Company

They never call.  They just drop by.  And expect to be fed.

When I lived in the suburbs, it seemed to me all the bears were gone.  And much of the wildlife.  But here at my cabin the branches swaying out my bathroom window signal company has arrived.  This orphaned cub in the photo above has come three times this summer for servings of cherries.  He will come for apples next and then plums.  On the slope which I walk up to my hillside garden barrels, there is a pile of eleven plum pits - the remains of what last fall was a pile of bear scat.  

The deer sweep up my road, stop to browse on the ivy, and slip down to the river for a drink.  My dog listens for them and hopes for a sighting.  Their company a diversion.

        
Wolves, moose and a cougar all make my mountains their location for meals.  I am surprised at the diversity.  A moose was born just up my road a half-a-mile a month or so ago.  A cougar took a goat for a mid-night meal last week at a hillside meadow close by, and wolves feasted on elk in the high snowy meadows this winter.

Even while sitting in the river on a hot day, company arrives.  Water snakes sunning on the rocks by my hand.  Fry - slashes of black - feeding on some watery bounty beneath my feet.

 
A Pacific Slope flycatcher nested in the eaves of my cabin and would sing a little ps-seet, pt-sick, seet as it flew about feasting on bugs above my patio.  It was joined by a family of violet green swallows, the young ones fledging in tight circles past my chair.

Swallowtails fluttered past on their way to flowers in my garden.  My company is good.    

Even my dog gets into the mode of dropping in and eating, as if she were company.  In the past couple of weeks, she had invited herself to eat bacon grease, popcorn, a coffee and chocolate granola bar and dried eggs.  Some company is bad.

Guilty of Admiring Jet Stream Skies

Guilty.  I was guilty of admiring jet stream skies while on a field trip to behold the bounty of flowers found in the Blue Mountains.   Pollution versus nature.  If I were trying to defend my case, I would argue that I was admiring the wind and its capricious redistribution of man's trailing lines of waste.  I wasn't glorifying pollution; I was merely noticing the properties of a natural phenomenon.  It's a point of artistic translation.  

The flowers competed for attention.  Without guile or avarice, they flourished in this year of deep snows and bountiful rainfall.  Evidence of their tenacious hook on this earth.

Yet, as species are under stress, those jet trails seem to mark x's ...

...for the spots in which flowers are diminished in number or being scorched into non-existence.

The day's sky was a rare full-on blue atmosphere.  The group of Audubon members stopped on a small plateau to eat lunch and chat.  We looked for bears and listened to birds.  Our hosts for the field trip, Jeff and Cheryl named species after species.  Their knowledge astonishing.  All of us worked at remembering the names; as if by naming and noticing, we could with linguistic skills keep the plants from disappearing.

Jeff took us to see phantom orchids in a densely wooded area.  These orchids have no chlorophyll, hence, their stalks, leaves and flowers are white.  As forests diminish, this northwest native species is becoming scarce.  The ones we saw were just beginning to bud.  They resembled something.  Oh, yes.  Their stalks were like the trails of white jet streams.

              

Balance

The gravel on my dusty road had been strewn with rose petals to guide me to the cabin where a healing gathering for women was in progress.  In a little while, I was lying on a massage table from where I could hear the laughter of mothers and their daughters muffled through the curtains hanging in the doorway to the kitchen.  As a reiki therapist circled the table, she asked me what I wanted from her session.  I was hoping to write in the evening, so I asked for balance.  I closed my eyes.  I could not see her hands, but I felt them splayed like a hinge with my sternum the pin.  I have a fondness for hinges.   

Brass hinges of any sort.  Rusted iron ones and butterfly hinges.  As I laid on the table, I remembered the butterfly recuperating in my garden from a run-in with my car.  Instead of leaving it on the hot road, I brought it home and tucked it among the flowers in a garden barrel.  I hoped it would recover, but I noticed that one side of its hinged body drooped slightly.  I was not optimistic.  The swallowtail spread its wings in the sun and unsuccessfully attempted flight.  When a hard rain came in the night, I tucked it under a canopy of large marigolds.  The pale swallowtail folded its wings in an awkward off-centered way and now has remained there, quiet and still.  Unhinged and off balance.  

The reiki therapist's hands moved silently.  Everyone brought something to contribute to the afternoon event.  Her gift was the healing of hands.  I had puzzled over what to bring.  Rhubarb cake or fudge pie?  And then I remembered much of my writing is about healing, so instead of desserts, I brought a few pieces to read.  I have been slow to think of my work as a writer as having validity. Only the week before, I had finally ordered myself business cards.  One of my writing classmates said, "What kind of business are you going to advertise?" "Writer," I responded with a wry laugh.

I designed the cards double-sided, as if hinged on the paper’s sharp edge.  If the two sides of the business card were splayed open, one hinged side would hold the painted image of me - my gray hair blowing in the wind - and the other side would proclaim I was a Writer.  The English language allows one to paint or to write, but culture is parsimonious in granting the award of nouns – artist or writer.  I have been patient.  Occasionally, my writing critics would refer to me as a writer, but it was only after completing my first manuscript was the noun of writer comfortable to me.  A metal pin holds the two sides of a hinge together.  The completion of my manuscript was my pin to hinge me to the name, Writer.

On my shed window each hinge has two kinds of screws – flat head and Phillips.  This proved to me the window had changed locations.  My moving to the cabin has brought the writing side of me to a new place.  When I asked for balance from the soft-spoken reiki therapist, I asked for my body to be ready to slip into a chair by the fire with the river breeze blowing through my hair and the smell of pines and wood smoke drifting across my nostrils.  Quid pro quo.  If I feel balanced, I write.  If I write, I feel balanced.

My reading went well.  I came away from the gathering refreshed.  A thank you to the women who brought their generous gifts of feminine spirit.  Arriving home, I checked on the butterfly and took a last photo of a hinged purple petal with raindrops poised and balanced.  

Hazards of an Open Sky - Hwy. 395

The distraction was the sky – the way its clouds blew into piles and pillars, casting swift silhouettes across the sage-covered land.  The hazard was the temptation to match individual thunder clouds to shadows on the ground or blue holes to patches of skimming sunlit across the sand.  But to do so, meant taking my eyes off the road.  Fortunately, Highway 395 northward across Oregon to Burns has a paucity of traffic.  I travel it every few years and am inevitably drawn to its beauty and to its hazards.

One hazard is the temptation to drive too fast.  The sky is just so big. The horizons are too far off to seemingly arrive anywhere on time.  So, speeding seems sensible.  An incident twenty-some years ago, made me more cautions in this matter.  I was driving fast south on Hwy. 395 and I hit a sage thrasher.  When I hit it, it was just a bump on the windshield.  When I stopped and then returned to find it, it was a gray and still bird.  When I located it on a page in my reference book, it became the sage thrasher.  With it lying dead and warm in the palm of my hand, it felt contradictory to put it in on my life-list of birds. Shortly thereafter, I think, was when I stopped keeping the list and driving so fast.

On my recent trip, I didn’t hit any birds, but I did find a small flock of yellow-headed blackbirds on the fields near Burns.  They were the birds that inspired me to become a birder.  My first sighting of them was in a barnyard off Hwy. 395 back in the 1980's.

I liked the way the bird's coloring almost matched a near-by ranch truck, which I stopped to photograph.

I always wanted to be a rancher.  Maybe it was because my dad read westerns and I grew up when cowboys were heroes on every T.V. channel.  Lake and Harney Counties are ranching country.  I passed cowboys on horses, impressive barns and huge bales of hay.

It was my birder's eye that spotted the Canadian goose on the above stack of hay - nesting or resting.  Look again at the photo and you can see the curve of the bird's back.  Burns is on a migration fly-through zone.

The Malheur National Wildlife Reserve south of Burns was the scene last year of a rancher's protest.  And here I am, wanting to be a rancher.  Obviously, not every rancher has a penchant for taking up arms and stirring up trouble, but I have wondered if the big sky is part of the problem of becoming obsessed with boundaries and fence lines, of what is mine and what is yours.  Of who you are and who I am.

    
My theory could be faulty, but it is just conjecture.  When I consider living under a wide sky like the one along Highway 395, I wonder if I would acquire a habit of caution, of wariness for what might appear over the distant horizon.  My livestock fences would be to keep my cattle in, but their barbs would keep others out.  A protection and a defense.  I might shift from being open and welcoming to being wary of outsiders and unknowns. I'd watch that open sky and begin worrying about the weather.  I could see it coming from a long way off and begin fussing about its consequences.  Tourists driving too fast, coming up on my tractor moving slowly on the highway would worry me.  I'd begin looking at the drivers as hazards, wary of their opinions and their abilities to harm me.  I'd draw my gates closed and put up warning signs.  The sky, I would say, is the hazard.