A Cascades New Year

Three days and three nights in the Cascades spliced the two years.

Hunkered, we were, between past and future.

A four-mile walk around Black Butte Ranch. The sprawling vacation development strives to fit into its natural setting. A noble human attempt that inevitably comes up humanly short.

Take it for what it is, not what it seeks to be.

Muted houses, mostly vacant, stand off from the road. Pedestrians separated from cars. A detailed trail map. Open space. Vistas. Hidden lakes. Ponds. Paved and plowed paths that follow creeks and contours.

We saw no for sale signs marking these get-away homes. A guess is that such commercial intrusions are as prohibited as garish exterior paint. Who wants to think of foreclosures, bankruptcy and tangerine siding while on a mid-winter get-away?

Black Butte Ranch in these sober times is a happy-face Potemkin mountain retreat.

A numbing windstorm whipped through the Cascades on this New Year’s weekend. It closed the Santiam Pass. No trucks or SUVs got through. We managed without The Oregonian with its news of the new year and reflections on the old.

Ah but the Scrabble, backgammon and books. So many books; so few words for a “Q” when you don't have a “U.”

Our walk was too far yet not far enough. Our muscles ached from effort while our eyes hungered for more.

Between the pain and delight. our mountain ramble was enough.

Just enough.

We stomped through the snow-muffled, wind-whistling wood, too thinned to hide hulking dwellings.

At our own rented threshold, we tramped snow from our boots, then settled next to hearth and fire and reached for the warmth of books and hopes for the new year.

Browsing Bound Ink Blots

Going through books donated to the Hillsdale Book Sale (this Sunday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Watershed Senior housing building), I was drawn to an odd assortment of titles.

My attraction served as a kind of literary Rorschach test, circa Dec. 2007.

Here are the blots of ink I chose to browse.

A 1977 edition of “Playboy’s Book of Backgammon,” with a forward by none other than Hugh Hefner. To quote Hefner: “Backgammon is an oddly moral game. It punishes self-deception.”

A 1953 Landmark Books edition of “Thomas Jefferson, Father of Democracy” by Vincent Sheean. I vaguely recall reading this “young readers’” book when I was 11 or 12. Could this tidy little, illustrated volume with its big, scholastic type have been formative? Chapter 1: "He was over six feet tall when he was seventeen years old—a rather awkward boy, with carroty red hair and freckles, a pointed nose and chin. You would never have called him handsome, and yet...."

Two Lewis Thomas books, “The Medusa and the Snail” and “The Fragile Species.” You can never get enough of Lewis Thomas, the self-described “biology watcher.”

“Flu,” subtitle, “The story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused it.” By Gina Kolata, who's name sounds suspiciously like one of those exotic Hawiian drinks. Never mind. Thoughts of the 1918 flu pandemic take me back 20 years to one of those random English rambles that delivered me to a country parish graveyard, There I found myself staring at four rows of 16 military graves. The markers read that the graves belonged to Aussie soldiers who died in 1918 not in the horror of battle but in the agony of the Great Flu Pandemic.

“Oregon Geographic Names” by Lewis L. McArthur. 1984 edition. I’m surprise at how many times I have trundled down to the Hillsdale Branch Library to look up some nominal oddity in this book by my neighbor up the hill. What a treasure. From the “Hillsdale” entry: “The name Hillsdale has been in use since pioneer days, and is quite suitable for the place. Hill is from the old Anglo-Saxon hyl, and the Norse holl. Dale means a small valley. It comes form the same source as dell, and the German thal and Slavonic dol.” Now you know.

“An Army at Dawn” by Rick Atkinson, about the 1942-1943 North African campaign. I had read somewhere that this Pulitzer Prize winner was powerfully written. A dip into it did not disappoint. “September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hours, or 19 a minute or one death every 3 seconds….”

“Poor Richard’s Almanacks” by Benjamin Franklin illustrated by, get this, Norman Rockwell. Coffee-table format. What price can you place on this: “If you’d know the Value of Money, go and borrow some”? Or “In the Affairs of this World Men are saved, not by Faith, but by the Want of it.”? The price of "Poor Richard" at the book sale, a Franklin-esque $2.

There’s more, but somehow that’s enough.