It's Not About Me

Ichabod

October – The month of hot sun, cool air and shorter days. It’s also the month that middle-school lit teachers bring out “The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow”.  I was a wimpy kid. I never liked horror stories (well maybe Poe), but the supposedly scary “Sleepy Hollow” just never gave me a fright. Maybe it was because Ichabod Crane was such a preposterous character. Maybe it was because he was wimpier than I was and made me feel brave, or maybe the headless horseman was just not creepy enough. 

Over the years the story became a distant memory, but the name Ichabod remained intriguing. It’s a ridiculous name, an icky name, one with sharp edges, like the pointy elbows of Irving’s scrawny school master.  These days it's common to find kids with uncommon names – Aloysius, Esau, even Jedidiah, but I’ve yet to find an Ichabod.

In the Old Testament Ichabod was the son Phineas, the son of Eli. The day he was born the Ark of the Covenant was captured by the Philistines, his father was slain in battle and his grandpa fell off a stool, breaking his neck. The shock of it all sent his mother into early labor and before she died she named him Ichabod, meaning, “the glory has departed”.  It was a bad day – a bad day for Israel, a bad day for the Eli  family and a rough start for the baby.  His name only pops up once more in the Bible and then it concerns his brother Ahitub and not Ichabod.

What on earth triggered this meditation on Ichabod?  The summer of 2009 in Coloroado was  hands-down the most glorious summer in my memory. Every day seemed to be filled with sparkling, azure skies, billowing thunderheads and then hours of crackling lightning for our evening diversion. It was never too hot and never too dry. Daily rains brought forth a feast of wild flowers and kept the water bill low. Then two weeks ago ice and snow hit the Front Range with the leaves still green on the branches.  The usual blaze of color from carpet-bagging maples and native aspen never arrived. Frosted leaves wilted, went straight to brown and now wait for a gale to finish their embarrassing finale.

The glory has departed.

Risking Life & Limb At Dunstrom

Video, courtesty of Matt Barley of the wall raising at Dunstrom. Kind of like a Steeler game - not pretty but they get it done in the end.

 

 

 

Community

"The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community. But the fall of community reveals how precious and how necessary community is. For when community falls, so must fall all the things that only community life can engender and protect: the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature and the lives of wild creatures. All of these things have been damaged by the rule of industrialism." - Wendell Berry from "Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community"

There are lots of beautiful places in the United States, but most I've visited lack a sense of authenticity and community. There are places in the United States I've been that enjoy that camaraderie and sense of place, but are not lovely. Northeast Oregon is the spot I've found where the kiss of beauty and community is the sweetest. The beauty is not perfect. Many there have no sense of the gift they've received, building and developing without respect for the land. The community is not perfect either. Sin is more than present. Pride and thoughtlessness destroys relationships there just as anywhere else, yet the spirit of industrialism does not rule. The seasons matter. The cycles of night and day impact there more than on the unsleeping city. It is small enough that you will regularly run into people you are out of fellowship with. That alone is reason enough to be kind to your neighbor.

This valley is not nicknamed "The Shire" simply because the ale comes in pints.

It is not time for me to live back there again. Maybe it never will be. God knows. Never the less, it makes me smile to see progress on our little piece of Wallowa County.

 

The Last Day Of Summer

The office manager where I work started a contest a couple weeks ago, guessing which date would bring the first snowfall. I picked a safe and traditional date - Halloween. It's always snowing, windy and miserably cold that evening. Good idea, bad choice. The correct answer was the last day of summer, today. Throughout the day he snow level kept wandering up and down the mountain with us sometimes above, sometimes below. The accumulation seemed to settle in at about 8000 feet. There's more expected tomorrow!

Below, my son trying to catch some flakes on his tongue and white mountains appearing as the clouds part, just before dark.

 

Dunstrom

While traveling through Northern Ireland last fall we saw the castles of Dunluce and Dundrum. It seems that the word Dùn in Gaelic means "fort". (That's an "o", not an "a".)  The word has morphed into "Down", such as the town Downpatrick, which comes from the Gaelic "Dún Pádraig".  Anyway as we were driving up to Spokane last week the discussion was what to call the new place in Oregon. After throwing around a number of Scandinavian and Celtic names, Lauren came up with "Dunstrom". I'm not sure that's what it will be called, but so it will be for now.

     

        View from Dundrum and the current state of Dunstrom.

It's Getting Better All The Time

Early this week we drove thru central Montana and Wyoming. It was 25 years since I first made my way thru this western landscape. I remembered a burnt wasteland. but instead was treated to snow lingering on the peaks of the Bearclaw and Bighorn ranges. Below we saw luscious, green river bottoms while following the Yellowstone drainage and later on the Tongue, Clear and Crazy Woman Rivers. The cottonwoods, not surprisingly, trace the same serpentine path the water does, twisting around the feet of sharp mesas as well as treeless, yellow bluffs. It must have been a wet summer for even the grass looks more like late June then early September.

I also remembered poverty and lots of it, but the money must have trickled down thru the fingers of the ‘90’s.  Mostly gone were the hopeless Indian shacks at Crow Agency. No doubt the economic engine that improved those people’s lives is the Little Bighorn Casino that sits at the bottom of the hill where General George Armstrong Custer and company were slaughtered, not so awfully long ago. I'll bet he would have preferred a pony ride down to the casino for a cold brew and some AC to the adrenaline of that day. I thought it looked tacky.

We didn’t make it to Gillette, Wyoming on this trip. I wonder if much has changed in that town since the oil shale boom of the ‘70’s? My buddies and me hit that town one Saturday evening in 1975 driving my hippie bus on our way to Banff. We were tailgating in the back corner of a truck stop parking lot, munching food from our packs, when a battered, mud-covered, muscle car complete with smashed windshield roared across the lot, spun a 180 and screeched to a halt. To our utter amazement out of the driver’s side jumps a woman carrying a small child under her arm like a football. We knew we were out of our league and it was time to head west and get outta the Wild West. 

That same evening we made it to Billings. A few four-story buildings made it look a bit more upscale than Gillette, but not much. There was the typically, wide, main drag running east-west for about two miles. The storefronts were closed, but drunken, cowboy-hatted, twenty-somethings roared up and down that strip in their pickups screaming out their windows at stoplights. The alcohol and gun racks made us feel as equally unwelcome, so we pointed the VW north towards Great Falls and Sweetgrass

I look back to those days when I saw this western landscape fresh. It seemed so much more raw and real then today when even Sheridan and Casper look like Memphis or Cincinnati with their homogenized strips of Subway and Booger King heading to Taco Hell in a hand basket of fast food.  I’m sure though that what I saw as fresh someone from the 1930’s would have seen as encroaching civilization. I’m also sure that some of those despised it and others welcomed it with open arms.

    

     Despite clear directions, we did not go to Gillette.

Home Safe - Again!

Back in December I wrote that as it came time for us to leave Northern Ireland that we were wished "Home Safe!", and that my girl had done just that. Well she is back home again after another three months among the saints of Saintfield, NI. Thanks to all who were kind to her! 

Having her home brings to mind this Irish blessing:

"Bricks and mortar make a house, but the laughter of children makes a home."

Creation Struts Her Stuff

I may have written this before, but easily the best thing about living in Colorado are the skies (not the skis). 

Monday night it was the skies and more. Coming home from work a black, Mordor–like cloud began to extend its hand over Colorado Springs. There wasn’t much else happening in the heavens so I figured it would pass without much excitement, but as its midsection crested the mountains, two very close bolts of lightning got our attention.  Little bits of hail began falling a short time later, but you couldn’t really see the hail as it dropped. It was most visible as it bounced back up from the lawn, appearing as kernels of popcorn hopping out of hot oil. After about three minutes that too passed, but it wasn’t long before loud thunks began to resound off the roof as ice the size of golf balls smacked our house. Luckily the damaging hail was quickly gone, but as my son raced outside to collect the large hail he yelled, “Hey Dad, you’ve gotta hear this!”.  I wasn’t eager to interrupt the pork tenderloin in front of me, but I joined him only to hear a drumming, rumbling din as if dozens of trains were passing through the valley below.

The storm must have picked up strength as it came down off the heights, for not a mile away houses, cars, trees and whatever was not under shelter was getting just absolutely hammered by the golf balls. (I was told that yet another Sky Sox baseball game was rain cancelled and that water was coming down the stands in rivers.) Eventually the near-setting sun came out and lit up this same evil vapor in a rich, butterscotch shade. The amazing anvil of the super cell reached probably 40 miles over the plains with huge udders of icy, mammatus  billowing from its rear flank.

By this time the camera was out and I decided to enjoy the display by heading to a nearby park. Creation was not done dazzling me yet. As I worked my way into the park I noticed huge antlers silhouetted at the top of a hill in the darkening sky. I didn’t have time to creep up on the beasts. The light was failing fast, so I made straight for them. I found seven bucks grazing together, maybe the largest collection of deer antlers I’ve ever seen on the hoof. Three looked like elk, all in velvet.

Now it was dark, the deer trotted over the hill at the approach of me and my pooch, but the evening was not done. The cloud, now well over the eastern plains looked like an engine of lightning with constant internal flashes illuminating it in yellow sheets, ginned up even more with occasional white, spidery bolts.

All in all I enjoyed three hours of Creation strutting her best stuff. I could have topped it off by getting up and seeing the Perseides meteor shower last night, but at 4am, just like years past, I watched the inside of my eyelids instead.

Flag Lap At Chief Joseph Days Rodeo

Jon Jumps