The Glide

Years ago I thought I was perhaps writing too many stories featuring my friend Jerry Roberts. He was good copy in the years I was trying to establish  my freelance career, a backcountry mentor, extremely quotable. And then there was the avalanche. 

One of the first pieces I did was called “Buddhist Road Patrol.” In which I ride with Mr. Roberts in his orange Colorado Department of Transportation pickup, on Red Mountain Pass, long after midnight, in a blizzard, to check storm boards for new snow amounts, which, if the numbers are high enough, could trigger, at Jerry’s discretion, closing the highway. He is driving by feel, essentially blind, snowflakes like warp-speed stars rushing the headlights. We pass beneath dozens of avalanche paths, some of them having swept cars, and even 20-ton snowplows into the canyon. Six people, three of them snowplow drivers, have died in slides on the pass. Jerry nudges the tension aside with a smile and an impromptu haiku: “Traveling under Brooklyns paths/fear/is my companion.”

He writes free-verse haikus. One of his favorite formal examples is by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo-Basho: “Come, let’s go/snow-viewing/’til we’re buried.” Jerry’s email handle is “snowviewer.”

Not that he ever wanted, or expected, to be buried. But it did happen some winters later when, after just a couple of turns, the slope he was skiing fractured and he was carried a thousand feet down a slide path on Red Mountain No. 3. I saw it happen. It was awesome, terrifying, surreal. 

Once the snow stopped moving Jerry realized he was completely buried, couldn’t move, not even a finger. The professional avalanche forecaster, the snow guru had fucked up. He was calm. He thought to himself, “I gambled and lost. I had a good life. Filled with good friends.” The weight of the snow meant he couldn’t expand his lungs to take a breath. It didn’t matter if he had an air pocket or not. Less than a minute later he blacked out.

We found him, the four us with him that day, in seven minutes, using our transceivers, and shoveled down to his face. Which was blue. His girlfriend implored the blue face: “Breathe, Jerry! Please. Breathe!” And, after a while, after removing the snow from his mouth and nose and scooping out a cavity beneath his chest, he did. His eyelids fluttered. Pink gradually returned to his cheeks. 

I wrote about it for SKI magazine, for The Avalanche Review, various Colorado newspapers, the L.A. Times. I couldn’t not write about it. 

And now here I am writing about Jerry again. 

He appeared to have vanquished prostate cancer a couple of years ago. But it came back. With a vengeance. He’s known since early summer that he is a “short-timer.” That was the term he used on the phone. He sounded good, laughing, self-deprecating, like his old self. And he continues to sound grounded and amused, on the phone and in emails. Weaker, but his old self.

Jerry has a popular blog, The Robert Report, pronounced Ro’ bear Re’ por, after Stephen Colbert’s old show, with links to his own weather forecasts, to the American Avalanche Association web site, the poetry of Charles Bukowski, R. Crumb’s drawings, the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Jerry was profiled in Tricycle in 2016, even though he considers himself a “zen heretic.”

In July, The Report blog noted the anniversary of a friend’s death, on the Grand Teton. Jerry thanked our departed friend George for helping him on “the glide.”

Jerry’s on the glide path. The final approach. Friends come by. Lots of friends. I mention a t-shirt he gave me with a black-and-white silk-screened photo on the front. A couple of leather-jacketed bikers ease their Harleys through a freshly bulldozed cut in slide debris on the Red Mountain Pass highway. Might be the Muleshoe slide. The cut is at least 10 feet deep. Below the image is a Jerry haiku: “Newly fallen snow/fresh/signatures.”

Lisa reads to him most evenings from the writings of Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. He has “the cocktail” in the fridge. (Colorado is one of the states with a sane death-and-dying law.) For now, the pain in his bones is bearable. “I’m still enjoying life,” he tells me. He’ll drink it, he says, when the pain becomes too much, when it’s time, finally, to touch down.

A Powder Apology

I should have waited. Given the 14 inches of new snow, and no sign of it letting up, I should have waited a day for the groomers to get out there and pack it down. Instead, for some crazy reason, I decided to brave it and head up the mountain.

The first challenge – and it is a big one – I couldn’t see my skis! How is one supposed to know what the skis are up to if you can’t keep an eye on them? Just the tips showed occasionally, so who knows what was going on down there, really? 

And there were no other skier tracks to tell me where to go! How am I supposed to know where to go – or where I am, even – with no other tracks to indicate the way? Nothing but whipped cream.

I like whipped cream – on my mit schlag certainly – but a foot or more of it? On everything?!! Trees. Trails. Filling the air. Filling my lap on the lift rides. Everything whipped-cream white. I had to agree with Bush One about “the vision thing.” Without the vision thing one is left entirely dependent on other senses. And what other senses could I call on? Couldn’t hear anything: the snow made absolutely no sound beneath my skis. No smell – unless you count the smell of my own labored breath emanating from inside my neck gaiter (which probably needs a wash), but never mind. No taste except for the frozen flakes flying unbidden into my nose and mouth – but more on that later.

I was forced to rely entirely on my sense of feel. On lower angle pitches there was the constant, disconcerting pressure of the snow against my shins and knees. Would it allow me an instantaneous hockey stop should I require one? It would not. Then on steeper pitches the world fell away entirely. Unbidden, I found myself floating! Falling, untethered, through space. No firm ground on which to stand!

Scary. But that wasn’t all. While thus weightless, more often than not a wave of snow slid up my chest and blotted out what little sight was left me. Snow wanted to get in any crevice, any crack or opening in my kit: neck, mouth, goggle seam. An ice facial! In desperation I conjured photographs by Alta’s Lee Cohen, for one, depicting the near suffocation of other hapless skiers – only a hand showing, perhaps, or a pole and a gloved hand waving for help when clearly there was no help forthcoming. 

A final indignity – after I’d somehow returned whole to the flats – was the inability, among all the other white lumps, of identifying my trusty CRV, Phyrne. Such was the continued storm production. Not the final indignity, I should say. For, after locating Phyrne, I then had to clear her of her whipped cream blanket only to find, once I’d plopped at last into the driver’s seat, that the windshield was again completely, opaquely white.

There’s a story there

Unlike most panhandlers in Bend who sit sadly desultory behind their cardboard signs, this woman was walking right out in traffic.

I was stopped at the light, Wilson and 3rd streets, maybe three cars in front of me, as she walked briskly down the double yellow line, a sign in her right hand, a clutch of roses in the left. 

I glanced only at the top line. In neat black printing on white poster board it said something anodyne like PLEASE HELP. There was more, which might have explained more, but I couldn’t focus on her sign, I was transfixed by her strategy, the roses, her dark hair and small, round face. I looked quickly in the ashtray to see if any stray dollars remained there, but it was empty. By this point she was looking in my window. I gave the sorry/guilty/ineffectual hand signal, and she moved down the row behind me. 

Then I saw the kids to my right on the grassy verge between the curb and the sidewalk, a Dutch Brothers coffee takeout on the corner. There were at least three of them amid a clutter of indistinct possessions. One of them, the oldest, was taking care of the youngest, a baby swaddled in some kind of seat or carrier. Nothing appeared tattered or filthy, just out of place and more than a little forlorn. 

I remembered I had an emergency twenty in my wallet, which was buried in a pocket in my backpack on the passenger seat. It was too much to give, and the light was about to turn green, but I impulsively steered into the exit drive of the Dutch Brothers, and dove into my pack. When I looked up she was there at my window, as if she anticipated what I was doing. I handed her the twenty, and she said, “God bless you! God bless you!” in practiced but heavily accented English, while pulling out first a red rose and then a white one and handing them to me. 

They had long stems, no thorns, and looked slightly careworn, though the buds were still mostly compact, not yet open. I asked her where she was from. “Bulgaria,” she said, drawing out the vowels. “How [I started to say How in the world] did you get to Bend?” “No English,” she said. “God bless you. God bless you.”

I wanted to ask Where are you going? How are you traveling? Are you alone with these kids? Where did the roses come from? How did you get them? Is this about refugees? Asylum? Immigration? The American dream? Gypsies? A scam? What? 

Some girls in a Honda needed to get out of Dutch Brothers, and I was blocking the exit. I put it in reverse. Luckily, the guy in the approaching pickup saw what was happening, stopped short and waved me back in the lane. I waved my thanks to him and then waved the Honda girls into line in front of me. The Bulgarian woman – if she was Bulgarian – took my bill over to the ball of children and refreshed her handful of flowers. 

When I got home Ellen clipped the stems way back and placed each bloom in its own little vase. By next morning they were beginning to open, unfurling in that delicate, miraculous way. “Those roses have a story,” she said. A story we will have to fill in ourselves.

Give It Away

My mother has given away as much sculpture as she has sold in her eighty-plus year career. And she did sell quite a lot: in clay, wood, bronze, and stone, through galleries and commissions.

Ellen and I have 16 of her sculptures in our house and one 100-pound marble outside based on an observed moment when our daughter Cloe was about four years old sitting, knees up, in a wicker chair with a huge towel wrapped around her head. My siblings and numerous cousins and friends – not to mention a few collectors and public spaces – have original Miriam Sheltons. 

By most measures, it has been a successful career. She sold one piece for $10,000, back when a dollar was a dollar. And she carved a 10-foot-tall redwood Christ, on commission, that got a lot of press, for a church in Southern California. But my mother has never been comfortable with the commercial side of her art. She’s always said that she wasn’t good at selling herself, which seemed to her a requirement for success in the art world, a requirement she resented. Shouldn’t the art, if it was good, sell itself?

She carved her first extremely lifelike wooden figures when she was a teenager in Berkeley. When we kids were growing up she would sometimes race into the kitchen at supper time, having completely lost track of time in her little backyard studio. We were a traditional 1950s family; Dad worked, Mom did not. Sculpture was her work, her escape, her affirmation. 

She is 97 now, sitting across from me at one of the relatives’ tables at her granddaughter Eliza’s wedding celebration. She is wizened compared to the May Queen beauty my father married in 1947, but still handsome with her thinning gray hair pinned back, her skinny frame inside a flowing kaftan dress. She lives alone, guarding her independence with a ferocity belying her years. But she doesn’t sculpt any more. We kids think it probably has to do with her failing eyesight, the macular degeneration which she has called, in confusion, her “macro dementia.” (It’s funny in the retelling in large part because she remains, much of the time, astonishingly sharp.) 

In fact, the sculptural output declined over years. The large marble and granite pieces were no longer possible after the studio space she rented burned in a Laguna Canyon wildfire. She might have continued at home, but residential codes prohibited using the air compressor she needed to drive her stone chisels. So she went back to wood and worked for years roughing out pieces with a small chainsaw. Then that became too dangerous and she returned to chisel and mallet. During this final phase, she created a series, upwards of 70 wooden figures, each about two feet tall: men, women, old, young, sailors, acrobats – each one frozen in a moment but standing, as all her people do, in balance, in anatomical truth with gravity. She called them her “Community.” 

But then even the Community stopped coming. Was it her eyes? Waning strength in her remarkably strong hands? No, she said. You’ll see, when you get old.

The buffet dinner has just been announced, and here come a line of Eliza’s millennial friends. Only they’re not lining up to eat, they are coming unbidden to pay their respects to Miriam Shelton. They’ve seen my mother’s sculptures in Eliza’s various abodes and they want to tell her how blown away they have been by them, how they’ve wanted to tell her so, and feel honored to meet her at last. 

These are genuine, not just polite, statements. The young people, like Eliza, in their thirties, are artists themselves: one is a filmmaker, others are designers and visual artists. They’ve studied, they know what they’re talking about.

As the praise rains down, in an effusive concentration I doubt my mother has ever experienced before, I wonder how much of it she is hearing. She earlier took out her “ear plugs” (another malapropism) because of the music and the general roar of the revelers. Cacophony drives her physically, painfully batty, so she took them out and handed them to me for safe keeping. Without them, she hears only a little in a quiet room, let alone in this fantastic buzz. 

The young artists lean in to voice their appreciation. My mother looks up and smiles and clasps their hands when offered, nods and says thank you, thank you. She is touched, perhaps overwhelmed, but I also see a hint of disbelief on her face. She has spent so many years, decades, armoring herself against perceived slights, and her own doubts. She knew she was good – she lights up to this day when anyone asks to have a tour of her studio – but I believe she felt underrecognized because of her commitment to representational art. In contrast to much modern sculpture, hers are recognizable, if stylized, human forms: mothers and children, ballet dancers, circus performers, outsized stone flowers and seed pods (I have a foot-and-a-half high single iris bloom, in olive wood, on my dresser), many of them finished to a Michelangelo sheen after days, sometimes weeks, of sanding with ever finer wet/dry sandpaper.

These young people could see the work involved, the skill and the vision, and they say so. They say she is an inspiration. Then they are gone to the food line, and I say (I think she hears me): “Wow. That was really wonderful of them to say all that.” Her cheeks are slightly flushed. She is discombobulated by the hubbub, by the cocoon of not seeing or hearing well, by being far from home, where she knows where everything is, and she can touch the walls and the furniture as she shuffles by, and the Community – most of them, the ones she hasn’t given away – stand on work benches she no longer uses, each piece draped in a white plastic bag.

great blue

I didn’t mean to startle him. Or maybe her. But it happens sometimes.

This time the great blue heron and I caught sight of each other at exactly the same time. It startled us both.  Heron took off, and I nearly tipped off my paddle board. Heron gathered air in her huge scoop wings and, with a sound like a snapping towel, leapt up out of the flooded grass.

To my surprise, she flew only about fifty feet away before settling again. Head high, broomstick neck extended, she eyed me for two minutes then recommenced feeding. Very slowly, she’d get low in what was for her knee-high water, pull her head back, freeze, stare, and strike, gobbling whatever it was in her long scissor beak. So quick, I couldn’t make out what it was she was eating. Whatever it was, there were a lot of them. She settled, stared into the water, struck again. And again.

I drifted around to a different angle, but I still couldn’t tell what it was she was gulping down. Whenever I dipped my paddle, though, I noticed small disturbances in the shallow-water plants nearby. The plants were arum-leaf arrowheads, lovely floating leaves three or four inches long that do indeed look like arrowheads and support delicate, three-petal flowers, white as snow. With every move I made some critter dove from the near-surface to the safety of the root tangles below. After a while I spied enough of them to see they were polliwogs, big round ones, as fat as a big aggie marble. 

So that was the breakfast buffet. There were hundreds of them, thousands. Easy pickings and good reason for her to tolerate my presence. Which thrilled me, because so often herons bolt from the river’s edge, or the lakeside slough, before I can get close enough to reassure them of my intentions. This one was too busy to mind.

What kind of proto-frog was she devouring, I wondered, not strictly up on my amphibians? I hoped it wasn’t the Oregon spotted frog, which was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 2014. While not so upsetting as the spotted owl, the little frog and its miles of designated critical habitat have stirred arguments over water and property rights, irrigation allotments, in-stream flows, and releases from Wickiup and Crane Prairie reservoirs. Decades of contention led up to the frog being listed, and the acrimony has not entirely gone away. 

If my heron was indeed snacking on spotted frog tadpoles, at least, I thought, she is a natural predator. More likely the little bundles of protein were the larval stage of invasive bullfrogs. So said a friend of mine when I told him this story. A friend who is retired from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The bullfrogs, he said, eat spotted frogs at all stages of their development. So, maybe Heron was chowing on bullfrog larvae. That would be better. 

Great blue herons are not endangered. I’m not sure why. Or why not. Here is this astonishing four-foot-tall feathered dinosaur with golden eyes, knees that bend backwards, and a Harpo-Marx honk – millions of years of evolution – surviving on the shores of slowly drying rivers and ponds and might do so for a million years more. 

And here is this ridiculous, soft, hairless, balancing creature, only recently up on two legs, full of ignorance and ambition, floating on his exquisite fiberglass barque, with his carbon-fiber blade (and his water bottle and his cell phone in its waterproof pouch)… And how long will he be around? How long before he realizes that it’s all about water?

“As for men,” Loren Eiseley wrote in The Immense Journey, “those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?”

Travelogue

A redtail sailed into the branches

near the top of the hundred-foot spruce across the street

just as outflow winds from an approaching thunderstorm began to rock the tree 

like John Muir’s Sierra Doug-fir

(he called it a spruce)

which he climbed in a wind storm and rode

like a carnival ride 

round and round, to and fro 

in “so noble an exhilaration of motion”

that it hit him:

“We all travel the milky way together, trees and men;

but it never occurred to me until this storm-day,

while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense.

They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true;

but our own little journeys, away and back again,

are only little more than tree-wavings – 

many of them not so much.”

A Fork in the Road

[Now, with the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe, this column of mine, from 2013, has fresh resonance, to go along with the anger and disappointment in America’s rearward direction.]

As the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade came and went last week, I thought, inevitably, about the abortion I caused, struggled with, decided on and went through with, in 1967, six years before the Supreme Court made the procedure legal. 

Not I alone, of course. My girlfriend had something to do with it. A lot to do with it, yes. And my mother. And my father. And a doctor I never met, who ended the pregnancy on a cold Sunday afternoon in December.

We could scarcely have been more naïve. It was my first physical relationship, the summer before starting college. That’s no excuse, but it was a fact as we explored and experimented and ended up, late that fall, with a couple of missed periods.

This girl, I’ll call her M., couldn’t tell her mother, so together we sat down with mine. There were some tears, but after the initial shock I remember the conversation settling, as most did in our house, into a reasoned examination of the options.

I had thought my dad would be the most ardent about getting an abortion. It had only been a matter of months since he’d given me some fatherly advice, expressing his hopes for my college years. He said those four years had been for him the freest, the most open-ended of his life, and he wished the same unencumbered time for me.

But Dad seemed intrigued when I brought up the possibility of our keeping the baby and my joining the Navy. He had been in the Navy during the war. We lived on the coast; we shared a love of boats and the ocean. (He was also a real straight arrow when it came to knowingly breaking the law.)

On the other side of the world Vietnam was raging. I had a student deferment, but nobody knew what might happen long term with the draft, and maybe, I thought, this was a fork in the road, the first in my young life, fate nudging me off the path most expected. I was more than willing to get married. I thought that was the outcome M. and I were headed for, whether or not we became parents at 18.

M. was not demonstrative on the Navy option. (We’d barely had time to talk ourselves.) She had also been more or less silent on the option of taking the pregnancy to term and giving the baby up for adoption. She was in college, too, at a branch of the University of California closer to home. Given the weight of emotion and the psychic exhaustion in the room after a time, I think she just wanted to do what was best for all of us. And by the next morning that best thing clearly was to terminate the pregnancy.

My mother was the one who, once the decision was made, steeled herself to action. She had friends, friends whose daughters had “gotten into trouble” and had to be rescued. M. and I knew nothing of this world; we would have been at a complete loss had we been on our own. Mom took over, arranged everything. She wasn’t happy about it, but she believed it was the correct solution. She was fond of M., but she knew it was mostly about the sex. She had warned me, gently, at the outset of the relationship. Too gently, I guess.

It was hard for me to think straight as I paced the alley behind the surreptitious clinic. It was too soon for perspective. But if I had been able to see the bigger picture, I would have realized how many lives were in fact saved that day: mine, M.’s (we parted, amicably, about two years after the abortion), probably M.’s mother’s, too – a single woman perched unsteadily on a financial and emotional edge. 

Our decision also saved, or made possible, the life Ellen and I found together, starting in our mid 20s. And the lives of our dearly anticipated children and grandchildren.

I couldn’t see the future then, of course. I walked up and down, numb and anguished both at the same time, while M. and my mother were inside.

I remember there was a lot of broken glass in the alley. As I walked, I stared hard at the shards, like stars in a black asphalt sky, reflecting the sun on an unusually brilliant early-winter day.

Headwaters

Before I got around to where the clothes-optional couple were camped at the far end of the lake, there had already been a good deal of wildlife excitement. 

Straight away I surprised a great blue heron, and he me, as he leapt from the sedges on enormous grey wings, sounding for all the world like sheets flapping on a clothesline. A tiny western sandpiper sounded her peeping alarm and blasted off from the shoreline rocks, furious wing beats inches from the water’s surface. Much more calmly, a mama merganser led her fuzzy brown and yellow ducklings down off the rocks into the water, where they feel most at home. Along the south shore, where head-high bulrushes march out into the shallows, I floated above thousands of fingerling trout, like a starling murmuration, roiling the glassy surface. Why aren’t you ospreys fishing here? I said aloud to the duet soaring over the lake’s deep-blue middle.

It was June 16, my first paddle of the season on Little Lava Lake, the nominal headwaters of the Deschutes River. Usually when I come to Little Lava, I point my paddleboard down the outflow channel, near the boat ramp on the west side, to drift over gravel bars until the river narrows and speeds up and I have to turn around and return to the lake. But this day, for the first time in the admittedly brief time I’ve been paddling – coming on four years now – there wasn’t enough water in the outlet to float my board. Bleached deadfall lay across exposed rocks. There was hardly any water movement at all. 

The low water didn’t seem to deter the naked people. They had their tent set up on a lava rock promontory, camp chairs pointed at the sun. Their paddleboards were moored just off shore. Later on, I saw them scramble down across the old high-water line – black rock above, gray below – to ease into the chilly water and swim out to their boards. The lake level appeared to be three or four feet into the gray.

A fisherman farther down the shore told me he hadn’t seen the water this low in years. What was going on? It had been a numerically average winter on Mt. Bachelor, with about 450 inches of snowfall at mid-mountain. Most of the automated Snotel sites in the Upper Deschutes Basin had recorded average, or nearly average, snow-water equivalents for the season. (The Snotel system measures the amount of water in the snowpack by weight, rather than snow depth.) I knew that Little Lava and its nearby bigger twin, Lava Lake, were both largely spring fed, drawing from a basin stretching north and east to the summit of Mt. Bachelor. Was it possible snowmelt had not reached the lakes yet? There was still a lot of snow up high. Mt. Bachelor’s massive cone hulked above, its western hemisphere patched half-white, like a paint horse. South Sister, taller but farther away, sported her usual solid early-summer snowfields. Maybe the water just hadn’t made it down this far. 

Or maybe an average snowpack was not the key metric. What else might be going on besides snowmelt? Other deficits? Issues of timing, or (shudder) of a changing climate? Maybe my experience was simply too limited. The Atlas of Oregon Lakes website said that sometimes high water didn’t come to the high lakes until late summer. 

On my way home, unable to think through the mystery, I stopped in at the Lava Lake Resort and talked with Joey Franzee, whose family has run the place – selling bait and beer, renting boats – since the 1980s. He seemed a little down. “Lowest it’s been in 40 years,” he said. He blamed last year’s dry summer. All the lakes were down last fall. Wickiup, the biggest reservoir on the Deschutes Project, emptied completely for the first time in its history. “Then comes winter. Frozen water doesn’t move,” Joey said from behind the counter, his toddler daughter, Kenley, wide-eyed on his hip. “It’ll come back up. It’s coming up now.” The words were confident, but his face wasn’t showing it.

It’s nearly impossible to measure the inflow, the groundwater discharge, into these high lakes. Creeks on which to place monitors are short-lived or nonexistent; the rock is just too porous for much water to flow on the surface. I knew, and Joey confirmed, that Lava and Little Lava are filled from springs in “the wall” along the east side of both lakes. The wall being his term for the lava flows that created the lakes beginning about 18,000 years ago. They came from the Mt. Bachelor Chain, which erupted, south to north, over a period of about 8,000 years. (At 15,000 years old, Mt. Bachelor is one of the youngest volcanoes in the Cascade Range.) 

There’s an informative, and rather wonderfully written, U.S. Forest Service sign at the Sparks Lake boat ramp titled: “Where Does the Water Go?” Sparks Lake, 10 miles north and about 700 vertical feet higher, was created by the same series of flows that dammed Lava and Little Lava, but it has no visible surface outlet. “Instead,” the sign reads, “water leaks out through fractures and cracks in the rock. Listen carefully along the shoreline and you will hear gurgling and sucking sounds – the lake is literally draining away. The water flows through layers of gravels and older lavas until it encounters an impermeable layer of rock which forces groundwater to surface as a spring. This water goes to places like Snow Creek, Quinn Creek, and Little Lava Lake, the headwaters of the Deschutes River.”

The last sentence on the sign was penned with a wink: “Sparks Lake has a secret: It’s the unofficial source of the Deschutes River.”

Which just confirms what Jonathan Lamarche, a hydrologist with the Oregon Water Resources Department, told me. I had asked him if anybody knows how long it takes for the snowmelt to percolate down and reach Little Lava Lake. “The short answer is I don’t know,” Lamarche said. “The complexity of the hydrology and geology means it’s somewhat unknown.” I had read, on Wikipedia, that the spring waters filling Clear Lake, across the divide on the McKenzie River, took 20 years to travel from their source on Mt. Washington. Lamarche was doubtful: “I would ask the authors of that article to explain how the estimate was derived.”

He pointed me to a United States Geologic Survey study, done in cooperation with OWRD, which charted the time lag between peak snowmelt and peak flow into spring-fed streams. In sequences of wet years, the groundwater discharge came relatively quickly; during drier spells, it took longer to reach peak flow. Lamarche used a garden hose analogy. “If it’s full and you turn the faucet on, you get immediate outflow. If it’s mostly empty, there’s a delay.”

So the aquifers themselves are low? “Overall, since about 2000, we haven’t seen the sequences of wet years that help recharge the aquifer system,” Lamarche said. “And that is probably reflected in the lake levels.”

Natural climate cycles? Or the specter of climate change? Like all scientists faced with limited data, Lamarche answered cautiously on the latter. “Qualitative conclusion – yes. Quantitative conclusion – no.” As the planet warms, “the amount of recharge is probably going to be less.”

On the cool early morning of August 5th I went back to Little Lava Lake to see what might have changed. The air was completely still, the water mirror smooth. If I looked cross-eyed at the surface reflection, I could imagine myself paddling up Mt. Bachelor’s remaining snowy furrows. Redwing blackbirds still clung to shoreline reeds, but the males’ scarlet shoulder patches had faded from their breeding-season brilliance. The fingerling trout were gone, perhaps to cooler, deeper waters? Perhaps eaten by bigger fish? My mergansers, adults and the nearly grown babies, rafted together in the middle of the lake. I paddled out to get a closer look, but they were in no mood to let me near. With their uncanny ability to triangulate my speed and approach angle, they steered their little flotilla to a constant, safe remove. 

The nudist couple had been replaced by fully clothed campers. Same quiet camp spot on the north shore, but this time I noticed a lot of gear and clothing hanging up to dry. The night before, a dramatic thunderstorm had turned our street in Bend into a curb-to-curb river. I asked if they’d experienced the same. The man answered cheerily, “Yup. Rained hard for about an hour.” He hadn’t quite gotten the rain fly on in time. 

So there was another source of aquifer recharge, if not nearly on the order of a series of wet snow years. 

I had felt hopeful a few days before on the phone with Melissa Franzee, Kenley’s mom. I’d asked if the lake was still coming up. “Sure is,” she chirped. And I’d felt the relief (or was it just denial?) that for one more year, maybe, possibly, perhaps, the direst scenarios of a changing climate might be put off, held at bay. 

Paddling around at last to the Deschutes River outlet – there was water between the grassy banks! I dropped down to paddle on my knees, against the possibility of running aground, but it wasn’t necessary; my fin floated clear. Down I drifted, without effort, feeling the pull. It was barely discernible but definitely there, the beginning of the big slide, downhill to the Pacific. With man-made pauses along the way: south to Crane Prairie and Wickiup reservoirs, then the turn north, the irrigation canals, Bend’s logging-era Mirror Pond, Lake Billy Chinook, the mighty Columbia, and so on down the line. 

The ancient, inexorable cycle. 

Epilog: I wrote this story in 2018 for a publication that decided ultimately not to use it. Since then water levels have dropped farther in Lava and Little Lava Lakes. The Deschutes River outlet has been bone dry for years now.

The Writing on the Wall

In a lava-rock back corner of a bay on Sparks Lake there’s a standalone tower that calls to me every time I paddle near.

It’s a wall about a dozen feet high above water, the end of a slender, buckled spine of lava that juts into the cove. I like it for the clear, green water underfoot. And for the gnomish gardens growing in its crevices: lichen and mosses, red columbine, purple larkspur. And on top a proud, twisted, bonsai pine living, it would seem, on air alone.

But this morning what caught my eye were the patterns of light reflected onto the slightly overhanging wall. The sun was in the right place behind me so that ripples on the water’s surface danced as pure white light up the black rock. Ribbons of light waved back and forth like strands of kelp, white-light Morse code appearing and disappearing on the rock’s craggy contours.

I thought of hieroglyphics. Moving hieroglyphics. Animated dancing glyphs on a cartoon obelisk. Writing on the wall.

Meaning what? Silly boy. No meaning other than the play of sunlight, the reflectivity of smooth water, the receptivity of a stone tablet.

But could it not somehow be deciphered? Like the Rosetta Stone, might there be some key to a deeper understanding?

Silly boy, I thought, as it hit me: The ripples doing the writing, the source of those oscillating shapes, were the ripples being generated under my paddle board. My unconscious balancing, my little weight shifts, created the squiggles being reflected. The writing on the wall was my writing. I was writing that moment in light.

Celebrate, come on!

A mini speaker near the lift shack played “Celebration” by Kool and The Gang. We stood in line, masks up, faces obscured, socially and maybe emotionally and even a little suspiciously distanced from the skiers and riders around us. 

And Nicholas danced. 

He looked to be in his early 20s, couldn’t have been born yet in 1981 when that funky dance groove hit Number 1. Though he, too, was masked up, and it was hard to tell his age. 

Nicholas – so his name tag read – was in charge of the lift line, calling out “Front row!” when it was time for the next wave to shuffle forward toward the turnstiles. In his sky blue Mt. Bachelor lift-op jacket he might have been indistinguishable from the other blue jackets raking snow, loading chairs. But he set himself apart with a floppy brimmed hat ala Bill Murray in “Caddyshack” and – and this is the important part – he could really dance. Not just bop along in place but really move, shoulders and hands, hips and feet, in seamless, swiveling, perfect time to the music. 

“Celebrate good times, come on!” Up and down the maze he pranced, pointing to the singles to slide on out (“Two singles!”), never putting a foot wrong, back straight, staying within himself, never quite inviting the crowd to join him. 

But we couldn’t help ourselves. People behind me started singing: “…we gonna celebrate and have a good time!” Other voices chimed in: “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time.” I found myself tapping my poles and bouncing up and down. 

I couldn’t take my eyes off Nicholas. I’ve never been a good dancer. Maybe it was a reaction against mandatory cotillion in junior high. Maybe I’m just a white guy without rhythm. I envied Nicholas his body ease, his unselfconsciousness. But standing there waiting my turn, involuntarily grinning (unseen, of course), fully infected by this man’s contagious expression, I felt the sun on my back (after days of stormy weather), felt the gratefulness that should flow on a day on a mountain of snow, and marveled that one guy, in a position of power no less (and Lord knows, there are enough grim-faced ones), had the ability to make scores of people feel that there was a party going on.