Christmas 2007

Late in October, I wondered aloud over dinner how I should vote on an upcoming ballot initiative in our state that would have taxed cigarettes and spent the money on health insurance for kids. It seemed like a no brainer on the surface, but I worried that such an issue was important enough for everyone to pitch in, not just cigarette smokers. Logan pushed hard for a yes vote. Taxing tobacco would encourage people to stop smoking, he argued, which would be a good thing, in his view. But if that’s true, I said, then the tax receipts would fall and the money would not be there to fund the program.
“Nope, that won’t happen,” Graham said. “Demand for cigarettes is inelastic.” Logan and I just looked at him. If we didn’t let out a collective “huh?” our blank stares said enough.
“Demand for many things is elastic,” Graham continued. “If prices go up, people decide not to buy them; demand goes down. The demand is elastic.” I think Logan and I were still staring, so Graham jumped up and returned with a pencil and paper. He drew a large X on the paper, and began with the lower left corner of the X, following the line up and to the right. “If this line is price,” he said, “this other line is demand.” He tracked the lines, showing how as prices go up, demand goes down at the same rate. “But with cigarettes,” he continued, drawing a new diagram, beginning with the first line heading up and right, “as price goes up, demand stays about the same.” Instead of completing the X, he drew a nearly level line that started on the left, continued right, but just barely sloped down. Retracing this line, he said, “Cigarettes are addictive, so as price goes up, demand doesn’t fall off. People might forego other items, but they will still buy cigarettes. He continued the trajectory of both lines, showing how as cigarette prices grew higher and higher, the demand line, running nearly level, stayed relatively high. Satisfied that Logan and I finally got it, he put down his pencil and returned to his dinner, concluding, “Demand for cigarettes is inelastic.”
“Where did you learn this?” I wondered.
“Economics,” Graham said.
These conversations are becoming so common around our house these days they hardly bear mentioning, except by way of noting the beautiful transition from a boy to a man that occurs with breathtaking speed. It’s easy for friends and relatives who don’t see growing children on a daily basis to comment on how big they’ve become since the last visit. I do it myself all the time with my nephews or small niece, or the children of friends. It’s harder to notice, at least on first blush, how smart they become at the same time. Somehow, I find it all the more miraculous to think about the information they take in and process on their journey to adulthood. I leafed through Graham’s textbooks the other day while he was at swimming practice: economics, calculus, chemistry, American history; his copy of Steinbeck’s East of Eden for English. I wondered if any of the parade of talking heads who seem to constantly find fault with public schools could do this work for a week, plus the pool time (or the cross country workouts of the autumn). At least it would make them realize how easy their jobs are.
We ended last year as we end this one; Logan in middle school, Graham on the Phoenix High School swimming team. But this winter we have another set of practices and games to attend, as Logan joined the Talent Middle School basketball team. He also ran cross country in the fall, and Logan is planning a track season in the spring, after wrestling in January. That makes him a four-sport athlete, which hardly leaves time for his piano lessons. Graham finished his swimming season in February with improved times and skills, and the Phoenix High Pirates astounded all us fans when the boys and girls varsity swimming squads earned a special award for having the highest combined GPA in the state.
We spent the winter skiing Mt. Ashland and Mt. Bachelor, then departed on the first day of spring for Spain. We met friends there, Javier and Dawn del Rio, during the year they spent in La Mancha. Javier taught both Graham and Logan at Talent Elementary, and on this trip, both Graham and Logan attended a day or two of school, where they found their dual language experience at Talent had provided them with passable Spanish. Later, we met the del Rios on the Costa Sol at a rented a vacation home; Javi’s parents were there, and speak no English. Graham was able to jump into the conversation and I’ll never forget the body language of Javi’s dad when he realized a student of his own son from the US could really speak Spanish. He and Graham embarked on a long conversation about soccer, as we had just seen a game between Spain and Denmark in Madrid. (Logan cheered for Denmark). A few days before, we marked the fourth anniversary of Lisa’s death with our first swim in the Mediterranean. Well, actually, Logan swam. Graham and I sort of hung out on the beach.
But the real wonder of the trip was how well Graham and Logan traveled; they travel well anyway, but on this trip they we’re fascinated by the architecture, food, culture and museums. Before the trip, Logan had completed a research assignment on Picasso, and we spent much of the trip chasing down museums and references to the master. (Logan prefers Picasso’s Blue Period.) Graham lectured me on the War of Spanish Succession, which he’d been studying in Euro History. In Granada, after a long day touring the Al Hambra, sitting at a cafe at midnight on a weeknight, having our late meal of the day, (when in Rome), Graham got it. He looked around the crowded café and said, “I should come here for a year or two after high school, hang out, get to know the country.”
We returned from Spain and I toiled for four whole days, then took off (barely over my jet lag) for a six-day guys’ trip to southern Utah. I flew our Cessna 340 to Livermore and picked up Scott Lambert, and we took our mountain bikes and a stupid amount of gear and flew into St. George, Utah, for a couple days (polygamists at the thrift store!) mountain biking and touring Zion, then on to Bryce Canyon and then Moab. We holed up at the Gonzo Inn in Moab, mountain biking in Canyonlands (desert bighorns!) and Arches, then knocked off the Slickrock Trail in 2.5 hours. (That’s a good time for anyone, let alone a geezer.) We made a quick drive to Grand Junction, Colorado, to see John Prine, so the score was four national parks and one national treasure.
Logan spent a week at an academic camp at the university in Ashland, and Graham spent a week at the high country running camp in the Steens Mountains for the second year. My mom and sister Sheryl and her family came out to see us over the 4th of July, and we all traveled to the Bay Area and did some sailing and sightseeing in San Francisco.
Then, it was back to school; both boys ran cross country in the fall, and Graham’s team did well enough to earn a berth at the state championships, so he was able to add a fat state meet patch to his letterman’s jacket. They are counting down the days to winter break, and we are all watching the weather and checking the ski report daily.
Our best to you and yours for the new year. Love, Los Tres Thirkillos

I’d learned to sail as a kid; my dad had a small sailboat and we sailed it to Catalina in the summers and around Long Beach harbor. I’d always wanted to cruise but life, college, marriage, kids and a career conspired to prevent that from happening. I bought a Catalina 25 in 1999 and sailed it in summers on a reservoir in the Southern Oregon Cascades. I’d trailered it out to the coast and sailed from Crescent City to Brookings and back, and trailered down to San Francisco and sailed the Bay, and I’d hauled it down to Channel Islands Harbor and sailed out to Catalina and Long Beach. I had been researching cruising sailboats for a few years when I became a widowed, single dad in 2003. I decided it was time for a long voyage with my two boys, so with that in mind, I bought Quest, a Golden Wave 42, after finding her on the City Yachts dock at the San Francisco Marina. At the time, the name was perfect; I was on a Quest to live a new life as a voyaging single dad. Not surprisingly, my boys didn’t think much of my idea to sail away on a quest on Quest, so we compromised. I sailed her to Brookings with a couple buddies and kept her there for a few seasons. There’s not much to do on the Oregon Coast, so a friend and my oldest son sailed her back to San Francisco Bay, where we used her as a second home, exploring various marinas on long weekends, voyaging as far as Half Moon Bay. Our time on Quest was, shall we say, utterly adequate. I spent one spring break replacing the head, and that didn’t feel like much of a Quest. But it was adequate.

One warm summer evening, my youngest son’s piano teacher, Cybele Abbett, called, saying he had told her about our time sailing. She said she’d always wanted to learn to sail and she wondered if I knew anyone who could teach her. Tomorrow is the 11th anniversary of our second day sailing the Catalina 25 on our local mountain lake; we married last October. In the interim, we sailed south on the Baja Haha in 2014 and during our time in Mexico, the name Quest became irrelevant. Neither of us was on a Quest. We were happy together and in love and living a life we had created together, cruising a beautiful sailboat in Mexico. The old name represented a different time, a different place, a different mindset. It was the past, and we were looking to the future. We began casting about for a new name. One morning at anchor I was in the cockpit listening to the Grateful Dead (okay, it was a morning like every other morning) and Eyes of the World, with Branford Marsalis on soprano sax, came up. It was so beautiful and Cybele popped up in the companionway and said, “Hey, how about Eyes of the World?” I loved the idea. We love travel and we can’t wait for new destinations and vistas. Eyes of the World. But after rolling it around a bit, we decided it was a bit of a mouthful to say on the radio. A few days later, we heard a boat hail, “Eyes of the World, Eyes of the World, this is Distant Drum.” Given there was already an Eyes of the World, and it was a mouthful on the radio, we kept casting. During the same concert, Bird Song came up, a lovely eulogy to Janis Joplin. Cybele and I are both musicians, so the Hunter/Garcia tribute to Janis was particularly sweet. We are birders, too, and much of our time is spent watching birds, listening for birds and identifying birds. At some juncture, that all came together. Bird Song. Or Birdsong? We settled for BirdSong.

I made a nice road trip the other day through my corner of the West, driving from the southern Puget Sound south to Portland and on to Bend for a few days of skiing at Mt. Bachelor. When I stopped to run some errands in Portland, I got a text from my nephew recommending a podcast just as I was queuing up podcasts for the drive across the Cascades. Bryan sent me a link for Expanding Mind, and in particular Erik Davis’ conversation with Grateful Dead scholar and professor Ulf Olsson regarding Olsson’s book Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation. Olsson says says he began listening to the Dead in the late ’60s. “I had a friend who was well off and he could buy any record he wanted and he had all those early albums but we didn’t understand them but we were fascinated.” I came in several years after that, but I’ve been listening to and thinking about the Grateful Dead for some 45 years now, so I enjoyed these two dissecting the complex anatomy of the Grateful Dead, such as whether the journeys of improvisation were actually freedom or just interesting kinds of coercion.

This was great conversation for the road, (Grateful Dead music was erotic but not sexual; the band knew how to use silence; they could be frightening when they stretched out–what if they couldn’t get back?) but I had trouble maintaining my lane position when Davis, quoting a guitarist who doesn’t like Garcia’s playing said, “He kinda never really resolves what he’s doing; he never really lands.” I corrected my lane position and focused. Garcia doesn’t resolve his musical line? He never lands? This can only be true if you expect a guitar line to follow the structure of Freebird. Garcia always resolves his line; he always lands, but the Grateful Dead are on a symphonic timetable. The remarkable piece of music from February 18, 1971, for example, from Dark Star to Wharf Rat and back to Dark Star through Beautiful Jam is more than 21 minutes long. (25 minutes if you include the seamless Me and My Uncle, of which there are 613 recorded renditions, according to Olsson.) Like a symphony, the band presents a theme, turns it inside out and upside down and plays it backwards. There is a second movement and a third and a fourth. I need to play this piece of music for friends who between them compose, conduct and perform classical music and see if I’m off my rocker.

When the podcast was over, I opened to the Relisten app which interfaces with the Live Music Archive at archive.org where there are millions of audio and video files. Relisten provides an easy user interface to more than 170,000 concert recordings. There are 100s of artists represented, but I rarely get past the Grateful Dead. To use the interface, I tapped Grateful Dead in artists (other temptations include: Animal Collective, Bela Fleck, Blues Traveler, Charlie Hunter, Del McCoury, Derek Trucks Band, Donna the Buffalo, to name just a few through the letter D, then Everything, then Years. I scrolled down to 1971, tapped, then scrolled down to the February 18 show. There are 11 sources for that show, each identified by a description of who taped the show and the genealogy of the source. First I listened to Dan Stephens’ and Scott Thompson’s Soundboard (4.75 stars). Later I listened to Betty Cantor’s board. Nor surprisingly, the Betty Board is warmer. I scrolled down to Going the Road Feeling Bad and the ultimate road tune began to play. LyricFind lists it as traditional, but the members of the Grateful Dead are credited, too. Probably because they’ve played it more often for more people than anyone. Woody Guthrie played it memorably. The tune came to mind not just because it’s a great road tune, but because I was going down the road feeling sad. The Expanding Minds podcast had taken my mind off my melancholy for a good hour, long enough to get into the devastation of the Beachie Fire. I had just come from my bio-dad’s home on Puget Sound. Paul Petredis died a year ago this month, and I’ve taken over the reconstruction of his home after it was partially destroyed in a fire four years ago when he was in a nursing home. During the last year of his life I’d pick Paul up at the Washington State Soldiers’ Home and take him to the site so he could see the progress. Progress was always slow, but his dementia was advancing and he was always thrilled to see what had happened the previous month. He loved these field trips and discussing how great it was going to be when it was finished and he could move back in. He particularly liked to discuss that over tacos or ice cream. Paul knew he’d never be able to leave the nursing home, but he liked to daydream he could. Often he’d reflect on the great care he got at the Soldiers’ Home. It was true; they took really good care of him there. He was with his tribe, aging vets of WWII, Korea and Vietnam and he liked the camaraderie, for the most part. The cabinets were installed on this trip, and I framed the structures for the fireplaces and replaced a garage door opener. The granite countertops were templated, the plumbing fixtures delivered and the heating and lighting fired up. In the past year we have installed the plumbing, heating, electrical, insulation and drywall, built the decks and, interior millwork, and painted. He missed so much progress in the past year; his absence at the stage felt particularly acute. And I had to make some special accommodations for the countertop interface with the garden window. Paul really wanted a garden window over the kitchen sink. I tried to discourage it; garden windows are a little dated, but he really wanted one, so we had it installed. He talked about that garden window every time we visited the site. Now, after solving how the granite countertop would engage the garden window, I would carry that window on my mind for a few hundred miles. Or at least what the window represented.

The night before I got on the road I had watched the extraordinary televised stage production of Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself; I had raved about it to friends and family; that’s what prompted Bryan to send me the link to the Expanding Minds podcast. Hulu’s description:

Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself is a new kind of lyric poem. It tells the story of a man fighting to see through the illusion of his own identity, only to discover that identity itself is an illusion. An intimate and powerful exploration of what it means to be and be seen, the film chronicles Derek DelGaudio’s attempt to answer one deceptively simple question, “Who am I?” His personal journey expands to a collective experience that forces us to confront the boundaries of our own identities.

As part of confronting the boundaries of identity, (spoiler follows) DelGaudio tells us he was born to a teenage mother whose father left when his mother became pregnant. That is my story, too, a common part of my identity I share with DelGaudio, who urged the viewers to consider what makes up their identity. I thought of things like entrepreneur, builder, father, son, brother, friend, nephew, uncle, musician, sailor. My story was much different than DelGaudio, who never found a father figure. Very early in my life my mom married my dad who adopted me and gave me his name and raised me as his own with my mom; together they made me the son and brother in that list of words that give me my identity. But DelDaudio had a different word: accident. He was an accident. But if he was an accident, I must be as well. I’ve never really thought that deeply about being an accident, but there it was. Life is full of accidents, and a good portion of us wandering around on the planet are probably accidents, too. Mostly my life has been a long series of happy accidents, but reflecting on the powerful and emotional performance of DelGaudio and his notion of being an accident really scrubbed at me. I carried that feeling out of the burn zone of the Beachie Fire, up over Santiam Pass. The view from the garden window was now the view from my windshield, and the horizon of Oregon’s high desert lengthened and expanded in various grays spotlighted by holes in the cloud cover as I dropped over the divide of the Cascades. Suttle Lake appeared far below to the right. Another half hour and I’d be at my home in Bend with three days of skiing fresh snow ahead. Another happy accident.

The next day I went to Bend’s Pine Nursery Park. A rare Harris sparrow (HASP Zonotrichia querula) had been spotted there the day before; I hoped to find it. I’d never been been to Pine Nursery; I didn’t even know it existed, but it’s a jewel of open space that’s been protected from Bend’s rapidly developing northeast quarter. The park comprises mostly sports fields, and some wide open flat areas designated for future sport fields. A couple large signs detail the ongoing fund raising process for the future sports fields. Other sports fields spread out across several acres, covered in natural turf and artificial turf.

There is also a 20-hole disc golf course spread out among the natural landscape of rolling volcanic bluffs and scrubby juniper forests. The terrain offers stunning views of the Three Sisters Wilderness and a buffer from the busy streets that border the park. I began my search for the HASP by wandering around the meandering trails of the course. Disc courses tend to be enveloped by the landscape they occupy, and it’s easy to wander around as the players have walked here and there to retrieve their discs. Soon I encountered a young man playing alone, wheeling a disc golf cart behind him. His assortment of discs, held in a boxy valise, like pilots wheel through airports carrying their flight tools, were organized neatly like a day-glo record collection. He asked if I was playing. I said no, don’t mind me, play through, I’m just looking for a rare Harris sparrow. He nodded and we talked about how nice the park was. It contained his favorite course, he said, and he tried to play here as often as possible. He winged a disc at a distant cage, then called after the disc as it sailed on. “Get down; get down.” Not satisfied with that shot, he flung another. Apparently, when you play by yourself, you can take as many mulligans as you wish. “I just love this,” he said, motioning to the the sky and landscape and informal course spread out in front of him. “I guess you could say this is my own Harris sparrow.”

I followed the course along the western boundary of the park. There was a lot of foot traffic, kids on bikes, people walking dogs, disc golfers. I was not surprised to see few birds; a couple robins, a scrub jay. But it was a nice day, cold and clear, and I wanted to get the lay of the land and I figured I’d find better habitat eventually. After wandering past the artificial turf fields and a frozen pond (a sign warned: Danger! Thin Ice!) I found better habitat along the park’s eastern boundary, marked with a tall chain link fence. Signage on the fence advises it’s Forest Service land on the other side. That, too, is undeveloped, so this area of the park is mostly landscape of the original high desert biome.

I caught some movement and found dark-eyed junco (DEJU, Junco hyemalis), grazing with golden- crowned sparrows (GCSP Zonotrichia atricapilla) and white-crowned sparrows (WCSP Zonotrichia leucophrys). I’ve never watched sparrows so carefully and I glassed each individual in case the HASP was hanging out with them. I followed the meandering flocks from a dried grass meadow through some brush piles and into an area of young pines. Suddenly, a familiar movement caught my eye. I thought nuthatch, with the dash up the trunk, but I knew almost as quickly this was brown creeper (BRCR Certhia americana). I hadn’t seen one in some time, but the little brown turtle shape is distinctive. I watched the individual for several minutes. He wasn’t shy and I was able to stay fairly close, seeing a lot of detail in his maneuvers as he worked the bark. Up and down the trunk, probing with his long scimitar bill, occasionally dropping a leg behind so he could brace against it to gain leverage. I was amazed how far he could work the bill into voids in the bark, sometimes pulling a small morsel from deep recesses. They could have been small larvae, or maybe even insect eggs of some sort. Again and again he probed, getting deeper in some pockets than others. It reminded my of periodontal charting, a similar, but less pleasant, experience.

I caught a flash of something bigger and quickly located a hairy woodpecker (HAWO Picoides villosus) in the lower boughs of the Ponderosa forest. We get a lot of downy woodpeckers at our home suet feeder, but the HAWO is bigger, and the bill is heavier and proportionally longer. And powerful! This HAWO would BANG, BANG, BANG in a burst of a few blows to the bark, then on the last blow, twist and wiggle his head from side to side, leveraging his bill against the sapwood and prying a chunk of bark away. You could see the lighter bark below as the woodpecker forced chunks of bark away, prospecting for whatever hibernating insects, larvae or eggs he might find.

A few minutes later a saw a chickadee. There was something different about it than the black-capped chickadees we get at our suet feeder at home. I thought mountain chickadee (MOCH Poecile gambeli) and I checked my field guide. The primary difference: the MOCH has a white eyebrow stripe. I got back on the binoculars and sure enough, there was the white eyebrow stripe. More MOCHs appeared and I soon found myself among a small trailing flock as they moved from tree to tree in a loose, trailing formation.

Farther on, I found more YCSP and WCSP, and I glassed each individual trying to turn one of them into HASP. Suddenly, I caught a flash of something in the pod of GCSP and WCSP. Yes! Clear breast, blackish face fading to speckles down the bib! Here was..could it be HASP?! Oops, no. House sparrow (HOSP Passer domesticus) We were moving farther from Zonotrichias.

If you get a chance to visit Bend in the high desert rain shadow of Oregon’s Central Cascades, take it. Choose a clear day in early winter, when the light is low and the high altitude air is clear and bright and the colors are turned up to 11. I chose two such days this weekend. On Saturday, I walked the Deschutes River Trail from Archie Briggs upstream to Mirror Pond in downtown’s Drake Park. South of the trail’s detour around the River Edge golf course, the trail rejoins the Deschutes River. The river is slow here, and I saw several Common Goldeneye. (COGO, Bucephala clangula). I’ve known this bird for decades, but I’ve never seen the eye so golden. That low winter light and rarefied air returned an image to me as bright and glowing as a polished dubloon and the iridescence of the drake’s head flashed purple, green and blue and every combination of them.

I also saw several beautiful Hood Mergansers (HOME Lophodytes cucullatus), and I got a nice long look at a female HOME swallowing a fish. There were also a couple of American coots (AMCO Fulica americana) standing on a rock near a Great Blue Heron GBHE (Ardea herodias) and multiple pods of mallards MALL (Anas platyrhynchos.)

Upstream, the river runs so slow it forms Mirror Pond, a reflecting gem only a few hundred feet from the heart of downtown Bend. It feels closer. (This is the eponymous Mirror Pond of the pale ale that launched the Deschutes Brewery a few blocks away in 1988.) As I approached down the soft bank of expansive lawn of Drake Park, a squadron of Common Mergansers COME (Mergus merganser) came in low on a fast sortie, banking slightly to hold their position over the center of the river. I got a good look at them through my binoculars. Heavy birds, with fast, powerful wingbeats, each bird locked in steady formation with his wingman. There were a mix of drakes and hens, the drakes with their bright green heads and flashing white and black bodies; the hens a little duller with a pale orange head, crest pulled back by the wind. The group passed, and another whistled through, then another. They continued upstream (to the south; you can’t really see the river flow here.) A little farther south, a flotilla of a couple dozen COME were lolling in the slack water. Most of them were preening; a few napped. One or two scratched their head with a fanned foot. I glassed through the floating birds and found a few Ring-necked ducks RNDU (Aythya collaris.)

Continuing south, a formation of eight drake buffleheads BUFF (Bucephala albeola) moved forward like a battleship group on maneuvers. Is there a more striking bird per square inch than the diminutive bufflehead? That bright white crest seems to be half the bird and inflates their size. There was one hen with them. I watched them dive in perfect sequence, each bird ducking under the water immediately after the bird to his left, like a line of synchronized swimmers. I don’t know what was happening below the surface, but I would surmise they hold their formation to herd fish into a tighter school for easier pickings.

All my friends and family are tired of hearing this story, but you seem a more appreciative audience. In 2005 or so, I bought a new Ford pickup. While we were in the office finalizing the paperwork, I couldn’t take my eyes off an advertising poster on the wall announcing the arrival of the new Mustang. The tag line, in hot-rod lettering, proclaimed: You’re Wildest Dream Is Here! Below was a graphically souped up model in red. As we finished up the paperwork, I said to the salesman, “I have to say, I can’t take my eyes of this poster.” We had the following conversation:

Salesman: Oh, yeah, the new Mustang GT; 17 inch alloy wheels, 4.6 liter V-8….
Me: No, I don’t mean that. It says “you’re wildest dream.” That’s not right. It should say, “Your–Y O U R– wildest dream.” I spelled “your.”
Salesman: (puzzled and proofreading) No, that’s right. It’s got the possessive apostrophe.
Me: That’s not a possessive apostrophe. That’s a contraction of “you are.” That poster says, “You Are Wildest Dream Is Here.” That’s not right.
Salesman, (pondering) Hmmm. No, that’s right. That’s a possessive apostrophe; that’s right. I have a degree in English; that’s correct.
Me, sputtering: You may have a degree in English and I’m a homebuilder, but that’s just wrong. That slogan says: “You Are Wildest Dream Is Here.” That doesn’t make any sense.
Salesman: Well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
To this day I regret not asking if, when they were done with the promotion, I could have the poster. As an aside, just now, wondering if such a typo was a collector’s item on eBay or something, I googled “2005 Ford Mustang You’re Wildest Dream.” Google returned: Showing results for 2005 Ford Mustang YOUR Wildest Dream. But it sounds like a collector’s item, so if any of you Internet sleuths come across that poster, I’m in the market.

Five Gifts, on the Occasion of the First Full Day of Winter, 2020

My first gift of the first full day of winter came as I slept in late on the shortest day of the year. Cybele got up early and went into town to provision groceries to carry us through the holidays. When she returned, she woke me gently, then whispered in my ear, “The snow level came down last night; we need to go skiing.” While I organized the gear in the car, she made my favorite breakfast of scrambled eggs– smooth as velvet and delicately soft as only she can make them– sautéed vegetables and warm tortillas.

We drove to the Pederson Sno-Park at Mile Post 27 on Dead Indian Memorial Road. The Pacific Crest Trail crosses the highway here. It is literally the spine of the Southern Oregon Cascades, and the best snow in the area can be found there. Three inches of new snow awaited us, light and fluffy, on top of a crust of variable texture. We were the first skiers to head up Burton Flat Road that morning, so we had to break trail, but the snow was light and we glided through it easily. This was particularly true for me since Cybele broke trail for most of the 2.5 miles out. Call that the second gift.

When we were ready to turn around, we ate a couple cookies from the bounty that had arrived the night before from my mom’s kitchen in Southern Michigan. She is a wonderful baker and sends us an astonishing array of homemade cookies each Christmas. It is a long, welcomed tradition to open the package each year and take in the sight of four or five different cookies stuffed with dates or figs, nuts dipped in white chocolate and others in dark, gingerbread, short sugar cookies with anise, candied pecans, fudge, peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate, rum balls, and layered bars with dried fruit and coconut. I’ll call that gift three, but truthfully, at my age? It’s innumerable.

Retracing our tracks back to the Sno-Park was easier, both because we had already packed the fresh snow in our tracks, and also because the road we were skiing maintains an overall gentle rise on the way out, so the ride back is easier. In some places we could just glide along with double pole pushes. In one area, we didn’t even have to do that; instead, we had to watch our downhill speed and use caution to avoid a spill, which happens easier than you might think on skinny skis. Because of the elevation drop, the glide back is much quicker than the kick out. I’m always surprised when we turn the last corner and see the stop sign announcing the highway.

With 150 feet remaining before we arrived at the car, a Pileated Woodpecker flew across the road, right in front of me, and landed with a flamboyant flare on a Douglas fir snag 50 feet away. I froze and tried to take in all I could of this handsome bird. North America’s largest woodpecker, the size of a crow with nearly a 30-inch wingspan (and I had just seen all of that span on the flare), is an elusive resident of Western boreal forests. I have not seen one in a couple of decades, and we have been looking. Yet how easily and suddenly the Pileated Woodpecker emerged from the forest unbidden; here were the strong claws, heavy beak, bold face pattern, the classic Woody Woodpecker crest. (In the Wikipedia entry for Woody Woodpecker, “woodpecker,” links to a picture of the Pileated Woodpecker, even though there are nearly two dozen other species of woodpeckers in North America.) He worked his way up the trunk, probing here and there. Cybele came up behind me and together we watched our Pileated work the bark for several minutes. We whispered excitedly to each other, calling out what we were seeing and how fantastic it was. When he flew off, his wings made audible swooshes through the air. We were transformed and stood where we were talking about the sighting for a few minutes. As we began to move again, Cybele saw our Pileated cross the highway to the north where she saw him join another. She gave me clues as to where I could pick them up visually: “Your nine o’clock; big bare tree; about 15 feet up.” The pair began working again. Soon, one flew off, then began calling. From time to time one or the other would hammer a tree, making a loud, solid thud that echoed in the forest. The Pileated’s extinct cousin, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, was known as the Good Lord Bird; that’s what people said when they saw it. “Charismatic Megafauna” is what we call large, exotic mammals, but I’ll make a personal exception for this encounter, which stayed with us on the drive home, each of us commenting from time to time what a wonderful, long sought experience we had shared. You know that’s gift four.





There was one final gift on the first day of winter. After we arrived home, still buzzing from the excitement of our encounter with our Pileated Woodpecker, I finally sat down and opened the cards and letters that had been arriving for a few days. I hadn’t quite had my head in the right space to open them when they’d arrived. That has never happened to me before. I’d been drifting in an inchoate funk induced by weird current events, the Covid-19 global pandemic and the Almeda Fire. The latter had devastated our town on September 8, making homeless nearly 25 percent of the residents of Talent and our neighboring town, Phoenix, and turned to cinders innumerable homes (many of which I’d built), businesses, cars, forests, gardens and yards. But as I opened and read cards and letters bearing season’s greetings of hope and cheer from dear friends, I brightened too on the shortest day of the year. The longest night would itself be followed by a night not quite as long, and a shorter night would follow that. A New Year, with lengthening days, will follow 10 more days, each longer than the previous, and with that thought, my hope was reinforced for healing, returned fellowship and longer, brighter days. Peace, love and respect to you and yours for 2021.