This week I begin an experiment of discipline. My intention is to write every day about something for a bunch of days in a row. Let’s say until the next full moon. It shouldn’t be hard. I have part of two different days in this first post. We will see…
This is possible? It doesn’t have to be good. It is all practice.
Also, I promise to stop using the word Psithurism for a while after this post.
Some snow has held on the north facing upper slopes of Mt. Mcloughlin since the end of September. I have found myself West of Klamath more than normal these last few weeks–drawn to the high country for biking before it goes away until June. Drawn outdoors to breathe the last of this years verdant oxygen, hues of magenta and yellow filling lungs with melancholic decay.
This year it all seems very healthy. Prolonged vibrant color.
The first big stands of leafless aspens are appearing in pockets that do not appear to be contingent on micro-climate. Groups that I would expect to be past are peaking this week. Other, sheltered, lower elevation groups are well past for some reason. Maybe it is always the case and I simply didn’t notice until now. Rarely does one get a chance to really watch the aspen trees.
This year has been better than most for justified aspen access. I am technically too busy for leaf-peeping, but if I can disguise my pursuit of outdoor selfishness as “volunteer work” and “work trade” then things are balanced for fair a bit more than just me burning gas to exercise and take photos in beautiful places. Cooperating with other people to earn a common goal through work and commitment pairs well with the minimal constriction of outside. It might be the only venue I feel confident socializing in for work purposes.
I have spent most of my career working in relative isolation, trying to coordinate my tasks so that I have to interact with people as little as possible.
Recently I have decided that this is not healthy, but at 47 my struggle to reintegrate into a society has been the challenge of painful, fun and decisive all at once. Everyday I make decisions about what is essential for time I have left in the day and for that which I have left in life. For what is essential about what I leave behind. What destruction and consumption lies in my wake. It is an odd lens to live through. Seasons and life are exhilerating. Scary and curious. Anguish and repose.
Is there time to learn how to code so I don’t have to WordPress? I am sure I could make this look better if I knew how to code. Ha.
Everyday you let go of one thing at least.
At least you get up the next day with yourself, and more opportunities to fail. Maybe you are lucky enough to share those fast morning moments with people you love before heading out into abuse.
Breathe when you wake. Is the coffee on?
My working life until now has been spent on projects of varied scale and site. From commercial tenant improvements to large, well crafted residences.
Light Construction Spectrum…
After the morning scramble I used to go out there to where the water cooler is a social hub.
One fact of life experienced by most construction workers is a changing “office”. This change isn’t just the site or people as phases of a project are complete. It isn’t just the fact that the building is closing in or a goal is met. Many jobs see years of seasonal rotation in construction. That adds obvious challenges to scheduling, but also opportunities for problem solving and interpersonal growth. The weather has caused several incidents of unusual requirements and comradary on jobs that I have worked over the years. A sudden windstorm or down pour sends crews running to protect whatever is vulnerable. Sometimes snow starts building when you are working miles from town. Equipment gets stuck…etc. Lots of things happen that get collective attention.
As a carpenter I spent much of my time building walls that connect the foundation to the terrestrial world and form the structures of our shelter. It is one of my favorite things to do. Unfortunately, my ability to do it is in decline. One of my mentors told me at the beginning of my career to stay focused, save money and that it doesn’t last forever. All the old guard told me.
I had no idea what they meant at all. Gary used to joke that we were the “Football Players of the Workforce”–always working injured, but without the pay. No kidding. There were too many days when I was young and healthy that I was ungrateful for the gifted life I live. Even if the pay is crap I can only be thankful to have worked actually building unique things, mostly, out in the sunshine.
Where’s the Sun?
Who gets to ask that as part of their job? Lucky people!
Now I am just as lucky in many ways, even if I can no longer work at production levels all day, every day.
A few weeks ago my sister posted an Instagram of her recent Colorado trip and the aspens on their way to peaking in that high country. This loosened some aspen memories for me, and triggered a letter to her. I am always excited for other people when they experience aspens for the first time. This is not that letter, but I will say a few tenuously connected things about them, and small ways in which they helped to mold my world.
I first encountered them in July 1993, on a weekend excursion from Archaeological field school.
The school was based near Fort Rock, Oregon and was where I fell in love with the High Desert. On that late July Sunday I found myself sitting and dreaming in the massive saddle of a mature aspen tree on the West slope of Steens Mountain. Psithurism calling Autumn with a gentile upslope breeze in the hot afternoon dappled, leaf-flipping rippling sunlight and shade.
It was my first “crotch nap”. Something I wouldn’t do now, but did a few more times without getting hurt. Maybe it is asking a lot of the Angels. Risk assessment is different the older you get.
I can get just as much connection to the tree by just sitting and listening now that I am older. I no longer need to climb up. Sometimes I still do, but I don’t need to.
There are so many great memories from that little trip because it was part of the most bohemian period of my life. A lot of pain too for the entitlement I must have exuded as I went through my days. I owe more than I have paid. I hope to live long enough to feel that I have earned my luck and the grace of people I love who helped me along.
In the decades after I first connected to Aspens I was drawn to their colonies in the Sky Islands of Arizona, and on Sandia Mountain in Albuquerque. All over the desert West they enhance Autumn. Above Austin, Nevada they are sunset immaculate or opaque luminescence on windswept grassy rimrock reposing talus.
When I see them changing I know that Autumn is getting real.
Are all the apples down yet?
This year I was watching the trees around town and up at High Lakes Pass, trying to gauge when a stand that I know about on the OC&E Woods Line Trail, 37 miles out of town, might be peaking for color. I was looking for an excuse to group a few activities that are otherwise unrelated, but worked out well in concert. So…
Several years ago years I drew working plans for a friend of mine to build a log cabin. He owns a lumber mill and more or less made every wooden piece of his house. There is no drywall in the house at all. Everything is wood. He built his own everything. It truly is an achievement, and I will be adding pictures of it to the portfolio page as he gets a few more details polished up in the next year.
It takes a long time to build an ultra-custom home on your own. I feel that his vision has translated well as a finished product.
Knowing that I was going to go out and at least get a few photos and a progress check on his dream I kept Fatbike in the Sienna where it already was and grabbed my go-pack for camera transport in case I had time to visit the trees too.
The aspens on the OC&E are not too time consuming a diversion if I am pairing the trip with another (cough) work-related task like pictures for this website. The excuse was good enough, and with some threat of rain I ventured for a rare trip East into the misty rising sun.
In Dairy I stopped for potatoes. $15 for 50 lbs of large red locally grown potatoes. Fair enough. Those beautiful farmlands transitioning into the foothills of Bly Mountain are worth the fee to cross the bridge at Dairy, and people love it when you share potatoes.
It shows that you care in a way that no one can deny unless you have some sick inside joke or something…
A potato perversion.
Anyhow…things that pass through a mind as you drive along, watching for hawks on fence posts.
In 45 minutes I was there. That is a lot of East and a bit of North for a few photos and quick chat, but at some point you have to get away from trying to make “complete sense”–sometimes you just have to get away for a bit. A micro trip.
Deep in Klamath County there is a whole world that does not pay much attention to the City. It is live and let live more or less. A good place to have a small sawmill operation and work at home. When I met my friend he was driving an hour from here to come up and work on the building I was leading. He is a diverse guy and fun to converse with. Lot’s of creative energy.
At his log home I found a deeply comfortable space. In spite of the dark Juniper walls and increasingly grey skies the little wood stove and bright conversation made the couches comfortable enough to tolerate the dogs that were jumping all over. Bad dogs. I got a few pictures of my friend and the dogs. Soon his ex will be taking them with her as she moves out of state. Hopefully I can work one in Lightroom and make a print for him. He will miss those little Jack Russels.
I captured some images of a few finished details that were looking tight and gave my friend some potatoes. We took a tour to the garden and greenhouse, now cleaned up for winter. It gets cold up there against Bly Mountain. Sweeping around we stopped at the well house where he stores his root crops and apples in juniper shavings. He gave me some huge, beautiful beets. A fair trade for potatoes and welcome to the home stores.
Over at the saw mill I surveyed bundles of curing planks. Ponderosa, Lodgepole, Juniper and Douglas Fir mostly.
For a few months I have been thinking about the shelf that goes over the coat rod in my mudroom. I almost just bought a 2×12 and was resigned to paint it to blend, but it really wasn’t the look I wanted. I considered metal grating of several types and configurations, and overall, I probably settled on a boring option and execution of the solution to this problem. I give me a C- on my final solution for creativity, but it looks OK. Not everything has to be art.
About a month ago I started thinking of looking for a plank of some interesting species or fragment of “significant wood” as the solution. Maybe a piece of driftwood from the lake four blocks away. On all my bike rides I had my eye out for neglected legal and free wood salvage for my shelf project.
At the sawmill I was looking at the wood stacks and asking him what he would charge me to run a log if I found one when I saw the slab I had been looking for on the ground. Unaccounted for. Separate from any similar material.
Can I have that one?
Sure (a bit confused)…
I will pay you for it. How much?
No…no…
I will give you $20 for it. Is that enough? (it is)
You don’t have to pa…
Here…take it please.
Ok. Thanks.
I put the slab in the Sienna and thanked him. I had my shelf.
That was a good visit for so many reasons. It is always good to see Paul.
From there I took my diversion to the Switchbacks Trailhead on the OC&E and had a view of the little aspen grove in that Lost River tributary canyon. It sits down in the valley, next to a pasture. Idyllic, but I missed the peak. Outside the Sienna the wind was stronger than I ordinarily like to ride in so I sat, debating whether or not to get my bag together and descend several miles to the bottom lands. It is railroad grade so not much effort, but the rain wasn’t far away and bound to be unavoidable soon.
No Chamois, wrong shoes for thrashing off the trail. Why not? I descended. Many of my rides end with climbs. I like it that way sometimes. Most of the time. Something about stopping at the peak of exertion maybe?
It was simple gravel sailing for two miles. I didn’t have to pedal but I did and made great time for Fatbike. At the bottomland I almost got distracted by the margins of trees and grasses on the desert forest edge of bovine delight. The pasture was rich and green from recent rains, blended with warm colors in the atrophy of this years growth.
I made it to a small group of aspens that reside on the rocky edges of a fluvial passage. I am not sure what it takes to make this creek flow, but obviously more than the recent inches of rain we had. These aspens were part of a tranquil forest just south of that first pasture in this canyon and north yet of an area called Devils Garden–another adventure for a different story.
Sitting for a while in silence, recording the psithurism with my video camera and taking some stills too, my foot was feeling good enough to hike up to the top of a rise on the other side of the creek bottom. Careful not to scratch my new shoes, I stumbled a bit trying to protect my tender Morton’s Neuroma from preemptively incapacitating my afternoon efforts for the day. It was a conscious 1/4 mile of bushwhacking. I found what the bear found, but turned and got a nice view of the little aspen grove as I walked back down the slope to my camera case.
The morning was almost spent so I saddled up and immediately got distracted by a damp rock. The light was extraordinary. Eventually I regained my composure and continued the low angle climb to my car. The rain became enough that I sought to protect my well protected phone even more and then, at the base of the most climby section I was struck with instagrin. Oh Boy! Another culvert chunk!
For several weeks I had been questioning my motives and to some extent my sanity, concerning a sculpture project I am working on.
This summer I did a personal quest trip to the Blue Mountains North of Spray, Oregon. That trip is several posts in itself, and I will write them when their lessons reveal.
On that trip I found a dead end from my intended plan on one of the rides, but in that change of action I found two or more very exciting opportunities. Most exciting was a rusty, deformed old torn piece of steel culvert.
I was full of joy when I saw it on a water stop, both literally and figuratively. I was thirsty, and I stopped to drink from my bottle in view of a little pond adjacent an area called “Wetmore”. It is the abandoned and demolished site of a small logging town that was a frontier of Kinzua, which was such for Fossil…all the way down to the Columbia river through the Northern foothills of the Blues. I did make it to Kinzua a different day, but again, that is another story.
I looked and saw rust in the sand and weeds next to the road. It was almost small enough to carry the 14 miles back to my camp, but without a hiking pack I really couldn’t conceive of bringing it with me on that Eastern Oregon dirt road. I left it there, actually somewhat nervous that I would return to find it gone. That is greed defined. What value? What power? What ze heck?
Back at my tent I felt a bit defeated. This was supposed to be my biggest day of a week of rides. More than 60 miles on Fatbike. Fairview Pass to Fossil on the ridge line forest roads, back through Winlock and the upper Kahler Valley to the ridge where I had my compound set up. Instead I lay on my mattress and listened to the wind with only 32 miles complete.
I figured out what to do, and after I beat a serious thunderstorm to complete a second ride on the John Day River between Spray and Service Creek-58 total miles for the day, I went out in the long, clinging, humid light of late June to fetch the metal. I always have deep reservations about obtaining things–even beautiful junk, but I felt compelled by this metal. It came home with me.
Now, months later, I stopped for water and I was looking at an oddly similar find in a similar type of spot. Have water, have road, have culvert I guess. I pulled the beauty of deformed metal from the sand on the side of the trail and it came up, but it was heavier than I imagined. I determined that I could probably manage to get it out of there with the lucky hiking backpack I brought my camera equipment in. I was able to load it in the pack, but just barely. In doing so I saw the reason it was so heavy. A basalt boulder neatly compacted in the wrinkles of the mangled culvert chunk. My wife describes the rusty folds as “Hyperbolic Ruffles”–like the crumpled shadow and satin of a Flamenco dress.
With that in the pack I was lucky to be able to strap my hard case to the outside of the pack and do my best not to bruise my tailbone on the remaining ascent. Where are my cycling shorts now?
I made it and decided that I didn’t have time to make a useful work block between the drive home and when I had to pick up my daughter from school so I drove out a slightly longer way and came down the Sprague River and North end of Upper Klamath Lake. By this time the storm was moving East and I had gone West and South, glimpses of high Cascades peeking through cloud crenelation.
At home I had a minute to extract the metal from my backpack and hose it off. Muddy water poured out of it for minute after minute as I rolled it around, drenching it from every angle, letting it drain over and over. Eventually the water ran reasonably clean.
Clean enough for now.
Now it sits, and I hope to have time to consider what I want to do with it.
Something thoughtful I hope. Something that expresses the totality of embodied energy that brought it to our presence.
Aspens can’t hold energy like those twisted pieces of steel. they take and create energy. They breathe like I do and live with the seasons. It is not stored for long. In the cycle of life, even on a very small scale, aspen colonies are a short lived part of the system.
For this year they have mostly found dormant stasis on the surface. Underground is a whole other story. They are networking. As Oregon moves into winter we all project inward a bit, and I hope to find time to synthesize the materials and lessons of the warm season of discovery. Another summer of finding and exploring now becoming words and products, hoping to relate.
It was late October 1996 when my mentor, Gary passed down the metaphors and lessons of what it means to be a career carpenter as we sat in shelter from the rain talking about the coming football games for the weekend. There were no aspens in view of that office–a large home on a hilltop looking East and West from South Eugene. Madrones and Douglas Firs and the occasional peak at the Three Sisters through cloud crenelation many miles away. In 23 years I have not lost the feeling of exhilaration in the discovery of how it feels to be outside all year. Those early years left an imprint that cannot be undone. I hope that means I can relearn how to work with others. I used to run crews. I hated it, but I got things done. It is probably an important skill to have if I want to keep growing as a person. Working with the village. A forest of people. Maybe I can find a way to do it without losing me.
