We may never pass this way again

Our long experiment with Oregon is over.

Having retrieved our daughter and her belongings after graduation from the University of Oregon last week, and swept up Nancy's mom and her belongings from the idyllic park of erstwhile snowbirds along the way, we retreated to California.

Their tents struck, the wayfarers in our immediate family have come home for good.

Mom will live with us. Our daughter, a lucky Duck who gets to study in Ireland for the summer, will then look for work in the land of movies and television and entertainment.

Save for a week at summer's end to settle affairs at the snowbird park, we may never pass this way again.

(Which made me think of the Seals and Crofts song, but just the title, which you and I probably think is meant to be wistful. Which is why I think my high school graduating class chose it for our commencement theme.

But it's really more of a "let's get it on while the gettin' on is good" song. Which may be why my graduating class picked it after all, which means I've been out of the loop longer than I feared. The song was already old when my high school class picked it. We were bad choosers or we had bad choices. Our junior prom theme was "Reunited" by Peaches and Herb. Think on that a moment, while we return you to our regularly scheduled post, now in progress … )

We've no compelling reason to visit Oregon anymore, inviting as it is. Portland, emerald and grand and sweeping along the banks of the Willamette, is a loooooooooong drive from Sacramento, even for craft beers and friends with whom to enjoy them. It was only a quick morning's drive from Eugene in the few times we were able to visit our daughter.

Last week amounted to one last run-through, one last check under the bed for belongings. We did what we did for one last time. We tried to close the circle on some things, and even succeeded a couple of times.

While we weren't looking, our daughter Mo graduated. It is the blur people describe. When we gathered in a ballroom at the memorial union for our daughter's school commencement — she exempted us from having to attend the main ceremony the next day with thousands of other grads — I realized it was the only room at the university I've been in twice. The first time was when we dropped her off four years before, for a campus orientation.

Between then and now we talked Mo twice into staying at the university. Bleak mid-winter brought her down and she couldn't stand it. Her saving was the Newman Club, for Catholics attending public universities. Her grandma and mom encouraged her to visit the Newman table during orientation activities, and the friendships she had gained in Newman kept her in Eugene those winters, kept her going.

Eventually Mo worked as a full-time peer counselor for Newman one year, earned a scholarship through it, and led music for student Masses. She organized the music for her own baccalaureate Mass last week, her last official task in Eugene. The rest of her fellow graduates in their green caps and gowns sat in the front row, families behind them. Newman staff members recognized them, and the priest blessed them.

The songs she and the choir sang made our worship back home seem dusty, and us seem old.

Mo became an Oregon resident to save on tuition, which impeded her studies for a full year as she had to account for most of her income and do Oregon resident kinds of things that weren't college kinds of things. Somehow, though, by attending summer school a couple of years, she made up the lost time and finished in four years.

Maybe it's not a homeless-to-Harvard story, but it's gutsy and speaks to hard work, and I'm proud of her. She tells us her real education is out in the industry of her choice, and we as parents take it on faith.

Since we skipped the big commencement, we did the town a day ahead of everyone else: A nice restaurant the first evening, with our son and his girlfriend; my sister; Mo's grandma, her surviving grandparent; and Nancy and me. We went to craft beer places the next, Track Town Pizza, dependable ol' wood-paneled no-frills Track Town Pizza, the next. No lines. We beat the crowds each day.

Goodbye, Track Town Pizza.

Goodbye, Eugene streets that I had only last week gotten used to. Goodbye, Target® and Lowe's™, where we had bought dorm stuff and moving-away stuff. Goodbye, Hirons®©, which advertises as a pharmacy but is more chock full of tchotschkes than any store I have ever seen. Goodbye, Safeway®™ on 18th Avenue, where it's hard to believe Mo's car conked out in heavy snows last winter and had to be abandoned for a few days.

Goodbye, Courtesy Inn, and you lovely family that runs it and revels in your children, both high school valedictorians and probably doctors by now. If we ever come back, we will stay in your motel and not the Motel 6®© which charged much more for much less. It used to be Motel 6™® rates ended in 6 and were double digits. No more.

Goodbye, Keystone Cafe, the vegan breakfast place around the corner from Courtesy Inn. We never ate the vegan plates but we loved what we ate, even if Mo didn't care for the place. We even loved the industrial-strength boombox atop a refrigerator in the corner, playing Motown hits.

Goodbye, Fern Ridge Reservoir, you shallow, reedy lake outside Eugene. I was going to swim you one last time, but signs posted at the entrances warned, "If in doubt, stay out," and the water exhibited three of the symptoms of possible high bacteria count. My latent adventurous spirit has its limits.

Goodbye, University of Oregon. Goodbye, Eugene.

Goodbye, Sutherlin, you mystery town of former glory with few visible means of support. It can't be the snowbirds parked nearby, because they shop for goods and healthcare in Roseburg the next town over.

Goodbye, Cooper Creek Reservoir, draped in fog and nestled in the dark forested slopes. I couldn't swim in you one last time either, having locked the keys and all my swim gear in the U-Haul®™ truck our last night in Oregon. (U-Haul's ™® motto should be: "Order a 10-foot truck and we'll give a 20-foot truck instead, and make you drive 25 miles to the next town to get it!")

Goodbye, verdant slopes of southern Oregon, starting to look tan and raggedy and — dare I say, Californian?

Goodbye.

• • •

While I wasn't looking, the World Cup began. Not that I was looking all that hard, to our son's consternation. Though his love for the game has soared, mine faded when my children stopped playing. Similarly, my fascination with University of Oregon football team's flashy play and flashier uniforms, different each week, will die now that our daughter no longer attends.

I appreciate soccer; I appreciate that it's so much different than what we Americans expect of sports, that the joy is in the development of a near-goal so much more than the score.

But I left my heart in San Francisco with the Giants, and it doesn't have room for other sports.

• • •

While I wasn't looking, the Giants fell down a rabbit hole and became as expert at losing painfully as they had at winning handily.

Though I knew their rocket ride to first could not sustain, I didn't expect them to lose so atrociously, giving up leads in late innings all three times to the Colorado Rockies at home, losing six in a row and nine of 10 before finally righting themselves over the weekend against the Arizona Diamondbacks. As of last night they showed their losing side again, getting shut out by the lowly San Diego Padres, 6-0.

The Giants still hold the lead in the National League West. What kind of Giants fan does it make me if I wish they were in second, chasing the lead?
 

Long-ago logo for a mythical entity,
from Jan Conroy's design class

• • •

While I wasn't looking, Jan Conroy perished in a car accident.

Jan was one of the few people I'd call erudite. He was quietly bright, quietly mirthful, quietly tall, and it belied his passion for graphic design. He had retired as the executive director of communications department at UC Davis, and I was fortunate to be a student long ago in graphic design classes he taught.

Jan especially loved the history of graphic design, and it was contagious. He took great care to tell me when I had screwed up on a design, and when I had hit a groove, and he made me want to do more and better.

You'd have liked him. Goodbye, Jan.

• • •

While I wasn't looking, Gene "Gino" Bertolucci passed away.

Mr. B, as I called him, was larger-than-life, something I can't be. He was big and imposing, big laugh, big features, big laser eyes.

I don't know whether it would upset him to say he was the embodiment of the sacred and profane —truly a tireless volunteer for the poor and hungry in the neighborhoods around Our Lady of the Assumption Church, where he was a longtime parishioner, but with a disarmingly earthy way of describing the machinations of his volunteer work. You had to have been there.

Goodbye, Mr. B.

• • •

While I wasn't looking, Iraq all but dissolved.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, depending on your news source and political persuasion, and a slow U-Haul®™ truck and many miles to truck it all let me listen to the entire spectrum — has run of the place, I heard. The border between Syria and Iraq has effectively dissolved, many of the armed Iraqi units the United States had trained ran off, Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki is pissing everyone off, and his country may split into three politico-religious sectors.

Obama blew it, pundit after pundit professed on the caustic radio shows. My favorite was former Vice President Dick Cheney's blistering attack on Obama, "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many."

One clever Cheney critic said that's like a starting pitcher giving up 10 runs in the first inning, handing the ball over and blaming the bullpen for the loss.

Yeah, except for all the blood and mangling of thousands of lives, the waste of billions into someone's pockets, the outright lies and misdirection.

Goodbye, human decency.


Is it wrong of me to burden my children with hope for a better world?

A frayed knot

Trips trip me up anymore. You too?

Mine become essays, with themes and thorny puzzles, questions and frayed answers, and denouement, tidy or no.

I write and rewrite them at 72 mph.

Since most trips lately take us on Interstate 5, the long straight stretches across the Sacramento Valley set the drone for mental proofreading.

Except I don't really know the theme for last weekend's trip. Surrender? Futility, with faint light of redemption?

Lake Shasta is low — summer low. In the state's worst drought ever, the lake has such little water to collect from the Cascades and release into the Sacramento River.

The great rusted belt of earth exposed by the dropping water is lovely and terrible.

A path has been carved into the orange earth under the I-5 bridge so that boaters can descend to the marina and get to their slips. No one seemed to be boating what is left of the turquoise water as we passed.

Oregon's southern rivers — the Klamath, the Rogue, the forks of the Umpqua, the Willamette, the McKenzie — already roll in their summer somnolence, fast but thin, sheening shallow over riprap. Oregon is in drought too, though it's more difficult to see in the evergreen damp along the freeway.

We had taken my mom-in-law back home, after more than three months in Northern California, to visit and have surgery and recuperate. It occurs to me after dropping her off and tending to a little spring cleaning that she will be by herself for the first time in decades. My dad-in-law passed away last year. One of her sons had been living nearby, but he came down with us before Christmas and lives around here now.

She is strong and ready to be back with her forested and terraced community of retirees, which instantly embraced her. A resident busily scrubbing around the trailer waste disposal site recognized us somehow and asked Nancy how her mom is doing. It is community with a capital C.

She has much to do and much she wants to do.

I drove solo on the way up; Nancy rode with her mom in her car. Flipping the radio in a failed search for spring training baseball, I got Oregon State baseball for a brief moment, from a broadcaster who sounded like he was doing a Vin Scully impersonation, right down to the hissing lisp and the skirling Bronx vowels.

That's the thing with radio in southern Oregon: Brief moments. National Public Radio is handed off from tower to relay tower, signal crackling for 20 minutes before fading; if you're lucky, the station will list the other frequencies so you can catch the rest of the story on another station before its last raspy detail.

Christian radio knows no barriers here. Their signals stay strong even in the narrowest gorges. If you don't want one station, another is just a few blips away, just as strong.

Their broadcasters seem to talk a lot about "creation science." I hung with one program, the upshot of which was that the lack of fossil evidence for any transition of one creature into another proves "creation science's" point that creation diversified rapidly in the few thousand years the universe existed. "Creation science," the show host said, is more relevant than ever and needs to be taught in schools.

I processed that. So, because scientists haven't found a complete fossil array of related creatures, and "creation scientists" discount what they have found and the agreed-upon (except for "creation science") methods for how old they may be, then "creation science" wins by default?

A commercial on the station promoted books that parents can share with their children to bolster the creation story, including diagrams showing children how all the animals could fit on Noah's ark.

Why — why are we still talking about this? I sighed. Why is this not settled? Why can't we worry about other things, like how Syria and the Central African Republic are human butcher shops, how Nigeria's people burn at terrorists' torches, how Russia does whatever Russia seems to be doing to the people of Ukraine. Why can't we move on? What century is this?

We lumber in retrograde.

As for redemption … I look for hooks to snag hope. The reservoir near my mom-in-law's place is full, as is my beloved Lake Natoma, full for now. Their high levels are mysteries to me, or maybe I just choose to think that, water suspended in disbelief.

My mom-in-law prays for Nancy, prays for me, prays for all of us, just as her husband did. Prays for all the world's woes, which is sometimes what is left to do.

In the dipping turn of the freeway I find slack, then momentum.

See the signs and know their meaning

Maura and Liam on our epic vacation of the Pacific Northwest. That's the Yaquina Head lighthouse
at Newport, Oregon, which we visited just weeks ago with Maura. This painting has potential;
a lot of flaws, but enough to suggest I need to take more cracks at watercolor.

Life circles back, as it will, kicking up dust of dreams in its arc, and I'm back in another time.

A sight, a sound, just a gesture, sparks fire of mind.

Right now I'm 18 years ago this summer.

Natalie Merchant has taken me there. She was singing "Stockton Gala Days" from a corner of the house, from back when she was with the group 10,000 Maniacs. My sister long ago had given us cassettes (yes, that long ago) of the group's "Our Time in Eden" and "In My Tribe" to hip us up a bit. (I know what you're gonna say; but one can't become hip in one step; we needed hand holding; and in 1994, 10,000 Maniacs were MTV-worthy. Though I've never been crazy about Natalie Merchant's dancing, or the way she sang off-key in live performances.)

(Good thing this is not about why I like this music and you should too. I'll never write a post like that. Probably.)

"Our Time in Eden" literally became our soundtrack for a family trip into the Idaho panhandle, for one last visit to my grandma near Spokane, Wash. before she passed, and across Washington all the way around the Olympic Peninsula and south along the Pacific Coast through Oregon on the way back home to Sacramento. We played that tape so much I'm sure we broke it.

When Natalie began "That summer fields grew high, with foxglove stalks and ivy …" or whatever the heck she was singing (it presents a grammar problem right away, and we never paid close enough attention to the fact that sometimes 10,000 Maniacs lyrics were often either morose laments paired with happy-go-lucky music, or were words written more to fit a beat than make much sense), I returned immediately to the wheat plains of central Washington, on our way to Lake Wenatchee, quiet among the mountains.

Could we, we'd still be there, suspended in time, watching our four-year-old son stand atop a boulder near the shore, posing as a superhero in his underwear, and our two-year-old daughter devouring a Washington peach nearly as big as her head.

(Carter's, the infants' clothes company had a slogan, "If they could just stay little 'til their Carter's wear out," which remains with me. Never bought the clothes, but never forgot the poignancy of that sentiment. This was a time before school and scouting and sports and all those daily dilemmas that, though necessary, I suppose, only made that breathtakingly brief time with our kids as wee ones all the more precious.)

We listen happily to "Jezebel," a rousing tune about a marriage tearing apart, as we fly west down Highway 2. Most of the gas stations en route to the Washington coast have new banners promoting espresso. We had no idea what that was, no idea that Starbucks was just beginning to spread its caffeinated tentacles across the land. The closer we got to Seattle, the more frequent the banners. Before we left the Olympic Peninsula, we were coffee junkies.

(The best coffee we ever had, out of all those Puget Sound mocha meccas, by the way, came from a pedal cart as a guy pushed his mobile business between the looooong lines of cars and their captive inhabitants, waiting, waiting, waiting to catch a ferry across to the peninsula. Go figure.)

When Natalie tries to coax someone out of deep depression in the danceable "If You Intend," I'm walking around neighborhoods of Aberdeen, Wash. (where Kurt Cobain was from), making sure not to go near the hospital that was treating our daughter for what we learned was called nursemaid's elbow.

In pulling our stubborn daughter up from a beach she did not want to leave, I had dislocated her elbow. She didn't cry; she just wouldn't use her arm anymore. In fact, it was because she wasn't crying that we did a doubletake (she wouldn't like us to say, but she was a tantrum princess in her time). In a panic, we brought her into to the nearest hospital, and we decided I'd bide my time out on the streets so some clinician wouldn't turn the incident into a child protective services issue.

Not all the memories of our 1,000-mile journey are good, you notice, but I wouldn't trade them. It was one of those trips that made us want to chuck all we had and reinvent ourselves at every stop, just make things up as we went along, the four of us and our balky chipped-paint Plymouth Voyager minivan.

All it takes is the distant gargly warble of Natalie Merchant, with her silly dance, and I'm there.

These are days you'll remember.
Never before and never since, I promise,
Will the whole world be warm as this.

Swimming across America

Who knows what evil lurks in the floral depths of Diamond Lake?
Just plants … probably …

In my futile, doomed, disorganized, happenstance attempt to swim in every lake in America, I can at least cross two more off my list. It wasn't a big list to start with: Folsom Lake, Lake Natoma (Sacramento and Placer counties); Lake Tahoe (Nevada and California sides); Spring Lake (Sonoma County); Ozette and Cascade lakes (Washington state); (does San Francisco Bay count?). The list remained small because I had held to the wisdom, broken but a few years ago, to wit: "What fool would swim in a lake?"

(Lake Pend Oreille {Pon-du-RAY} in Idaho doesn't count. That was more of an organized attempted drowning when I was eight or nine; but that's a story for another time.)

(On second thought, if I include Lake Pend Oreille, I could try for a more bucket-listy swim-one-lake-in-every-state goal … )

Over a farewell-to-summer camping trip with my family the last long weekend, I swam in Lost Creek Reservoir (wonder why it's lost; maybe because the creek got turned into a reservoir?) and Diamond Lake in south central Oregon. Two more different lakes would be difficult to find, but I'll keep trying.

Neither lake caters to swimmers. Lost Creek Lake sets aside a paltry misbegotten swim area on the other side of steep peninsula from the narrow marina, where all the action, if you can call it that, was. The reservoir holds back some of the Rogue River, and the water level has dropped 20 feet from its max, leaving swimmers with a long, gravelly, weedy, desolate walk to the water.

At Diamond Lake, the swim area is even tinier, a rectangle of no more than 10 yards wide and 20 yards long on a narrow beach in front of its resort (where it's always yesterday, and the last good yesterday appears to have been 1964). I did not swim in Diamond Lake's swim area; since the water would have not even gone up to my waist, I would have had difficulty swimming there.

I swam in the middle of Diamond Lake instead, off the deck of a patio boat, the rental for which we splurged. I mean, how many chances are you gonna get to rent something called a patio boat (which is exactly as you would imagine, a floating patch of shaded indoor/outdoor carpet on pontoons, complete with deck chairs — it was missing a Weber™® grill — and an outboard motor on the back)?

We made a three-hour tour … a three-hour tour … around the lake, stopping to eat, stopping to look, stopping to swim, tootling along.

I didn't swim for long, because of the sudden realization, after I jumped in, that I would have a difficult time getting back on the boat. Much like an actual patio, the boat lacked rope ladders.

Knowing the effort back on the boat would be a pain, I didn't stay in the water more than long enough to note that it wasn't very deep (maybe 20 feet where we were) but very dark green and full of plants whose long tendrils crept just within the clearer water closer to the surface, to resemble fingers reaching up for my feet.

I'm not usually mindful of the flora and fauna below me as I swim, but these fingered plants made me want to get back in the boat quick. More and more these days, I'm mindful of the rhythmic risk-and-rescue that swimming is: Alternately submerging your face into the dark dense unknown and lifting it for a quick saving breath, just to risk all once again.

Shallower places along the lake were crystalline green, but I didn't get back in to look, a decision I regret.

Lost Creek Lake flat-out does not welcome swimmers. It's a powerboat/ski boat/jet ski lake (Diamond is a trout fisher's paradise where most boats plod along), so swimmers face high risks venturing beyond the swim area. My daughter spotted a floating swim deck in the middle of the lake (which seems stupid because of the high-speed boat traffic), but I didn't feel safe crossing the boats' paths to make the half-mile journey to the deck. My daughter and son and I were confined to the swim area, where the wind and chop had churned in the fine red dirt near the shoreline to a rusty murk.

It made me thankful for cool, green Lake Natoma, where a low speed limit discourages motorized boats. Except for a few racing kayakers who think it's funny to race right through a group of swimmers, most people on the lake leave swimmers alone.

Let me know of a swim-friendly lake in your state. Maybe I could make this a bucket list after all. Though I'd swim Pend Oreille again just to make matters kosher.