June 26th - June 30th

June 26, 2005

I had a bit of a scare late yesterday afternoon, upon my return from a resupply mission to Grants Pass. I’d put away my groceries and was heading out to take Gus for a walk up to the pond to cool off, and I smelled smoke. I hadn’t made a fire in the stove since early morning, and it was long dead. I looked south, in the direction of the river, and the whole river valley appeared smoky. I sniffed the air again, but now I couldn’t really smell smoke. Or could I? It was hard to tell. It’s nothing, it’s haze, I told myself, and I started up the road with my bamboo walking stick and Gus, who was glad that the bumpy, dusty ride had ended and that the pond awaited him. I got about a hundred feet before I turned back to look toward the river. It sure looked like smoke. I was suddenly quite worried. What if it was a forest fire started by some careless rafter or camper down on the Rogue trail? What if the fire was even now gorging itself on the vast mass of deadwood and headed my way? I reversed course, called Gus to follow, opened my trusty Dutch Henry Homestead Manual, composed painstakingly by Bradley, and located the number for the Oregon State Police, Grants Pass. The dispatcher answered and I told her I thought I smelled smoke and then the whole river valley looked kind of smoky. Had she heard anything about a fire, and should I be worried. She said they don’t really handle fires, and put me through to someone else. Again, I explained my fear and asked if they’d heard anything. Nope. No reports of fires along that or any other particular stretch of the Rogue. “Call 911 if you smell smoke,” she said. Somewhat relieved, we resumed our trip up to the pond. Near the upper house I had a better view, and it still looked smoky. Or hazy. Up at Rattlesnake Ridge it didn’t look like that. By the time we were walking back toward the cabin, Gus sufficiently cooled off, the haze was gone. Apparently, that’s all it was. Haze. The smoke smell? I don’t know. A weird trick of the olfactory, that old factory, I guess. John Daniel writes in new book about the Muzak he heard throughout his four month winter stay here. I’ve heard music, too, but only when the solar inverter is humming. Sometimes, in that hum, I hear bits of music and talking. Maybe the smoke smell was one of these strange sensory quirks, or the ghost of Dutch Henry pulling my leg. I can imagine him over in his meadow, hip-deep in daisies, having a good laugh. Scared that Yankee, didn’t I? But fire is something to fear out here, especially now that the dry season has started. This forest hasn’t had a good fire in many years, and so the brush and dead trees have accumulated to dangerous levels. If there is a fire, and there will be one someday, it’s going to be devastating. So I’ll keep sniffing the air and watching for smoke and trying to distinguish it from haze on hot days. And that slash pile in the yard, all those apple boughs Neil and I pruned? I’ll torch that on a wet day in the fall.

Well, I got my wish regarding the snake. Today Gus and I went to the garden to water, and there just inside the gate was my narrow fellow in the grass. Gus didn’t see it and ran right over it. A good three- or four-footer, it looked very much like the snake Gus was barking at the other day. But maybe it’s a different one. Anyway, I was able to distract Gus out of the garden and into the house, where I snagged the camera. Then I headed back out alone, much to Gussie’s chagrin. I tried matching the photos to the pictures of snakes in my North American Wildlife book, and its pattern looks most like a rattlesnake, but I saw no rattle, and the head didn’t look like a pit viper’s head. Maybe someone else out there, with better references, can tell me for certain what kind of snake this is. Whatever its name, it’s a beautiful specimen:




Tonight I made my worst dinner yet, and the only disappointing meal, come to think of it, that I’ve had here. It sounded good in theory: fried oysters and cubed steak, with salad. The oysters weren’t fresh-shucked from the shell, but jarred ones I saw in the fish section at Market of Choice and figured I’d try. They looked nice enough when I rinsed them and breaded them. But frying in oil, they turned to runny mush, and they tasted a lot like runny mush fried in oil, too, with a tinge of the sea in there, like the memory of a clam eaten yesterday. The cubed steak, pounded with flour and crushed black pepper and a little salt, sautéed in butter, wasn’t terrible. But it also wasn’t a marinated steak fresh off a mesquite grill, either. And it’s cubed steak, a rough cut the butcher feeds into a machine with teeth to make it tender. Filet mignon, it’s not. I’m not even sure why I bought it. Some vague recollection of my mother having cooked such steaks for me when I was a kid. I guess I liked them then. And the salad? I was midway into frying the oysters before I thought of the salad, and then I couldn’t go out to the garden to gather some mesclun and red romaine and celery and a cuke, so it was plain old green leaf lettuce, with a few slices of yellow onion. Even Gus wouldn’t touch the oysters, so they went into the woodstove. But he did help me eat the steak. But it was a sad meal, to say the least. So, now I’m assuaging my gastric grief with a fine Cuban cigar, a Cohiba Esplendido. And later, just as I’m starting to watch Empire Falls on DVD, compliments of Jim, I’ll cool my disappointment with a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch. Life in the wilderness is hard sometimes.


I picked up some Teramycin for Dutch Hen, who doesn’t appear to be getting any worse or any better. Every time I look in on her, she’s sitting in her nest looking exactly the same. I bought a package of the antibiotic for the Wilson sisters, too, and stopped by yesterday to deliver it. Ann is such a sweet old lady, and a lover of chickens and talk. It’s hard to get away once you’re there. She wanted to pay me for the Teramycin, and I said she could pay me in eggs instead. God knows I need them now that Dutch Hen has stopped laying. So I took out my first installment of a dozen. Ann offered to take Dutch Hen and try to nurse her along with her birds. I told her I’d see if the antibiotic helped, but I may wind up taking her up on the offer. Maybe she’ll trade me for a laying bird—one of her Rhode Island Reds. Here’s poor Dutch Hen:


I finished John Daniel’s book this afternoon (I know, I’m a slow reader), and I recommend it to all—not just for Dutch Henry lore but for its well-crafted, lyrical, frank and intelligent writing. Near the end, I was almost in tears. It’s a beautiful and remarkable memoir.

Here’s a new song I wrote, one of my best yet, I think:

Ive Got You


June 28, 2005

I spent yesterday making the final tweaks to the new puzzle I mentioned in my last upload. It’s an unconventional puzzle with four boxes outside the grid, and has a nice, clean layout. I’m sending it off to Will Shortz in the hope that it’s New York Times-worthy. I no sooner finished clueing that puzzle when an idea for another came to me, and I hacked away most of the afternoon trying to lay it out. I wasn’t pleased with some of the obscure words, so I need to keep at it.

I mowed up around the pond yesterday morning, once again making a wide swath to the shortcut path through the woods. My other chore was to weed one of the garden beds. Now that summer’s in full effect, the weeds are becoming unruly. My tomato plants don’t seem to mind them, but everything will be more productive if I stay on top of them.

Wrote this new poem this morning:

The Lesser Good


Out beyond my garden fence a black bear
fells another rotten tree with a crack,
and I’m clawed from the false world of a book
to go to the glass for a look, and there,
beady-eyed and unbathed, my ursine face,
the one only mirrors know, gazes back
wearing a lonely and a hungry look.
I have been too long pawing in one place,
grubbing through paper and words—and for what?
Where these trees end, my whole insomniac
race waits with plots to fill a trillion books:
betrayal and greed, violence and lust.
There are wars to read about, and famine,
and on the radio the hits play back-
to-back for a man a woman forsook
and for the boy hiding inside that man.
But here I go again, as I knew I would,
tearing through old wood for the lesser good.


My chore this morning was to consolidate in the woodshed and clear a spot for the nice round wood pile down by the barn. I like looking at that pile, but if I don’t get it under a roof, it’s just going to rot out there. It’s well-seasoned and ready to stack in the shed. On my way with the wheelbarrow, I almost ran over a different, bigger snake of the same variety as yesterday’s. This one was easily four-feet long. Since I was in the middle of working, and since Gus was romping next to me, I didn’t go in for the camera. Again, I looked for a rattle, and didn’t see one. And according to the Brothers and John Daniel, no one’s ever seen a rattlesnake on the homestead property. John claims that the rattlesnakes made a pact with Dutch Henry long ago to keep away from the place. I made four trips with the wheelbarrow before I broke a heavy sweat and convinced myself that I need not finish this job today. More tomorrow, in the chill of early morning.

By noontime, it was sunny and getting hot, a perfect day to spend the afternoon down at our beach. This time, determined to do it up right despite the heavy load, I filled up my large North Face pack with: quilt, umbrella, fishing pole and lures, towel, shorts, camera, binoculars, crossword book, journal and pencil, and hydration system. No food, since we’d just had lunch. The pack weighed maybe thirty pounds, just enough to make my legs feel it. We headed out, passing this lizard outside the cabin door:

They seem to be fattening up as the summer gets into gear, and they’re everywhere. Hanging my wash out to dry this morning, two of them were chasing each other around my feet. And the first thing Gus does every day when he bounds out the door is run to the rotting railroad ties to jam his snout in the holes and sniff for lizards.

On our walk down I tried to capture for you one of the monstrous Douglas fir trees along the trail, but the photo doesn’t do the tree justice. You see only a tiny portion of this massive giant. I think two people would have a hard time wrapping their hands around its trunk at the base. Even with Gus in the picture for perspective, it doesn’t look as big as when you’re standing next to it looking up to its tip well over a hundred feet up:


The trailside is dotted with Elegant Brodiaea, but I’ve taken pictures of those already. Here’s what looks to me like Queen Anne’s Lace, though it might be something else. I don’t have the energy to thumb through the stupid Audubon book:


By the time we neared the creek bridge, I was dreaming about diving in at the swimming hole. It was hot and dry, and I was sweating from hauling the pack. I’d already seen rafters float by, but I didn’t care. I’d make sure none were turning the bend and I’d strip down and get in my swim trunks and I’d dive into that cool green water, Gussie splashing after me. But when I got to the bridge—

— I saw a yellow dry bag strapped to the railing. “F___!” Campers. Whatever, it’s cool. They usually camp in the flat spot in the meadow, and I’ve never seen them at our swimming hole. So we headed down the path, dodging the poison oak, and there, sitting like sad reminders that I’m not the only one enjoying this river, were two red backpacks. And then there was a boy with a net. He spotted us and made an about-face, and then a guy in his late 20s met us at our beach. I saw a big blue raft, a cooler, tent poles, nylon. “You guys stopping for lunch?” I asked, but I could see they weren’t. “No, we’re camping here for the night. This is a scout troop. Did you pass a bunch of boys on the trail?” I couldn’t tell him that I walk only about an eighth of a mile of the river trail, that the rest of my descent is quite concealed up the hill. “No, we didn’t see anybody.” The guy shrugged. “They must be right behind you.” Gus looked as irritated as me. What were these freaking Scouts doing at our beach? “Well, we don’t want to crash your party. We’ll head upstream for our swim,” I said. I knew that there was no beach as good as this one, but I found a half-way decent place where there was some sand and where the current wasn’t so strong that Gus would be swept away. I set up the umbrella, laid out the blanket, got into my swim trunks. But it wasn’t the same. Now there were boys crawling all over the rocks with butterfly nets. For a second I considered packing everything back up and heading home, but I’d carried the heavy pack all that way. I might as well try to enjoy the river for a bit. But a bit was all I could stand. We stayed maybe an hour. I took a few casts, got wet, threw sticks for Gus, chatted very briefly with one butterfly-chaser, and then we packed it in. As if their invasion of our spot wasn’t bad enough, as I was traipsing through their camp on my way back to the trail, one of the leaders caught a fish, right in the spot where I’ve fished a dozen times and caught nothing. I went to investigate, and it was a trout. Definitely not a salmon fry or a half-pounder steelhead (which Bradley says aren’t in the river yet). No, though my eyes are inexperienced, it looked like a trout. That was all I could stand, and we skedaddled. Here’s the invaders enjoying our waterfront property:


By the time we got back, Gus was riddled with burrs. I can’t tell you how tired I am of combing burrs out of his hair. I’m sure he’s just as annoyed about it, but it doesn’t seem to deter him from sticking his soft-coated wheaten face right into a thicket of them. Every time he comes back inside, I have to clean him off. If I don’t, they’ll just get more stuck and eventually cause mats (especially in his beard and fall, which is really the only long hair on him right now). Even the short-trimmed parts of him collect these little buggers, and he doesn’t relish my removing them. But what is the bane of Gussie’s existence is my savior: the fine-toothed comb—
—which I ply with great skill.


June 29, 2005

Today’s update is an audio-visual one, a film montage of our morning walk from the cabin to the pond (via the garden). I shot the clips with my digital camera. I’m embarrassed to say that I still haven’t figured out the camcorder Jim was so kind to give me. It's a big file, 50 megs, so it might take a while to open unless you're fortunate enought to have DSL. Turn up the volume on your computer.

Montage of a Walk


June 30, 2005

Well, thank the ghosts of the Rogue: no Boyscouts at our beach today! It’s another warm, sunny day, and some topless rafters just floated past. “Where’s your boat?” one of them asked. “Oh, we hiked in,” I lied. “I like your dog,” said one of the bare-chested ladies. Yesterday was a hot, still day, and even by midnight, when I went to bed, it hadn’t dropped below the mid-60s. This morning I could tell it was going to be another hot one, so here we are by the cool river, sitting beneath our umbrella and hoping that if any more rafters drift by, they’ll also be topless. :-)

I saw a fox! A gray one. Yesterday, in the evening, going out to the garden to pick greens for my salad, I heard a thrash, and there he was leaping out of the compost heap with his long, bushy tail waving goodbye. I’ve been piling vegetable scraps in a makeshift bin next to my batch composter while the current batch cooks. The fox must have smelled eggshells and old broccoli. Gussie chased him into the woods beyond the meadow, but he’ll be back. I won’t have to worry about him getting Dutch Hen. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to put her in a nursing home: Ann Wilson’s chicken shack. I think she’ll be happier there, either to recover or spend her last days.

I was just interrupted by a BLM raft and the two rangers piloting it. At first I thought they were going to ask me for my fishing license, which of course is sitting on the kitchen table back at the cabin. But they didn’t. They asked if I was hiking, and I told them where I was staying. No need to lie to BLM. They guy doing the talking, Dave, said he knew Matt and Kate, the residents from 2003, who went on the following year to caretake one of the lodges along the river. Gus was barking at their big blue raft, wondering what this behemoth was invading his beach, and so they said goodbye, and pushed off with a wave.

It was a hot hike back up to the hot cabin, and it’s still hot. When we got back, the indoor thermometer read 87.9. Yikes. After the sweat stopped flowing, I took a cool shower and had a short nap. When I got up, the temperature had dropped one degree. I had no motivation to do anything but sit out on the deck feeling the breeze, mosquitoes or no mosquitoes. But I could see Gus was getting hungry, and then I felt hungry, too. Lamb chops for the two of us.

With this heat, I’ve been pining for ice cream, which I ran out of three nights ago. I’ll have to remember to buy two pints when I go into town again. Tonight I’ll have to settle for yogurt with sliced pear.