Thursday, October 14, 2004

It's sort of late. Well, it's 10:15. I usually don't hang out with the software in the evening. I just wanted to say that after my small morning lament, after listing all the things I missed--I just wanted to say that I heard a great horned owl out there tonight, early. And then just a little while ago I went out with the dogs, and the call was louder. And now I'm remembering how they court in the fall. Some dead cottonwoods stand along the creek on adjoining land. Maybe that's where she's living. I'll look tomorrow. Anyway, that's one crisis past; how things shift so easily into the new gear, the wheel turns away from the darkened side street onto a wide, serene, well-lit highway. And how it is that I have to say things "out loud"--post them here, in the absence of listeners--before I can come to terms with them, these things that aren't right. And then they come right. And then I let them come right. 10:36:47 PM    comment []

The coals from last night, a bit of odd lumber, now the slice of juniper that leaps into flame. The edge is off the chill, finally, as much from the sun through the double-paned windows as from combustion in the stove. A hill shields us on the east, so high and round that it's 8:30 before we glimpse the sun here these fall mornings. I fear that by December we'll see no sun at all as it shifts around behind hills to the east and south. This property is generous enough--22 acres--so why, I wonder, did the owner build in the hollow? Proximity to the creek, maybe. Easier to drill a shallow well--more like a cistern, really, a holding tank for filtered creekwater. I'm no Hill-Builder, but I think if this place were mine I'd erect the most luxurious, well-insulated, wood-floored yurt I could buy atop the rise behind us to the southwest, exposure be damned, and use the leftover construction money to drill deep from there for good groundwater. From there you can see the entire length of the Warner Range to the east, and the sweep of the Modoc plateau west, and past the Cascades all the way to Mount Shasta. Yesterday afternoon I drove with my brother to Lakeview, Oregon, 35 miles to the north. It was an impulse, something to do after fetching a disappointing cache of mail (unwanted catalogs, political pleas). It's a magnificent drive up 395 around the shores of Goose Lake. The view from the road down across the lake bed is like an image sent back from some exploratory craft on Venus. There's the glistening gray-blue plate of the water, and then a deep bright-white rim of alkali behind its receding, and out from that curves and waves of yellow and orange-yellow vegetation, all of it flat and meandering, unearthly. Naturally, I had no camera with me. BUT I did pass a tree at the roadside so burdened with ripening apples it seemed on the brink of collapse. Today when I go for the mail I'll take along gunny sacks and attempt to relieve it of a few. The road is so rarely traveled, I'm sure the apples are fine. We may have apple butter after all! *** There's not a lot in Lakeview, but the town tries hard. I spent an hour and a half in its used bookstore and came away with some cheap treasures. Just being able to walk around on city sidewalks was worth spending the fuel. My sanity has a value. But it strikes me how stir-crazy I get since I've moved. I can't seem to invest any energy in or derive satisfaction from my beautiful situation here. I so miss my woods with all their mystery, my orchard with its sapsuckers and woodpeckers and eight kinds of fruit, my barns with their little brown bats and barn owls, my acres of sagebrush. I miss the grosbeaks and brown-headed cowbirds at the feeders, the house wrens in the crannies, the great horned owls--the screech owls, even--and the cries of red-tailed hawks returning to their nests in the balsam poplars (how I miss my balsam poplars!) year after year. The heroic vistas. The promise of porcupines. The apple-scavenging deer. I miss my mountain lion. And I stumble on a clue--the word "my." I'm so grateful for this haven, and I do appreciate, in a distant, objective way, the cattails and the herons and all the little fishes, evidence of beavers. And a couple of weeks ago I met my first long-eared owl when I was walking on the hill one afternoon; it sat sleeping under a juniper, perched on a fallen fencepost. But it's silent here. Still. Enclosed. Hard stony hills covered in dead wheat grass and juniper after juniper. Maybe this place will be magnificent in the spring. Maybe I'm just having trouble adjusting. Maybe I'll make a million bucks and buy back my farm one day. 1:08:56 PM    comment []