Journal 2003

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9 January 2003, along the Columbia River near Astoria....

After midnight, I watch stars drop pinpoints of light on the surface of the river. This is a rare winter night along this stretch of water: no wind and clear. I watch running lights of ships as they slip up and down the river. On the beach, a campfire blazes orange and stretches a sliver of light across the water and into the darkness. A woman and a man stand silhouetted near the fire, gesturing their way through a story. I imagine each of these moments of light is an archetypal gaze into what has been here night after night beyond memory: the shining torches on Chinook canoes paddled up and down the water ... a sharing of ancient stories in firelight under the stars at the height of this season of winter myth telling. Dawn is a long way off. As I keep watching, more scenes come to light before sunrise reminds me which century this is.

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19 February 2003, on the road near Portland, Oregon....

In May of 1984, I first visited "She Who Watches" along the Columbia River. This was one of several visits to sacred sites at the end of a week-long journey through the High Desert with my father, Mr. Doty. We packed the Chinook pop-top camper and camped our first night at a favorite camp site just south of Lava Beds National Monument in NE California. Next morning, we headed north. Many of the native sites we explored were first visits to sacred native places that over the next 20 years would become old friends ... Big Wocus on Klamath Marsh, Picture Rock Pass with its ancient carving of a native storytelling scene, Fort Rock and Fort Rock Cave, Hole in the Ground, many others, and finally, Tsagiglalal ("She Who Watches") on the river the Chinook people call Wimahl ("Big River").

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3 March 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

The owls are back. In the silence before dawn, they call from tree to tree, sending their stories back and forth with deliberately creative hoots. They must be hearing motifs and images that have been shared for centuries ... ancient wisdoms they know well.... With each of their winter tellings, I feel I am a smidgen closer to understanding what they are saying. If I ever get to that point, I'll concentrate on the silences between the hoots. One of these winter mornings, I'll find a new way to listen, to sound as well as to silence.

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17 March 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

Today I am reading through e mails from the storytelling news group I belong to. After reading several that address whether or not an artist should use the stage to express personal or political opinions, I am reminded of Charlie Chaplin contemplating the horrors of the Great Depression and the even greater horrors of the rise of Hitler to power. Chaplin said, "I have said nothing. Shame on me." That didn't last long. His next film was The Great Dictator. Though at first Chaplin was criticized for the film (called by some a Communist, a traitor by others), as people began to understand more of what Hitler and the Nazi Party were all about, Chaplin's film was dubbed a work of genius.

Several years before Chaplin, Mark Twain had contemplated many of the same brink-of-war concerns we are thinking about today. His response was to write "The War Prayer" -- in my opinion one of the most powerful pieces of anti-war works ever written. After reading it to his friend Dan Beard, he was asked if he was planning to publish it. "No," he said. "I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead."

This dilemma of when and where to speak out as artists is an old one, and we each must find a path that is meaningful. Timing, it appears, is everything.

I spent last evening on the Plaza in my hometown of Ashland, Oregon. Three hundred of us joined for a candlelight peace vigil. In the pouring rain, candles sputtering, with solemn faces, we sang "Give Peace a Chance." I was a faint whisper in a much larger voice, and that voice was worth hearing. Amen, brothers Chaplin and Twain, we are all related and all our voices matter.

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2 April 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

In the middle of the night, snow sneaks onto this mountain ridge and covers up spring. Snow plays by her own rules and ignores everyone else's. Daffodils who thought it safe to bloom now bend under her weight. Snow teases morning commuters who by law had to remove studded snow tires from their rigs by yesterday. Snow blows in and covers the few sticks of firewood left on the winter wood pile. This far into spring, snow is a thief in the night who stirs things up with her in-and-out visit but goes home empty-handed. By mid-morning, daffodils will stand tall and yellow in spring sunshine, drivers will have made it to work, and a morning fire will have pushed away the chill. By mid-morning, spring will be back at Dragonfly Place. This brief visit from snow will melt into my memories of last winter's storms, at least until the next time she comes sneaking my way.

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3 April 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

Spring returned yesterday to Dragonfly Place -- for a moment -- and the snow came back for a curtain call. And another. And another. This is more snow than I saw here all last winter, and in April! The daffodils look seriously worried, and juncos and chickadees crowd at the feeder. This spring snow, however, lacks winter fierceness. Snow gently turns the landscape white, everything except the roads. This is handy. The road up here is steep, narrow and can be treacherous in a winter storm. If only I could teach all snowstorms to be as congenial as this one. But snow has her own mind and follows her moods, even if she doesn't know when to exit the stage.

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4 April 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

On this day 39 years ago (the first Friday of April, 1964), I made my first trek to Lava Beds National Monument in NE California. From that first childhood fascination with the magic of a native landscape brimming with stories and critters, I have returned as often as I have been able ... season after season, year after year.... I remember that first trek well. We had to dig our way to the campsite. Like this year, there had been some late snowfall. With shovels in hand we cleared away enough snow to get the rigs in. The sun came out, and for three days the high desert landscape shimmered. As a child I took the stories in, walking the trails through the backcountry to native sites, crawling through lava caves, gazing long at rock paintings and carvings and wondering what the old ones were trying to tell us. These days, I still wander that ancient landscape, and I listen for new stories. And each summer I share them in the Monument amphitheater, with old timers and new comers alike. As an artist, satisfaction lies not solely in the creation of art, but also in sharing it with others. For me, I find great joy in giving stories back to the places where stories first caught my attention.

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5 April 2003....

In a gully along Wright Creek, deep in woods lush with new green growth, I come across a trillium blooming, the first I have seen this season. The three-pointed flower shines white as a star in the center of green leaves, white as the brief spring snow falling through sunshine into the green of these woods.

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12 April 2003, near Portland....

On an early morning walk through the dripping forest, I discover constellations of trilliums. I remember lines from a poem I wrote nearly 30 years ago....

trilliums flare
in the evening
shadows

stars
on a moonless night

Now it is morning, and last night the moon shone bright. Though I find myself in different light in a different forest, each time April comes around, trilliums tie my years together.

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8 May 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

It goes against my native Oregonian sensibilities to fire up the wood stove in May of any year. But it's snowing again at Dragonfly Place, 29 degrees, and just enough of a skiff of snow on the ground to tell the story in footprints of Mister Fox's various visits through the night. Daffodils hang their heads at dawn. Morning birdsongs are far and between as juncos and chickadees crowd the feeder. Mountain snow clouds hide my usual springtime-clear view of the valley. But reality lives not in my memories of clear, warm mornings in May. It drifts out of the clouds and covers the new spring grass in the meadow. I grab a couple of sticks of madrone from the dwindling woodpile, feed the fire and watch it blaze, and look forward to a cozy morning in my mountain lair.

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2 June 2003, sauntering through the Cascade Mountains of southern Oregon....

At Crater Lake, wind-stretched clouds reflect onto the surface of the lake, sweeping the deep-blue water with streaks of gray and white. In the woods, pine pollen drifts onto a pond and slowly swirls into a yellow spiral. At Upper Klamath Lake, trout fingerlings crowd the top foot of water and turn it silver, a single cloud that ebbs and flows with each gesture and step I make along the shore. These springtime days of wind and clouds, pollen and trout, give singularity to every stretch of water I come across.

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3 June 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

Fox Girl moved into Dragonfly Place over the weekend. On her first night of burrowing into her new digs, the neighborhood fox came by on his nightly rounds and left his tidy greeting on the deck below the bird feeder. We see it this way: Mister Fox welcomed Fox Girl to our lair in the mountains, with a gesture we wish to believe was genuine. Here on the ridge we value all forms of meaningful communication!

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4 June 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

Cool evening after a hot day. Raven soars through the last peach color of sunset, catches the wind and climbs, cutting across a sliver of new moon. Bats swoop out of their home in the eaves and welcome the recent arrival of clouds of dragonflies. Stars come out. The constellation Great Bear in the Sky lumbers across the night. In the myths Bear dances counter-clockwise around the North Star to keep the seasons circling in their proper order, and tonight it doesn't take much to notice that his dancing is up to snuff. This time of year, darkness lasts just a few hours and sunrise comes early. Birdsongs bring the first light of morning, and the heat of an almost-summer day settles in and stretches on for hours.

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23 June 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

I spent all of last week on the next mountain range over from my lair at Dragonfly Place, teaching storytelling and story theatre to children at an arts camp at EarthTeach Forest Park. My students chose favorite places in the camp as settings for their original stories, and then they created a mythology for the landscape. Though their stories were new, they also felt familiar in an ancient native way. Bear and Salmon became friends when they discovered they both liked salmon berries. Squirrel and Chipmunk learned to share the abundance of nuts the forest offered. The words of children sharing stories drifted through the trees and along the creek, lurked in gullies and canyons, climbed the ridge into the Cascade Mountains. The woods were crowded with the animals of their stories. Critters slept and dreamed in the woods, then woke and followed their dreams. More "folks" visited EarthTeach last week than the landscape can ever recall, at least for quite a spell. Other artists also shared their arts. Children shaped stories out of clay, made music sing with stories, and danced and drummed and mimed their way through stories. The sounds of creation mixed into a melody that filled the woods. The oldest trees smiled to see art once again draw many breaths and live vibrantly on the land, remembering how it once was, and how it can be once again.

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23 June 2003, at Agness along the Rogue River in southern Oregon....

After visiting the bears at Wildlife Images, Fox Girl and I trek over the Coast Range, past Bear Camp, and down the seaward slopes to Agness. We spend time along the river visiting friends who are participating in a Tututni language project. For two summers this amazing project has been resurrecting the local native language from its last speaker and giving it new life. Last summer, after two brief weeks of learning the language, folks shared stories and songs they had composed in Tutudene at an end-of-project feast and celebration. This year, many of the same folks have returned. As we wander around the grounds where an old time village once stood, we hear snatches of conversations, some in English, some in Tutudene. Along the river, a fire flares orange as a man heats stones for a sweat ceremony. In the long shadows of evening, this brilliant firelight strikes me as a metaphor for what is happening here ... new light for an ancient tradition in an ancient setting. Bring the language home, and the culture follows close behind: ceremonies, stories, songs, and an old and wise way of knowing the river and the land that is vibrant and timely.

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24 June 2003, along Ashland Creek....

Early morning sitting by the creek, I watch an old doe with a lame back leg browse through the creekside foliage. First sunlight through branches and leaves speckle her back, and for a moment, she looks like a fawn.

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28 June 2003, Medicine Lake, northeast California....

The first explosion of summer heat colliding with the smell of mountain pines is as familiar as my childhood. This is one of my oldest memories of growing up in this region, and it is strong at Medicine Lake today. At 7000 feet, June heat blasts out of a summer-blue sky and finds its way to the last drifts of snow that speckle the shadows. As these drifts melt, the lake warms to its summer swimming temperature, a little nippy for those newly arrived from year-round-summer-like lands to the south but just right for us natives. The water is skimmed with a pale-yellow dusting of pine pollen. In my first mountain-lake swim of the year, I dive into the depths where the water is clear and swirling with trout. Looking up, I see the glare of the sun shining through pollen. Even underwater, I can almost smell the beginning of a mountain summer.

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4 July 2003, EarthTeach Forest Park in the Cascade Mountains of southern Oregon....

In the spirit of spending Independence Day being independent, I wander the backcountry of EarthTeach Forest Park, my first saunter into the interior of this wildly primal place. I walk miles and miles, from Celebration Meadow through the dark hollow and the vision place, past the moon circle and the labyrinth, along ancient tracks into wetlands where I startle a pair of sandhill cranes, and up and up over the ridge to Sharon Fen, one of the largest floating bogs in the country.

Except for the wocus-covered marsh around the margin and a stretch of open water in the center, this 300-yards-long bog looks like any alpine meadow. A foot and a half below the grass, however, is water. If I stand too long in one place, puddles gather around my feet. I keep moving to keep dry, and each step sends grassy ripples across the fen. Halfway out I realize that I am no longer fully in control of this journey. Each step makes me wonder how deep the water is. And what if I fell through? Would it be like falling through ice? Surely it would be pitch black below. Would my survival depend on swimming blindly through marsh water to find the original hole I fell through and the strength to clamber out? Perhaps there are pockets of oxygen between the soil and the water where I could take refuge and breathe as I slowly feel my way toward freedom and light? And what semi-mythological creatures might be lurking in the murky depths? These visions swell my imagination and inspire quicker steps back across the bog to the edge where I scramble to the top of a rocky ridge and do a little dance on solid ground.

In the heat of late afternoon, I walk cross-country through a mosaic of old growth forests and lava flows -- pausing at each opening to savor views of the fen -- and then a steep scramble down rugged cliffs and into the woods. I walk into twilight past ponds and lakes, stopping at springs for visits with thirsty deer and water snakes, back down the trail to my rig at Celebration Meadow. Indeed, this Fourth of July has been one of independence. No crowds. No parades. No fireworks. Just a day to celebrate and contemplate on my own, to pause in the deep interior and offer my solitary contribution to the rippling pulse of the country.

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19 July 2003, in the Central Oregon high desert near Bend, Oregon, images remembered as I saunter through stories and the summer landscape....

Heading out at sunrise across the Cascades. First shafts of orange sunlight through layers of fog. ----- Eating turkey sandwiches with Fox Girl on the point above Hells Gate Canyon on the Rogue River. Vultures gather and circle lower. And lower. Too close. They're after the turkey! We run for the rig. ----- Full moon over Lava Beds at the end of a desert storytelling. The eye of Gaukos, the Modoc moon. Huge. Mythic. ----- Along Ashland Creek, water songs tumble and dance on a sluggish summer afternoon. ----- Walking the EarthTeach labyrinth. Cleansing. Connection to earth. Home again.

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30 July 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

Even here on the ridge, nearly always 10 degrees cooler than in town, it's hot. A hundred degrees yesterday -- 108 in town, and almost as hot today.... Whew! Nice breeze in the evening, but it doesn't cool till late, and I move slowly from story to story, chore to chore.... What I cannot figure out is where the fur-coated grey squirrels get their energy. From sunrise to sunset they are in Grandfather Pine, knocking off cones, stripping them of seeds and stuffing their winter caches. No lunch breaks as far as I can tell, no naps, nothing but a work ethic that puts even 7 day-a-weekers to shame. Perhaps in those few hours when they sleep, they dream of long winter naps and lots of snacks between.

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10 August 2003, On the porch of Timber Mountain Store, at Tionesta in the northeast California desert....

On this hot, sluggish afternoon, I sit in the shade and sip something cool. The table on this covered porch is made out of an old hand-carved road sign. The words are weathered but easy to read: "Lava Beds National Monument. Entrance 10 mi. Visitor Center 14 mi." An arrow carved in the shape of an Indian arrowhead points the way. And this is precisely where I am, a few yards from the dusty intersection where the sign once hung on a tree. In the middle of this sign-now-table, covering part of the words "National" and "Monument," is a pyramid-shaped cone of bird poop about 4 inches tall. I take a sip from my drink. And another. And plop! More poop is heaped on the pile.

I look up and notice a swallow's mud nest in the rafters above the table. Inside are four babies. Outside, Mama Swallow swoops through the landscape for food and brings it back to greedy wide-open mouths. I notice a regular rhythm: Mama Swallow arrives with food, stuffs it in one beak, leaves for more, and a couple of minutes later there is a stir in the nest and that same baby turns around, hangs its bottom over the edge, and plop! -- another addition to the "National Monument." I am amazed that swallows so young are already toilet-trained and know not to mess up the interior of their nest.

I look around the porch and notice all kinds of "historical" junk and debris piled high. I'm thinking Mama Swallow and her babies might give lessons in tidiness to their neighbors. But after thinking it through, I realize that the folks who run this store are quite neighborly and their pile of stuff is limited to their own property. And it's at least as interesting as the pile of poop. The swallows, however, seem little concerned about whose nest they make a mess of, as long as it's not their own. And who cleans it up? The lady in the store. And she points out, in a weary voice, that this is the second batch of little ones for Mama Swallow this year.

Who's tidy and who isn't depends on where you're sitting. And since I'm out of range and don't own the place, it's not my concern. I take another sip and move my drink across the table a good distance from the pyramid of poop. But as the afternoon drags on, my observations tell me that moving my drink was more of a nervous gesture than a necessity. Each of those little folks have precise aim.

More sips in the shade, and I watch the afternoon shuffle slowly past, measured by the plodding plop, plop, plop of one of the most accurate desert clocks I have ever spent time with.

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24 August 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

In my backcountry treks I have seen cougars, and I have heard the stories of sightings in my mountain-ridge neighborhood. I have even seen their tracks within a few yards of my home. But this evening was my first eyeball to eyeball connection with one of these huge, almost-mythic cats. I had wandered downstairs for a drink of water, gazed out the front window, and there she was: padding slowly down my driveway between my deck and where I park my rig, not 15 feet away. We gave each other a good stare, and she continued on, just as slowly and as sure of purpose as if I hadn't been there. As she disappeared into the trees, her gold coat matched the golden glow of the evening as if the long shadows had swallowed her up and she went back to being one of those mysterious, magical critters one reads and hears about but seldom sees. And now, even minutes later, I wonder if she was real or some shadow in some story I had been daydreaming. I have a look around outside. Her tracks are sharp in the dust. One very real speck of this story remains. Her eyes are vivid in my mind's eye as evening settles into night, and the long shadows disappear.

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2 November 2003, Dragonfly Place in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon....

Early morning. Without a sound, first snow drifts out of the clouds and onto this mountain ridge. No fierce storm blows down the Siskiyous, no wild wind rattles my roof. In the silence of a grey sunrise, one has to be looking to notice the snow.

A few days ago, as my eyes wandered through reams of hand-scribbled field notes, I noticed another subtle event in the seasonal shifts of history. On another fall morning, 70 years ago today on November 2, 1933, anthropologist John Peabody Harrington arrived in the Rogue Valley with Takelma elder Gwishgwashan, also called Frances Johnson. After spending several days in Gwishgwashan's family home at Logsden near the Siletz Indian Reservation on the Oregon coast, he drove Gwishgwashan to the Rogue Valley, the traditional homeland of her people.

Takelma elder Aggie Baker-Pilgrim, Gwisgwashan's great niece, told me she remembers Harrington's visit those many years ago. He was a tall man, an imposing figure to a young girl, constantly asking questions and scribbling into notebooks, onto scraps of paper, even onto the backs of paper bags. Harrington's obsession with preserving the remnants of native cultures, often from the last speaker of a language, left the country littered with boxes of field notes and sound recordings stashed in rural post offices and neighborhood attics. He wrote in a poem, "Give not, give not the yawning graves their plunder; / Save, save the lore for future ages' joy -- / The stories full of beauty and of wonder, / The songs more pristine than the songs of Troy, / The ancient speech forever to be vanished -- "

Gwisgwashan's work with anthropologist Edward Sapir in 1906, and this trek with Harrington in 1933, provided the source material for several of Sapir's published texts and for Harrington's 1500 pages of unpublished field notes. They form the core of what remains of the Takelma language and old time culture.

Gwisgwashan and Harrington spent several autumn days visiting stories that still quietly thrive in the sacred places of the Takelma universe. If one looks closely, the stories are still there, waiting to be noticed.

More snow falls as I wander down the ridge for a quiet morning walk along Ashland Creek and through the storied landscape of my Rogue Valley home.