Maybe he's just her first crush. Maybe she loves that he loves her. Maybe she just doesn't want to leave Thornfield Hall because it's the only place she's ever been safe from abuse. In the book one would never think that but the movie dwells more on the horror in her life. – And then Rochester, like everyone else, breaks her heart. The cad.

When in the movie St. John Rivers offered to take Jane to India as a missionary, my heart leapt for her. India! Finally, Jane, your chance! Your chance to act, to move in the world as you've been longing to do! It's perplexing that she tells him no. It's perplexing that she runs back to Mr. Rochester. Without all the scenes of the two lovers together, without the funny scenes in which she insists Mr. Rochester save his ardor for after the wedding, what St. John offers seems superior. St. John saved her life. He respects her. He's nice to her. Why not take the safe route, free from abuse? Travel, Jane! Adventure! Why run back into the arms of a man already married? For goodness sake.

*

Don't get me wrong: I did enjoy the movie. I especially loved the scenes of Jane on the moor. The cinematography was spectacular. (Some day I'm visiting northern England and Scotland. You can have London; I want to see the moor!) It's been bothering me, though, the way the tone of the movie is so different from the tone of the book; I had to write it down to understand how I felt.

That said...

Updated 4/19.

I do love the iPad. I like to curl up in bed and watch movies on it, just like I'd read a book; or else, curled up all cosy-like, I look at items for sale on Etsy. (I've never bought anything from etsy sellers, but oh, I do love to look at the things people make. Bend is a small town still; it's hard to find anything like what's available in Etsy, especially for clothes. I'd buy this if I could figure out a place to wear it.)

I use the iPad almost exclusively for internet browsing: searches for recipes or summer camps or edible native plants, for example, or reading all y'all's blogs. I check email on it. I check the weather. I check Mt. Bachelor's current conditions. I read the news. I stream podcasts through it when my work gets tedious; I prop it on the windowsill and watch movies while I'm washing dishes. The WebEx app for iPad is better than WebEx on my company-provided laptop, so when I'm not hosting, I often "attend" meetings that way. Sometimes – don't tell! – when I'm on a conference call that turns irrelevant (or, more often, when I'm tempted to say too much and need to hold my tongue) I play Solitaire on it.

I find it miserable to type on, though. Cutting and pasting and backspacing is just painful, and it turns out that even when I compose emails, I do a lot of cutting and pasting and backspacing; so I never compose anything on the iPad. The problem is not really the iPad in itself, but the fact that I'm trained to a keyboard. I'm almost 40. I type 80 words/minute. Using a touchscreen to compose is as slow as ... as ... as writing!

Also, I dislike reading books on it. I think again it's a matter of mental models. The Kindle app is intended for reading books, so when I hold the iPad I think: book. But it's not a book. It's a computer. It doesn't provide the same satisfying tactile experience as a book, and it does poorly the few things I need a book to do (which, essentially, provide comforting familiarity. When I read fiction I channel my 12-year-old self). And I don't yet know what it does better than a book.

Movies, on the other hand, I find vastly improved by the iPad. I never have liked going to the movies, not ever in my life; and I don't like TV either. Movies have struck me as loud and obnoxious and too obviously manipulative with that music and faces as big as a house: gah. Watching them on the iPad, though – curled up in my bed, alone, quiet, in control – it's so intimate. It is, actually, just as intimate as reading a great novel. Also I like being able to (as it were) re-read sections that puzzle or intrigue me. It has been a great pleasure to discover movies – in my late 30s!

I still prefer books.

For Maggie.

My son finished books 4 & 5 of the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series in a week so I promised him I'd get 6 & 7 from the library; but when we visited the library, it was closed. Oh, the disappointment! So we walked to the nearest bookstore which, alas, did not have books 6 & 7.

So I did something for him that I'd never have done for myself: I got the Kindle app for iPad and I bought the e-book.

Verdict? Bah.

It's nice that the book only cost $5 and it's nice that I was able to indulge my son's reading habit, which I understand is an unusual one for a 9-year-old boy, but we won't be buying an e-book again soon. It's too annoying. You can't tell where you are. The e-book has no page numbers and no chapter headings and no dog-ears, of course, and no places where the book naturally falls because you bent back the binding. If you touch the wrong part of the screen, going back a chapter or back to the beginning, for example, and you're a certain 9-year-old, you're going to have to yell, "Moooooo-ooom!" and she's going to have to speak in that come-away-from-the-window-ledge voice to keep your fury in check.

I imagine as a reference tool the Kindle for iPad would be useful – with a reference book one would find the search function necessary – but for casual reading, I (we) prefer a printed book.

I'm not wearin' no trousers rolled

The problems which seemed so intractable before I left now seem

really

really

really

small.



That's the main thing.

*

More pics at Tom's blog.

Swoop

Baldface Lodge is primarily known for its excellent tree skiing, but a few glades are wide open. In these open glades we made long, lazy, easy turns: ssswoooooop, sssssswooooop, ssssssswoooooop.

Once in such a glade the snow was so light I couldn't feel my board beneath my feet. No vibration, no hiccup, no pressure on an edge: just a smooth glide through the air.

Like a dolphin leaping into the sunlight.

View through the snowcat window.
We made two runs here, which explains the number of tracks.

Thanks, Mom and Dad

My parents stayed with the children while my husband and I were away. It went brilliantly. Every time I called home I heard laughter, both from my children and my parents; and when I returned, my dad was glowing and the children, they confessed that although they were glad to see me, they'd miss their grandparents.

The kids got to school on time. They did their homework every night. They remembered their library books and they remembered when to wear sneakers.

Also: my parents fixed my toilet. They replaced a broken toilet paper holder. They bought new shoes for Sasha. They cleaned the house, raked the yard and restocked the larder. They washed my car. And then – as Sasha said – "Grandpa couldn't get the TV to work so he bought a new one."

They didn't tell me about any of the work they did; I've been discovering it as I settle back into our routine. Five days later I'm still finding little treats around the house: a bag of white chocolate chips, a book about the fur trade, notes on spice packets saying "the kids liked this." It's like an Easter egg hunt!

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Lower left corner

Me.

Baldface-English Dictionary

Powder / Pow / Pow Pow: Any depth or quality of snow which has recently fallen and hasn't yet been "tracked," or compressed, either by the weight of a snowcat or a skier/snowboarder.

Snowcat: A truck-like vehicle with tracks instead of tires, like a tank. The cabs of the snowcats at Baldface Lodge sit twelve comfortably.

Fresh tracks / First tracks: Being the first person to lay a track in powder; that is, being the first to ski through an area of newfallen snow. Everyone wants fresh tracks. Riding through powder is so easy and smooth it's like flying.

Duff: Very cold, light powder – too cold to pack into a snowball – which flies up into a snowboarder's face as she rides through it.

The white room: When a snowboarder slashes through duff in such a way that the spray encloses her completely and she can't see in front of her, she's said to be "in the white room."

Shred it / Slay it / Rip it up / Kill it: To make turns in powder on a snowboard. The terms sound aggressive and are usually said with aggression but they really just refer to the tracks a snowboarder leaves behind her in the snow: like a long, lazy "S" traced in butter.

Moving sidewalk: An easy run.

Snowboarder pile-up: In the trees when the terrain flattens out, snowboarders wary of tree wells tend to follow each other's lines. If one person falls and the way is too tight or it happens too suddenly, the others will pile up behind him.

Tree well: When snow falls in a forest it catches on the trees' limbs. This creates a depression, or well, around the trunk of a tree. Tree wells can be five feet deep or more.

SFD: Straight fuckin' down. An answer to the question, "Which way from here?"

Chinese downhill: Usually we dropped in one at a time or in pairs, which means we had to negotiate the order of descent; but when the run was wide open and the avalanche danger low, the guide would declare a Chinese downhill (c.f. Hot Dog): everyone dropping in at the same time in a glorious mess.

A good husband raises your game

On a ridge of wind-rippled snow the lead guide asked the skiers to follow him in breaking trail for us snowboarders (ski poles being a useful invention after all). My husband, who had stayed by my side all day, glanced at me. I waved him on. "Go ahead," I said. "Just remember: if I fall off this ridge, tell the kids I love them!"

The second guide, who stood nearby nonchalantly checking the air temperature with this odd red thermometer – the second guide called to my husband, "Tell them mommy died doing something she loves!"

And everybody laughed, even me, perched light-hearted and exuberant on a snowy ridge in the sunlight.

The view from our chalet, 3/31

Training runs

ThirdCat asked if we still have snow. Yep, we do. Photos from today.

At the top of the northwest chair looking toward Sparks Lake.

Searching for untracked snow. There's a turn or two here!

I got a little lost when I ducked into the trees, thinking that I was a few turns from the run when in fact I was a lot further. I stopped to take this picture when I knew I'd found the run again. That's it, that bright patch of snow up ahead.

Headin' back up.

A case of nerves

Every day for a week I've woken up feeling nauseous. I'm jittery, shivering and nauseous.

It's nerves.

When I was a girl – about my son's age – and started traveling for gymnastics competitions, I'd wake up nauseous like this. I never could eat any breakfast; and then my nerves acting on an empty stomach would cause dry heaves. Once I nearly puked the whole drive from Hazelton to Philadelphia. My poor father.

I thought I'd outgrown this tendency. I haven't felt morning nausea since I was 14.

Turns out I just haven't been doing things that make me nervous.

We've going backcountry skiing. My husband and me. Next Wednesday we're driving 10 hours to Nelson, BC, where we'll catch a helicopter to a mountain-top resort. For three days, all day, we'll ride the powder in the interior mountains of British Columbia. We travel by snowcat...

I'm really nervous.

It's the claustrophobia. I get panicky in deep snow. Also I broke my arm once crashing into a tree and I really, really do not want to do that again... Luckily for the last few weeks we've had a fair bit of powder at Mt. Bachelor – two Fridays ago was epic – so I've been addressing my fear: taunting it: daring it. I snowboarded in three feet of new snow (the snow that Ullr brought) with my daughter, who got stuck three times; I had to unclip from my board and wade through it to rescue her. I snowboarded in eight surprise inches of new snow with my son, who got himself stuck once in a tree well and once in a wave; I had to unclip from my board and wade through the snow to rescue him. I haven't gotten myself stuck, but I have been riding as much as I can through the trees, searching out untracked bits, meandering, playing. If I feel I may be too close to a tree I throw myself into the snow, poof! and then have to figure out how to get back up and going again.

It hasn't helped. I'm still nervous. Mt. Bachelor just cannot replicate for even ten turns the untracked powder in the interior mountains of BC.

EEEEK!

How to tell a story

Some of the world's best storytellers – the folks at This American Life and Planet Money – discuss how to make a story interesting at transom.org. If you're interested in communication, go read this stuff. (Juliane, I'm talking to you!) Here's another good one.

Claustrophobia

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I learned to scuba dive in Lake Cayuga: a long, cold, muddy-bottomed lake near Ithaca, New York.

I learned to scuba dive in Lake Cayuga because my dad wanted to take us all vacationing in Belize. If I learned in Ithaca and my sister learned in Rhode Island and my little sister, mother and father learned in Pennsylvania, he said, then when we gathered in Belize would could all dive together, being at the same skill level.

That is so my dad.

Anyway. On our first day at the lake, bare trees waved in a strong wind, small branches tearing off and falling to the ground; the grass was brown, dead; picnic tables sat forlorn. We dozen students stood in the dirt at water's edge, shivering in black wet suits and flippers like so many displaced Antarctic penguins.

The instructor told us what to do, pausing every few minutes to remind us that this was a means to an end, that in Belize or the Bahamas or Florida everything would be different. There it would be hot! The water would be clear! It would be blue and alive! You'll see fish there, he said. It won't be like this.

So we girded our loins¹ and flopped into the lake. We tread water. We practiced breathing through our tanks at the surface. We swam out a little ways. Then twelve scuba newbies attempted to dive down through six feet of murk, struggling and splashing, utterly ridiculous. We could not control our buoyancy. Some people sunk, plunk, onto the bottom and then kicked their legs to come up a bit – and their flippers stirred the mud until I could see nothing.

Nothing.

My hands disappeared. My classmates disappeared. I kicked and kicked in a panic, searching for the surface and finding only brown – I did not know where I was, I did not know where anyone else was – I kicked and kicked and imagined I'd reached the center of the lake, where no one would ever find me except Nessie... Finally in exhaustion I stopped fighting and lo, I did float to the surface.

Yeah. Lost in six feet of water.

*

I took that class 20 years ago, so I don't honestly remember some of the details I included here, like tree branches being blown down in the wind. However I will never forget how I panicked.

I am easily claustrophobic now: in the children's tent; in a cave; or on the mountain in a storm when I've fallen and have to unclip from my board, struggling through waist-deep snow to reach a steeper pitch, and then clip in again and struggle to get upright, my hand sinking in the snow and my board sinking, too. At such moments I want to rip off my helmet and goggles and breathe, breathe, breathe.

*

Now see, I think a lot of blog posts read as if they were about something else. As if they were code.

No?

¹I had to look up that phrase. In totally unrelated wondering: how is it we still use a phrase that originated more than 1000 years ago?

6% moisture content

Last night my father-in-law called us to get the number for Mt. Bachelor's weather report. It was just an excuse. I mean, he did want to know that phone number but of course he could have looked it up himself; his call was an excuse to talk with his son about the storm.

I never knew any family so aware of the weather. During last month's dismayingly dry, warm spell my husband, his sister and his brother all explained to me – independently – that winter was being kept at bay by a high-pressure front off the Pacific coast. (I think it was a high-pressure zone. Maybe it was a low-pressure zone. I never listen to their words; I listen to the tone in their voices.) At any given moment my sister-in-law can tell me where the clouds are on a weather map and what it means for us; and any of them can discuss the current situation on the mountain passes.

It matters, they tell me. Here in Oregon the weather is changeable, and it matters.

Oh, I know. I check Mt. Bachelor's report on weekends, too. But still. This hyper-awareness of the weather is a continual reminder to me that Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore.

My husband was not able to take a call from his father last night because on Wednesdays he goes out with the boys. They skin up the Cinder Cone after work. Last month Wednesdays were miserable for them because the weather remained so warm and dry, but last week! and last night! Last night they skied in a storm, windy and very cold with poor visibility, relying on headlamps rather than the moon – but the snow, my husband told me, was so incredibly beautifully light: six percent moisture content, he said.

So I talked with my father-in-law instead. He told me about the situation on the Santiam Pass and I told him it was snowing lightly at our house, which is at a higher elevation than his house, and he said he'd call his son in the morning to hear a report on Mt. Bachelor's conditions.

Then I hung up and stood at the window awhile watching the snow fall.