Building Community, One Ski Run at a Time
A week before Christmas, Mt. Ashland Ski Resort, 20 miles south of downtown Ashland, kicked off its 2021-22 ski season. Opening Day on this small mountain is an outsized affair. Enthusiasts grab every parking space long before the lifts begin to vibrate. By tradition, folks dressed in “onesies” (one-piece snowsuits) ski for $25. Skiers who have not seen each other for months connect, teenagers gather and hoot, younger kids head to ski school, seniors stretch their quads. You may never see the folks you have come to know on the trails on the streets in town, but when you are here, a shared passion for snow sliding creates strong bonds.
Drought in Southern Oregon: A New Normal
The view of the Rogue Valley from Grizzly Peak, a spot named for the last known grizzly bear in Oregon, is nothing short of amazing. The Siskiyou Mountains flank one side, the Cascades the other, Mount Shasta looms in the distance, and rolling grasslands descend to the valley floor. As the crow flies, it’s roughly seven miles from there to where we live. A few days ago, as Tony and I skirted the peak on our return from a quick visit to Bend, Oregon—following the winding and disgracefully named Dead Indian Memorial Road—the sweeping views offered something we hadn’t expected: a large plume of smoke rising from the forest behind our house. Had fire season already begun?
And Still I Rise: Poems of Hope
On March 12th, Oregon’s mask mandate ends. In a world at war—in Ukraine, in our own democracy, in a planet of rising seas and burning forests—dropping our pandemic masks raises a sigh of relief, though our hearts are broken still. For years I have turned to poetry, as some of you may too, for perspective on darkness and resilience. Sometimes, the light shines quietly. When I was fourteen and feeling blue about my parent’s divorce, I discovered Emily Dickinson’s famous “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.” I wrote the first stanza on a piece of paper and carried it in my pocket: “Hope” is the thing with feathers/
That perches in the soul /And sings the tune without the words/And never stops – at all.
Totem Witnesses and Turtle Wisdom
“Alone in my Oregon studio, the world rushes in and I have a compelling need to give form to the local and global events reshaping our lives,” Ashland artist Betty LaDuke says in the introduction to the catalog of her newest work. Her exhibit, Fires, Fury & Resilience, opens this week at the Grants Pass Museum of Art north of town.Three years ago I chronicled LaDuke’s extraordinary story in another blog, “Do Something Challenging”: Paintbrush Harvest. She was one of the first people I met when we moved to Ashland, and she has inspired me ever since. LaDuke just turned 89. At the same time that the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, the humanitarian crisis on our southern border and, here in Southern Oregon, drought and wildfire were draining our souls, LaDuke had been creating a series of one-of-a-kind, carved and painted wood installations, infused with our collective maelstrom.
Our House Is On Fire: Climate Action Where I Stand
“Reports of our inadequate response to the climate emergency roll in as regularly as the tides,” David Remnick writes in this week’s New Yorker. The latest came from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), telling us that the crisis is getting worse even faster than we’d imagined. It’s hard to envision a louder alarm, and yet we seem able to sleep through it. Last week, I graduated from my ten-week course with Southern Oregon Climate Action Now and earned a “Certified Master Climate Protector” badge. My assignment going forward: to spread my new knowledge about climate change to others, believers and deniers alike.
Public Agency and Pigs on a Hill
One’s sense of powerlessness these days can stretch wide and deep, from Washington to Uvalde, around the world and back. By comparison, the struggles of a small citizen’s group in Southern Oregon to hold a reckless farmer accountable seem tiny. For those of us caught in the fray, though, they have been consuming. When I moved from Brooklyn to Ashland four years ago, I never imagined that my first foray into local politics would involve fighting a pig farm on a denuded slope near our house. Nor did I imagine that my initial engagement would grow into a three-year campaign, daresay obsession, to prod county officials to enforce the ordinances it proscribed and to uncover the harmful practices the operation, hidden from view and visitors, pursued with impunity. Nor did I understand how much accountability and public agency mean to me. Here’s the saga, what I’ve come to call “Pigs on a Hill.”
First in the Family: Stories of Perseverance
“College? Where I come from that’s another planet,” said Chyna Rodriquez, a rising senior at Southern Oregon University here in Ashland. “There wasn’t a person in my world who’d gone to college. Jail, yes. College, no. The first time I heard the word ‘college’ was in elementary school. I raised my hand and asked the teacher ‘What’s that?’” We hear so much these days about crippling student debt. For young people like Chyna, one of twelve siblings raised by a single mom tangled in her own demons, making it to college in the first place can feel like a journey of a thousand years. This spring, I organized a series of panels featuring Southern Oregon University (SOU) students for a class I taught at the university’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), a national program that offers noncredit courses for adults over age 50. The students on this SOU panel, save Chyna, were recent graduates, now making “lives of purpose,” as one put it.
Coming of Age with The Beach Boys
On a recent flight to Denver to visit our son and his young family, I did what I rarely do: I watched a movie. The documentary Long Promised Road about The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was the draw. In the film, released last November, longtime friend and Rolling Stones editor Jason Fine takes Wilson on an intimate road trip through Los Angeles, revisiting places that helped shape his career. Fine invites the interview-averse Wilson to reminisce as one or another of Wilson’s best known songs fills the car speakers. It got me reminisicing too. When “Surfin’ USA” topped the charts in March 1963, I was a sophomore in high school in Santa Monica, California, by then two years into exchanging my childhood in Ivy-clad Princeton, New Jersey for the teeny-bopper-heaven of LA. I loved Los Angeles — and I loved the Beach Boys. It would be hard to imagine a more exuberant soundtrack to Southern California in the early 60s than Brian Wilson’s soaring vocal harmonies.
Like the Ocean We Rise: From Oregon to Tanzania, Young People Confront Climate Change
“Greenland ice sheet set to raise sea levels by nearly a foot,” a New York Times headline read the other day. “Climate ‘points of no return’ may be much closer than we thought,” another warns. No wonder youth across the globe are taking to the streets, to the courts, to governmental organizations, to international conferences where the world’s powerbrokers and scientists meet, to local committees and commissions, to wherever they can make their case for climate action: “There is no Planet B,” “Our Future Is On Fire,” “When Leaders Act Like Kids, the Kids Become the Leaders,” “Bla, Bla, Bla, Action Now!,” “Like the Ocean We Rise.” And no wonder that climate anxiety, nicknamed “ecoanxiety,” has seeped into young people’s mental health. What once seemed like one-off occurrences—an historic flood, a raging wildfire, a once in a lifetime drought—have become part of an evolving narrative of inevitable, accelerating change, with large regions of the world becoming potentially unlivable.
Reminiscences: Growing Up in a Family of Mathematicians
The conversations at my dinner table growing up were not exactly normal. My father presided—the head of our dining table at night, and of the Princeton mathematics department by day. His method: tossing out riddles and problems looking for a solution. My middle-school–aged brothers, two and four years older than me, participated eagerly, chewing over possible answers along with their vegetables. “A 300-foot train is traveling 300-foot per minute must travel through a 300-foot-long tunnel. How long will it take the train to travel through the tunnel?” “Is it drier to walk or run through the rain?” Sometimes my father offered a mini-lecture, typically an introduction into the mathematical world of theorems. The “four-color theorem” received far more air time, in my opinion, than it deserved. (The theorem states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color.)
“Here’s my address. Write me a poem.”
I discovered Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry 17 years ago, introduced to this self-proclaimed “wandering poet” by a young fellow poet who joined our nonprofit What Kids Can Do as a writer and editor in its early days. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, Naomi Shihab Nye began composing her first poetry at the age of six. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, then moved to San Antonio, Texas, which has been her home eversince. Naomi Shihab Nye has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry and spent more than 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Her poems have a singular focus: our shared humanity. Struggling to keep my head above water in these sinking times, I recently turned to the “wandering poet” for ballast, mindful of her warning:
You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.
Still, here is a shiny plate of my favorite Naomi Shihab Nye poems.
When All the World’s a Stage (and Race is the Protagonist)
Tony and I weren’t the first pilgrims to southern Oregon who fell for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and imagined ourselves living here. While I wouldn’t call us diehard theater buffs, theater had been a constant in our lives. We were season ticket holders at the acclaimed Trinity Repertory Company in Providence and took in Broadway and off-Broadway shows as our pocketbook allowed. Our first summer here, we filled up on OSF, from Romeo and Juliet to Manahatta, a new play about a Lenape female lawyer squaring Wall Street with her Native roots. When the news broke six weeks ago that OSF’s new artistic director, Nataki Garrett—the first Black female director in the theater’s 87-year history—had been receiving death threats, I was both stunned but not surprised.
Moving People from Crisis to Stability: Our Unhoused Neighbors
There are a thousand and one scenarios for how someone’s life can unravel, perhaps over months or seemingly overnight, and discard them onto the streets. Homelessness is rarely a choice. Most often, it is a wrenching space of vulnerability. The “guests” and visitors who seek out Ashland’s recently christened emergency shelter and resource center, rising from the former Super 8 at the end of town, are as different from each other as you and me.
Just shy of his nineteenth birthday, Jason (the names here are aliases) has aged out of foster care. Anxiety, depression, and drug use stalk his days, while a furtive search for a place to sleep occupies his nights. Veronica, 68, has lived with her daughter and her family the past five years, but when failed rent payments led to eviction, Veronica, who is wheelchair bound, found impromptu shelter wherever she could. Garrett, a single dad and disabled veteran, struggles to raise his two children alone, cycling through temporary housing and unreliable employment. What worries him most, he says, is not being able to provide the stability his children need and deserve.
In the course of one week this fall, Jason, Veronica, and Garrett were among the 128 people who turned up at Options for Helping Residents of Ashland (now The OHRA Center), both hopeful and wary about seeking assistance. “Building trust is our starting point,” OHRA’s director Cass Sinclair, a former community outreach coordinator for Jackson County Public Health, emphasizes. Indeed, trust and dignity grace this re-envisioned space, which once housed passing travelers along Interstate 5.
Welcome to the Brink of Everything: Thoughts from Parker Palmer
Every day, I get closer to the brink of everything. We’re all headed that way, of course, even when we’re young, though most of us are too busy with Important Matters to ponder our mortality. But when a serious illness or accident strikes, or someone dear to us dies — or we go to a class reunion and wonder who all those old people are — it becomes harder to ignore the drop-off that lies just over the edge of our lives. Age brings diminishments, but more than a few come with benefits. I’ve lost the capacity for multitasking, but I’ve rediscovered the joy of doing one thing at a time. My thinking has slowed a bit, but experience has made it deeper and richer. I’m done with big and complex projects, but more aware of the loveliness of simple things: a talk with a friend, a walk in the woods, sunsets and sunrises, a night of good sleep. I have fears, of course, always have and always will. But as time lengthens like a shadow behind me, and the time ahead dwindles, my overriding feeling is gratitude for the gift of life.