Frogmarch

Although the average Northwesterner might be inclined to say that the land is visited with various Biblical plagues (tent caterpillars, espresso-bar chains, out-of-town relatives), a close reading of Exodus reveals that in fact there is only one discernable parallell between life in this region and the second chapter of The Good Book, which is the annual migration this time of year of tens of thousands of nickel-sized Pacific Tree Frogs from the ponds in which they hatched to the surrounding forests.

According to the Bible, the frogs of the Second Plague "will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs." Lacking both a palace and a kneading trough I cannot personally speak to abundance of frogs in those specific locations, but as a government official and a person (I contend it is possible to be both) I can attest to having froglets hop into my hair while I am picking dahlias on a rainy afternoon. Likewise, the tiny creatures are regularly seen bounding erratically across the living room, deftly defying our efforts to capture them by zigzagging with an unpredictability that would be the envy of an NFL running back. My oven has so far remained frog-free, but during most of the month of September we constantly find the froglets sticking to the siding, the greenhouse and the car, and tucked into the petals of nearly every flower in the garden. On wet nights we see hundreds of them hopping across the road, looking like exceptionally large raindrops.

Eventually the frogs settle into the salal and sword fern forest understory, where they spend the winter fattening up on gnats, emitting an occasional chirp and generally lounging around waiting for spring.

Deschutes Deliverance, Part III

 

So it all came down to this:  We were going to be eaten by coyotes, frozen, poisoned by spiders or killed by porta-potty stench.  We were alone in the wilderness.  I could hear my ancestors whispering to each other in pioneer heaven:  “She’s from your side of the family! My roommate sat on a rock, her sobs masked by the rushing water of the river invisible in the darkness.

Then, out of nowhere, a sudden wave of the kind of righteous anger that only a pampered suburban princess in danger of not getting her way can experience passed over me.  Channeling my inner Scarlett O’Hara for the equivalent of pulling down the drapes in Tara to make a dress, I rummaged the bottom of my filthy daypack for my one remaining soggy Kleenex.  Wiping off my face and shoes I marched back to the fishing camp.  Marlboro Man was now sitting in his battered pickup, listening to the radio.  Something about the determined look on my face must have impressed him, for he rolled down the window as trudged up.  “You have to have to help us!” I demanded.  MM looked at this new, enhanced version of me with a different expression.  “So your group really hasn’t come back for you?”  “No,” I said.  “And they’re not going to.  If you don’t take us to Maupin and something happens to us, it will be your fault” I declared like the lawyer I didn’t then know I was destined to become. “All right,” said Marlboro Man, grinding out his cigarette in the pickup’s ashtray,  “Get in.”  Desperately concealing my tears of joy at my new-found powers of persuasion, I shouted for my roommate to join us. 

The ride to Maupin was surprisingly uneventful.  Clouds of ghostly late-summer moths danced in the bouncing cone of the pickup’s headlights while ground squirrels darted across the washboarded road.  A conversationless twenty minutes after leaving Shearer’s Falls, our savior dumped us unceremoniously in the financial district of a town that can best be described as a badly-imagined Hollywood Wild West movie set. 

Across the street was a bar dim with burned-out lightbulbs and loud with jukebox country music.  We peeked timidly in through the ripped screen door to see a tableau vivant of buxom, leathery-skinned women of a certain age, rawboned older men in threadbare chambray shirts with bolo ties, and a scowling bartender.  Half expecting to jukebox soundtrack to switch to Ennio Morricone’s whistling theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” I shuffled up to the bar and asked if I could use the telephone.  In an eerie repeat of the afternoon’s experiences with Marlboro Man, he said “No, and get out of here.  You’re underage.”  I was sure what he really meant was “You’re a snot-nosed suburbanite college kid like all the others who parade through here every summer with your fancy gear and your shirts with the little man riding a horse embroidered on them.  Well, little missy, we ride real horses around here and don’t need no fancy-pants sissies from Seattle and Portland telling us what to do.  Now scram while I go shoot some spotted owls.” Anyway, since I actually was underage and was sick of arguing with people at this point, we left.

It was now getting cold.  Across the street stood a phone booth, its halo of hospital-bluish-white fluorescent light an oddly uninviting beacon in the surrounding blackness.  Between us my roommate and I determined that we had 35 cents, enough for one phone call, like condemned prisoners.  We squoze into the booth, shutting the door behind us against the growing cold, nervously pushed  the coins into the slot and dialed.  The operator answered, sounding nearly as cranky as the bartender.  I explained our situation.  “That’s not a real emergency,” [historical note – this was before 911 existed]she responded.  “Call back later if no one comes to pick you up.  In despair, begged for a number for the Sheriff’s Department.  The operator relented and started reading it to me, when I suddenly realized I didn’t have a pen.  Just as all hope appeared to be lost, my roommate pulled a half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich out of her bag.  Leaning up against the phone booth’s glass door, she wrote the number in peanut butter on the back of the lunch bag.

As fate would have it, at that moment I spotted a Wasco County Sheriff’s car trolling slowly by. I dropped the phone and burst out of the phone booth, skittered briefly on the loose gravel and took off in a burst of speed that would have made Florence Griffith-Joyner proud.  Seeing an apparently insane person running behind their squad car, and lacking Marlboro Man’s freedom to ignore us, the officers stopped.  As I ran up, the officer on the passenger side actually rolled up the window and pulled his shotgun forward, not pointing it at me but making sure I could see it.  ‘This is absurd,’ I thought.  ‘They’re afraid of a 100-pound unarmed coed?'  I pounded on the window, and Officer Friendly lowered it a crack.  “What do you want?”  By this time my roommate, who had started crying again because she hadn’t seen the squad car at first and thought I had finally snapped and gone insane, came up to join us.  I explained our situation.  As usual, my sublime persuasive powers yielded utter disbelief, until I got to the part about the plan to take the injured girl to the hospital in The Dalles.  The officer radioed the hospital, and lo, a miracle occurred.  The hospital confirmed that yes, a group of rafters had been there late that afternoon, and had discovered that two of their members were missing.  The officers softened immediately.  “Come with us,” they said.  “It’s a long way to The Dalles [about 50 miles]” so we’ll get you something to eat and drink and then we’ll take you there.  They called the owner of a nearby coffee shop, who came down in her bathrobe from her apartment above the store, unlocked the door and seated us in a dark booth and gave us powdered donuts and glasses of orange soda.  We were regaling the officers with our adventures when I spotted headlights coming down the gravel road.  It was one of our vans.  For the second time in the evening I sprang up and sprinted out into the street, waving frantically.  The van screeched to a halt, and our friends came tumbling out.  “We thought you were in the other van!”  “We didn’t realize you were gone until we got to The Dalles!” “We drove all the way back shining a flashlight on the side of the road looking for you!”  Thanking the officers, we clambered into the van and headed east back toward the college, into the faintest suggestion of dawn.

Deschutes Deliverance, Part II

My roommate grew up on a farm in rural Washington with six older brothers whose hobbies ranged from plumbing to bartending to backyard Camaro repair.  As she was a shy, scholarly type, her parents and brothers had taken great pains to shield her from the more unsavory bits of farm life, which meant she was well qualified for college but as prepared for abandonment in the wilderness as I was, which is to say not at all.

Our first reaction to the vanished vans was based on careful consideration of the situation and coolheaded assessment of our options:  We screamed.  After getting that step out of the way we cycled through several Kubler-Rossian stages of panic:

• Running up and down the gravel road to see if our colleagues were playing a prank on us by parking just around the bend (they weren’t).
• Walking cautiously back toward the outskirts of the fishing camp to see if Marlborough Man or any of his friends were around (they weren’t).
• Running back up the road to check again to see if our colleagues were playing a prank on us (they still weren’t).

Finally, the panic exhausted out of my system like a purple-faced toddler inhaling noisily when it’s evident that mother is not going to cough up a cookie.  It was time to take stock and actually come up with a plan. What would my study pioneer ancestors have done?  After all, they had mined gold in Colorado in the 1880s and in Alaska in the 1900s, opened a dry-goods store Vancouver, BC when it was nothing but a tiny railhead in the wilderness, and helped build the giant Fort Peck Dam in eastern Montana during the Great Depression.  I suddenly felt a weight of responsibility not to be an embarrassment.  However, as we rummaged through our meager belongings, it occurred to me that my ancestors had probably never found themselves in the bottom of a sagebrush canyon wearing t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, equipped only with half a peanut butter sandwich, an empty bottle of bug spray and a lipstick.  I suppose if they had, they would have figured out a way to fashion these items into a signal flare or a some such thing, but I was evidently sitting in the back of the class leafing through Vogue when those lessons were being taught.

At any rate, we decided to buck up and get ourselves out of this situation. Our first idea was to try to spend the night where we were.  I dimly recalled from third-grade Bluebirds camp that one was not supposed to wander about when lost in the wilderness as searchers would look first where one was last seen.  But the light was disappearing fast, and we had nothing resembling a shelter available to us.  My roommate suggested spending the night in the porta-potties, but then nixed the idea when a careful assessment of the floor plan revealed that the only way to do so was to cuddle up in a fetal position around the toilet itself, an arrangement unknown even in most Times Square hotels.  I then hit upon the bright idea of spending the night in a large culvert across the road from the potties, but the ominous dribble of foul-smelling water in the bottom of the giant drainage pipe did not bode well.  And there might be spiders.

Our second idea was to hike out on the gravel road to the nearest town, about eight miles away.  This plan went like clockwork for about a quarter of a mile, until we realized we were alone in a vast, empty landscape of lava boulders, tumbleweeds and dust, lit only by an immense black sky thick with stars.  Were those footsteps behind us?  Shhh!!!  What was that rustling by the side of the road?  Trying not to run so fast that we would trip and fall on the washboard road, we beat a hasty retreat back to our starting point.

When we arrived, out of breath, we saw twinkling propane lantern lights at the fishing camp.  Marlboro Man and a few others were drinking beer, filleting the day’s steelhead catch, and poking up the coals in the campfire rings. 

Emboldened by the adrenaline-fueled rush back to the campsite, I grabbed my roommate by the elbow and frog-marched her with me toward the nearest fisherman.  “Look pathetic” I advised her unnecessarily.  Smoothing the grit out of my hair as best I could, I shambled up to Marlboro Man, who barely looked up from cooler in which he was arranging a layer of bloody filets.  “Umm, we were left behind on a rafting trip today…” I croaked.  Marlboro Man’s cigarette shifted slightly in his mouth.  “Umm, could you possibly give us a ride to Maupin so we could call someone?”  Marlboro Man studied us carefully through a nimbus of blue-ish smoke, taking careful note of our bedraggled clothes, meager possessions and the goosebumps that were starting to appear on our bare arms and legs as the evening deepened into night.

“No,” he said, and turned back to the filets.

To be continued…

Deschutes Deliverance, Part I

My sorority sister and I stared at the muddy trickle dribbling out of the culvert in which we planned to spend the night. Did the risk of a flash flood outweigh the danger of being eaten by coyotes?  We’re going to die alone in the desert, I thought, and rush isn’t even over.

It was my second week of freshman year at a bucolic little liberal arts college in the New England tradition, located somewhat incongruously in the wheatfields of eastern Washington.  The ivy on the old brick dorms had not yet turned fiery red, and my biggest problem was that it was still too hot for me to wear as many layers of different colored Izod shirts as fashion dictated. There was a three-way tie for second-biggest problem: The crushing disappointment of having to pledge my second-choice sorority, disgust at dorm food (“kibbles and bits”), and desire to clobber the boy across the hall who put his stereo speakers in the window and left The Knack’s “My Sharona” on auto-repeat at full volume for hours on end.

So when I found a mimeographed flyer for the annual school-sponsored float trip down the Deschutes River in the Central Oregon desert a few hours away from campus I jumped at the opportunity.

Dawn on Saturday morning found me, my sorority roommate, about 20 other students packed into two Econoline vans, each towing a trailer full of deflated 8-man rafts, foot pumps and paddles. As we barreled down the interstate toward the turnoff for the river, comparing notes on our suburban upbringings (someone had once suggested the school’s mascot be changed to “The Wasps”) re-enacting our favorite Monty Python sketches and munching cereal and muffins packed for us by the dorm kitchens, the sun rising behind us turned the scrublands gold and distant Mount Hood pink and purple.

We wound down a long decline into the river canyon, trailing cometary clouds of dust.  We passed through the rough cow town of Maupin, feeling out of place as we drove by the battered pickup trucks and decaying mobile homes with dogs on long chains in the parched front yards.

We eventually reached the pull-out point, a wide spot in the road where the river flattened out a bit before plunging over the unraftable Shears Falls.  At the other end of the parking area was a dusty encampment of sport fishemen living in grimy campers that appeared not to have known the kiss of Lysol since the Nixon Administration.  As we prepared to leave one van behind so we could retrieve the other from the put-in point a dozen miles upstream, I could hear an early-season football game on a transistor radio.  One fisherman sat outside his truck in an ancient aluminum folding chair whose plastic webbing was worn through to dangling shreds.  Eyeing the gaggle of laughing, carefree college kids, he pulled a Marlborough from the half-empty pack, lit it in a cupped hand and turned his back on us to resume baiting his hook from a jar of bright yellow salmon eggs.

Momentarily taken aback from the show of disdain, I had a chilly realization that I was an awfully long way away from world in which I had woken up that morning.  But the sharp, flinty smell of sage quickly overwhelmed the cigarette smoke, and we sped up the road in a hail of gravel to launch the rafts.

The trip down the river was a washing machine of cold water, hot canyon air and bright blue sky.  The Deschutes is rough, but we were hardly descending the upper reaches of the Ganges or the Urubamba.  The worst peril we faced was losing a hat or a bottle of sunscreen.  On slow stretches we jumped into the icy water and swam alongside the rafts, clambering back in over the slippery hot rubber when new rapids approached.

One one stretch of whitewater a girl, much taller and blonder than I, who had pledged a higher-end sorority, slipped partly out of a raft and banged her knee hard on a rock.  The raft captain, a grizzled veteran of 19 on his second trip, declared that she should be taken to a hospital in the small town of The Dalles near the mouth of the river when the trip was over.

The afternoon sun was sliding toward the canyon walls by the time we returned the pull-out point.  Clouds of nighthawks had already  emerged from their roosts in the cottonwood trees and were diving and swooping on their sharp-pointed wings after the last insects of the season. The fishermen were nowhere to be seen. 

While the boys deflated the rafts on the beach, my roommate and I repaired to the bank of blue-walled portable toilet to change into dry clothes.  When we stepped out, both vans were gone.

To be continued…

Knowing Our Place

Nature, like our cats, abhors a vacuum. A large percentage of our time here at the Drainfield of Dreams is devoted to efforts to put nature where we think it should be, and nature basically ignoring us.

Our neighbors have called me at work to report deer standing on our front porch looking in through the glass door, no doubt preparing to ring the doorbell with their little hooves to ask what we might have available in the vegetable crisper. Other “peeping toms” include hummingbirds who suspend themselves in midair to stare reproachfully through the kitchen window when their feeder is empty. By contrast, the raccoons rarely spare us a glance when they lumber by the patio, being far more interested in looking for snails in the pond than in watching “So You Think You Can Dance” with us.

In an effort to keep the nocturnal masked bandits at bay, S.O. just bought the Rac Zapper 3000. Tired of waking up every morning to the sight of expensive waterlillies dessicating on the deck, S.O. is hoping instead to be lulled to sleep by “zzzzzt” sounds of the electric fence, followed by the pitter-patter of little feet scurrying back under the gap in the deck from whence they came.

The invasion of our space is not confined to mammals. Colonies of wasps live in every nook and cranny of the garden. The worker in the photo is fanning the entrance to a nest built inside a solar light, to keep the inside cool. They are deeply uninterested in us and seem to enjoy eating aphids, so we’ve left them alone for the most part. But I try not to think about how many there are when I’m out on the patio watching the paper wasps with long dangling legs hovering around the eaves. There’s also real drama on the balcony outside our bedroom, as the hollow-tube railing has been filled over the years by innumerable small spiders who hide inside during the day and emerge in the evening to check their webs. Occasionally one will venture too far and be seized by one of the iridescent blue mud-dauber wasps that patrol constantly. I once saw a mud-dauber grab a hapless spider, accidently drop it, and zoom down to catch it before it hit the ground, like a comic-book superhero (though no doubt not heroic from the poor spider’s point of view).

Some creatures actually do make it inside the house. We used to let the cats out through a kitty door until we discovered that the territory they were willing to defend was approximately the living room. Taking the Neville Chamberlain approach to diplomatic relations with the neighbor’s cats, ours achieved peace in their time by cowering under the coffee table while others made short work of their dish of cat crunchies.

Five-inch dull blue dragonflies whizz in through open windows, their huge wings making a distinctive dry, papery rattle. Hand-sized crane flies find their way in on summer evenings and cling to the drywall, far too big for the web-spinning spiders who came in on the flowers I cut from our backyard. Every fall when the heat kicks on, enormous mouse-sized (to my eyes, anyway) hunting spiders move in and spend their evenings scurrying toward wherever I happen to be sitting. All these invaders are duly evicted, but it’s a never-ending task.

Keeping nature where we want reminds me of a simplified version of the three laws of thermodynamics I once heard:

• You can’t win.
• You can’t break even
• You can’t stop playing the game.

Bambi is Godzilla

 

The deer are starting to eye the ripening apples on the ancient lichen-covered trees in our backyard.  Sublimely indifferent to the construction of our house and so-called garden on what they have rightly regarded as their property since the retreat of the last ice sheet, they spend the summer sitting a few feet away from me top of the septic system mound, chewing their cuds with an orbital jaw motion similar to that of a major-league baseball player setting up to hawk a fat glob out into right field.  Their smug expressions seem to say, “I wouldn’t plant that dahlia there if I were you.” I’ve begun my annual exercise of  putting up coils of unsightly black netting around our trees to keep the bucks from shredding the bark with their antlers to mark their territories.  Nothing detracts from a dewy late-summer morning quite like seeing a choice and expensive sapling that one had jauntily sped home with and laboriously planted by spending an entire afternoon with a pickaxe excavating a hole in the “soil”(a concrete-like matrix of clay and potato-sized rocks resembling a fossilized 1950s jello dessert) lying in a pile of splinters on the lawn.  This misery is compounded by the lack of modern recourse, as the deer remain impervious to litigation, Facebook slander campaigns and angry letters to the editor.   So netting it is.  The only redeeming aspect of this chore is that when I emerge from crawling through the rosemary hedge I smell like a roast chicken, which in my mind is superior to Chanel No. 5.

Notes on Camping, Maritime Division

Seafair weekend was chosen by our region’s founders because it is statistically the date most likely to bring an onslaught of migratory potters, glass-bead jewlery makers, hydroplane drivers and out-of-state relatives.  Actually it’s supposed to be the driest weekend of the year, and to many of us natives that means one thing:  Camping!

But we all know that statistics can lie like a cheap rug.  Never was this fact brought to bear more forcefully than on a long-ago Seafair Weekend when my Significant Other and I decided to take our twenty-four foot sailboat “Caution to the Winds” out for two days of glorious early-August fun.  We spent Friday night at Thriftway stocking up on all the essentials needed for the perilous expedition to Blake Island:  Sunscreen, bug spray, Tim’s potato chips, a Tillamook Cheddar Baby Loaf and select adult beverages.

Saturday dawned dismayingly cloudy, but S.O. and I were undeterred.  “It’ll burn off,” he said.  “Of course,” I replied. “It’s SeaFair Weekend. It never rains.” We pulled on our fleece jackets and tromped down the Shilshole dock, lugging a cooler filled with enough food and drink to have sustained the Lewis and Clark expedition for an entire winter, even if they had really liked Life cereal and Johnsonville Brats.

Since there was no wind, S.O. fired up the Iron Spinnaker. Twenty-five pulls on the starter cord later, the outboard erupted into a mighty roar reminiscent of the sound of a fork caught in a garbage disposal, and we powered out of the marina in a cloud of blue smoke at a breathtaking four knots. For those of you unfamiliar with arcane sailors’ terminology, that speed is, in miles per hour, “really slow.”  “It’s OK,” I shouted to S.O , anxiously eyeing the lowering gloom.  “It’s Seafair Weekend. It never rains.”  Moments later the heavens opened up and unleashed a frigid deluge, reducing the visibility to approximately zero just as we reached the shipping lanes.

At this point, however we were past the point of no return in the voyage if not in our relationship, so we pressed on toward where we hoped Blake Island was.  I endeavored not to remember how I used to tell my small-boat sailing students that it takes a freighter approximately a mile to stop, that is if we were even spotted, as our boat had been designed for racing and has a low profile and was coated with what appeared to me to be radar-absorbing paint.

Eventually the island hove into view and we dropped anchor on the far side.  The rain intensified. S.O. tied a blue cover over the boom to shelter the cockpit, this giving lie to the notion that “blue-tarp camping” is limited to landlubbers. 

We were now effectively confined in the recreational equivalent of a prison hulk.  We could not launch the dinghy to go ashore as long as the boom tent was up, and we could not stand up in the cabin or under the tent.  “It’s fine,” said .SO.  “It’ll clear up, it’s SeaFair Weekend.”

Since our planned barbecue on the island was now out of the question, I was faced with the daunting culinary challenge of creating a gourmet feast on the two-burner alcohol stove in the cabin, using only the materials nature (Thriftway) had provided:  Top Ramen, salmon dip, Cheetos and beer.  I dutifully cranked up both burners in an effort to heat both the ramen and the cabin.  While I waited for the water to boil I wrung out our soaked socks and fleeces, raising the ambient humidity in the cabin to approximately 250 %.  Just as I was wondering whether you could contract tuberculosis from the miasma of sweat, old campfire smoke and bug spray that results fishing last week’s camping clothes out of the laundry hamper,S.O. announced that the porta-potty had sprung a leak.  Thankfully, only of chemicals and not of “the other stuff,” but the resulting stench would have driven Osama bin Laden out of hiding in deepest Tora Bora.

Eventually we settled down to eat my culinary creation, reclining in the berth on one arm like ancient Romans because there was no room to sit upright.  S.O. managed not to make too much of a face, but I noticed he was careful to breathe only through his mouth while eating and followed every bite with a swig of beer. 

The evening’s entertainment consisted of reading the backs of cereal boxes as we had not brought any books or magazines.  “Why is there guar gum in both the peanut butter and the jelly?” I asked S.O., but he had already fallen asleep.

In fact it did clear up.  At approximately 2:00 AM I woke up and crawled out through the hatch onto the bow of the boat.  The vault of the heavens above me was filled with uncountable stars, shimmering a hard bluish white in the still, clear air.  The bay around us was a mirror reflecting the stars back so perfectly that we seemed suspended in a child’s snow globe.  The only disturbance to this perfect symmetry was a faint trail in the water made by the current passing our anchor chain and disturbing the bioluminescent algae floating past it.

The next morning we piled on every piece of damp clothing we posessed and motored back to Shilshole.  The following year we got married.  But not on SeaFair Weekend.