TWO NIGHTS AGO, FOR THE SECOND NIGHT IN A ROW, our cat Pesto brought a live bat into our house, set it free, and followed it from room to room as the bat searched frantically for an exit. At one point, the bat caught its breath hanging upside down from the cathedral ceiling in our family room. (Please, no bat guano on our beige couch, I prayed.) We eventually opened the patio door and the bat’s next dip and swoop led it back into the dark. Last night, the cat and bat game took longer to resolve. Tony and I actually went to bed while the bat still hung from the ceiling. It was gone this morning.

We hope there is no Act Three.

A quick Internet search—“how to get a bat out of your house”—suggests that you call Animal Control. Otherwise, try to confine the bat to one room and open the windows, “hold a broom upright and guide the bat toward the exit,” can it, or smother it with a blanket. Where Pesto finds the bats is a mystery, though we suspect he has discovered a bat colony in the large blue spruce tree next to our garage and waits for fledglings to test their wings.

Actually, this is not the first feline-wildlife encounter that has occurred since we moved to Ashland last spring. A month ago, Pesto’s partner in crime, Buna (which means coffee in Amharic), entered the house with a blue jay half her size and half alive. We put it in a cardboard box and it died the next day.

Tony and I belong to the cat strata, though we like dogs, too, but never longed to walk one. A week before we moved from Rhode Island to Brooklyn, a coyote snagged our 14-year-old cat, Google. We arrived in Brooklyn cat-less for the first time in our life. We figured we were done with cats and we didn’t want to add roommates to our three-room apartment which already felt small. What were we doing a few months later, then, in a pet store in Williamsburg that collected stray kittens? Our not-yet daughter-in-law, also a cat lover, lured us there. An hour later we walked out with two kitties­—five weeks old, abandoned though unrelated, and, according to the pet store owner, inseparable.

After a round of ringworm (which sent us to the dermatologist), we all adjusted. Captives of a fourth-floor apartment, Pesto knocked over whatever he could and Buna leapt through the air catching flies. Tony built them an outdoor enclosure of wire and wood, off the door to our roof, and the two spent hours eyeing up birds and squirrels. One day a raccoon came to visit.

Figuring they were indoor cats, we didn’t let them outside when we moved to Ashland. Tony drew up plans for a cat palace, approachable through our bathroom window, where Pesto and Buna could climb and safely admire the wild life. (You can google “outdoor cat structures” to see what’s possible.)

Pesto and Buna had their own idea. The moment we left the front door open for more than a few minutes, they escaped. They have been outdoor cats ever since.

Alas, Buna’s affair with blue jays did not end with that first fateful encounter. Ten days later, she came screaming through the cat door at 5 am and hid in the bedroom closet, buried in my best scarves. She did not leave the closet for three days, though she accepted nourishment, affection, and a litter box. She wasn’t hurt, just traumatized.

Could she have been dive bombed by blue jays, avenging the death of kin? Just before Buna rushed in, Tony had heard the cacophony of angry jays. Again, the Internet had an answer (yes, blue jays do dive bomb cats) and YouTube had the visuals: “My Cat Attacked by Blue Jay!” “Cat Attacks Blue Jay, Blue Jay Wins.”

On the fourth day, Buna left the closet as if nothing had happened and ran outdoors. A week later, she caught another jay in the back yard. This time, Pesto intervened and the jay flew away, uninjured. What was Buna thinking? Apparently, not much.

On the other hand, the encounters we feared between our cats and wildlife have not materialized. The deer who stroll into our backyard from the meadow and forests beyond come to eat the pansies and day lilies. The cats watch them from a few feet away; the deer couldn’t care less.

In the Rhode Island suburb where we lived, coyotes were a common presence. Indeed, we lost two cats to coyotes. We have yet to see or hear a coyote here.

One night Tony saw a large black bear standing on the curb as he drove up our street, lined with houses. There have been cougar sightings, too. A sign on the hiking trail near us, created by Ashland middle school students, advises:

STOP: Never approach a bear or cougar at any time for any reason.

STAY CALM: Face the bear or cougar and do not run. Running encourages it to chase.

APPEAR LARGE: Make yourself look large. Do not bend over or crouch down. Raise your hands. Hold your coat open. Hold small children.

FIGHT BACK :Fight back if attacked.

MAKE NOISE: Make noise while hiking to reduce the chance of surprising a bear or cougar.

KEEP CHILDREN CLOSE: Always keep children close by and in sight.

AVOID WALKING/HIKING ALONE

It is my guess that neither cats nor humans are preferred prey.  A Google search of “bear attacking cat” turns up You Tube videos of the opposite: “Kitten Attacks Bear in the Backyard,” “Cat vs. Bear. Cat Comes Out on Top.” This June, the local newspaper, the Mail Tribune, reported a rise in bear sightings in downtown Ashland. A mamma bear with her cubs were the repeat stars, appearing in trees in Lithia Park near the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in one family’s garage and another man’s bedroom, on a backyard deck (where their frolicking was recorded by the owner’s surveillance camera).

There has also been an uptick in cougar encounters downtown. Here, the story is darker. For years, Ashland’s tolerant deer policy has supported a resident deer population that nibbles on weeds and sidewalk gardens and rests on lawns. A yet-to-be determined disease is weakening some of the deer and the cougars are on to it. Twice this summer, residents have come across cougars feasting on deer.

Back to cats and bats. Tonight did, indeed, bring an Act Three. This time, Tony was ready. The cats come and go through a small cat door in a window in our garage, which then leads them to a cat entrance in the door between our family room and the garage. (Don’t ask why.) Tony uses the garage for his workshop. Last night, he purposely hung out there and when Pesto popped into the garage with yet another bat, Tony cut him off, opened the garage door, and the bat flew out.

Tomorrow night, we will lock Pesto inside.

I am happy to report that the cats haven’t bothered the goldfish in our front pond.

“He [the cat] always has an alibi and one or two to spare.” – T.S. Eliot

 

NOTE: According to a study by the Smithsonian Conservatory Biology Institute, over 2.4 billion birds are killed annually by cats in the U.S, though cats will only kill birds during the cat’s first years of life, when they are agile enough to prance on them, which is why birds count as only 10 percent of their usual prey. Two out of three of these birds were killed by farm, strays and colony cats; domesticated and owned pets accounted for the rest. One study suggests that a cat in a village will kill an average of 14 birds per year, while a cat in the city will kill two.

Cats kill an estimated 250,000 bats annually; since research on the subject is scarce, this figure is likely a massive underestimation. Bats are the only mammals capable of self-powered flight and account for about one in five of all mammals living on the planet.

 

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“NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL stocking up on protein bars,” I said to the tall, unshaven man with 75 plus bars in his grocery cart. I was picking up a dozen bars for my husband, Tony, who has a thing for them. “What’s up,” I asked.

“I’m a skinny guy to start,” he said with an Australian accent, “and I’ve lost 35 pounds the past two months hiking the PCT [Pacific Coast Trail]. I’m stocking up for the last leg. I just ate two breakfasts.”

I had heard that August was prime time for PCT “thru-hikers” to hit Ashland, perhaps the most favored place along the entire trail to grab a few zero days (a day with no hiking), resupply, rest, and restore. Stretching 2,650 miles, the PCT takes three to four months to complete, with hikers averaging 20-30 miles a day, often through rigorous terrain. It’s certainly a good way to lose weight.

I wasted no time asking the question everyone asks: “Why?”

“For me, it’s about extending myself,” Will said. “I know it sounds lame, but I feel I need to go long to go deep.”

A few days later, Tony and I met a young German woman at Starbucks who was hiking the trail with her partner. The pair had saved for a year to purchase airfare and equipment and to meet the estimated $1,000 per month (per person) needed to subsist on the trail. Their visa was about to expire and they worried that they wouldn’t make it to Manning Park in British Columbia, the last stop on the PCT.

Again, I asked why.

“It’s like this,” Shira said. “I don’t want to be caught by routine. I don’t want to swallow ordinariness when I can inhale majesty.” “My English isn’t so good,” she added.

There is a phrase along the PCT, “Hike Your Own Hike.” It encourages hikers to hike according to their own goals and dreams and not succumb to other hiker’s expectations. “This is your hike. Hike it your way.”

As the name suggests, the Pacific Crest Trail traces the highest portion of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges through California, Oregon and Washington, roughly 125 miles east of the Pacific Ocean. It runs from the Mexican to the Canadian border. Some know the PCT as the trail on which Reece Witherspoon lost and found herself in the movie, Wild.

With more miles of designated wilderness and more elevation changes—from 13,153 feet to sea level—than any other trail in the United States, the PCT reigns supreme. It passes through nine of North America’s ecoregions, including high and low desert, old-growth and rain forests, alpine glaciers and meadows. “It symbolizes everything there is to love and protect in the Western United States,” says the Pacific Crest Trail Association, the trail’s administrative center.

I’ve been a casual hiker all my life, with a few special moments: hiking the 22 miles up and down Mt. Whitney in one day, backpacking in the wilderness north of Yosemite, hiking at 13,000 feet in the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia. The closest I will ever get to the PCT “experience,” though, is when the short trail Tony and I follow into the woods near our house crosses the PCT.

I’ve learned that the trail’s first champion was a 59-year-old armchair hiker, Clinton Clarke, who in 1932 recruited the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and Ansel Adams (among others) to plan the trail and then lobby Congress to protect it. From 1935 through 1938, YMCA groups explored and laid out 2000 miles of potential trail, prefiguring most of today’s route. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Trails System Act and, for the next 25 years, volunteers organized by the Pacific Crest Trail Association joined the federal government in removing trees to create a trail corridor, erecting bridges to ford streams, engineering switchbacks and retaining walls—and hundreds of other tasks involved in trail building. In 1993, the PCT was officially declared finished.

Although solitude marks the PCT, a powerful sense of community links hikers. Often at the beginning of a thru-hike, some hikers form “trail families” that look out for one another and plan around each other’s needs. Hikers give each other “trail names,” often derived from a significant or humorous characteristic or event associated with the hiker—thought to be a better way of identifying a hiker than her or his given name. (How many Emmas or Johns are on the trail at any one time?)

Technology adds ties that bind. According to the U.S. Forest Service, thru-hikers have cell phone coverage roughly 70 percent of the time, providing a life line to critical bulletins and emergency assistance and allowing for almost daily communication among hikers. Not surprisingly, hikers also use their phones to post on social media. The Pacific Crest Trail Association encourages hikers to add their name to the “2,600 Miler List” when they complete the entire trail; to date, more than 5,502 people have hiked the distance, 87 more than once. The PCTA also invites hikers to write and share trail journals, which it posts and archives.

Alice “Stone Dancer” Tulloch writes:

I’ve often been asked how the death on the Pacific Crest Trail of my husband, “No Way Ray” Echols, has changed me. Ray and I were approximately 300 miles into a northbound PCT thru-hike when he apparently lost his footing and fell about 200 feet to his death. I was hiking about 20 feet behind him when he went around a corner and disappeared.

That cliff marks a sudden turn in my life. But I’ve come to see it as symbolic of how the trail changes each of us.

At Ray’s memorial service, someone asked me whether I would hike again. Instinctively, I said, “Yes.”

Less than two months after Ray’s death I was back on the trail in Oregon, hoping for solace in making miles. The main strength I found was a new acquaintance with fearlessness; I had already faced the worst the trail could deliver and walked through it.

We come to the trail for lots of reasons. Beneath them all, we want to find out what’s really important in our lives. The PCT answers us by stripping life down to its essentials. We shed not only ounces and grams, but also the mental clutter of our ordinary lives.

In the silence of the wilderness, we wrestle with the demons of our past and discover they are phantoms. In every hot, tired step we are undeniably physical beings. At the same time, our spiritual selves soar.

Undeniably, the PCT strings together some of the most amazing wilderness on this planet. Our time on it satisfies our need to belong to the Earth. We will always hold close to our hearts the Milky Way seen from a tiny sleeping bag on some improbable campsite at the edge of nowhere.

It is unlikely that I will ever again marvel at the Milky Way from a sleeping bag in the wild, but our move to Ashland has brought me closer to the Earth.

 

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When Angus Bowmer, an outgoing English teacher and Shakespeare enthusiast moved to Ashland in 1934, he convinced town officials to bring back the fireworks and summer festivities that lit up Ashland before the Depression. He also offered to stage (and star in) a three-day festival of Shakespeare plays as part of the celebration. Town officials agreed, but they assumed the performances would lose money and organized afternoon boxing matches to offset the theater losses. In the end, it was boxing that went into the red. The actors in the Shakespearean festival—local students and residents—returned to adoring audiences the next summer and the next and the next.

Build it and they will come.

More than 90 years later, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) has become the oldest, largest, professional, regional, rotating repertory theater company in the U.S. It is also the country’s most diverse and inclusive company, with 70 percent of the actors people of color (in a town where 90 percent of the 22,000 residents are white).

Much more than a summer festival, OSF now produces eleven plays, usually three to five by Shakespeare and the remainder by other playwrights (many new), on three stages during a ten-month season. Under Bill Rauch, OSF’s current (but departing) artistic director, the company has become not only diverse but bold—connecting classic plays to contemporary concerns, showcasing Asian and African theater, privileging female playwrights, making unlikely cast picks (e.g., a female Julius Caesar), and more.

 

A SUREFIRE WAY to escape the smoke and heat here in the Rogue Valley is to head to the Southern Oregon Coast. Twice now Tony and I have made the 140-mile drive through the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest to Brookings, where the Southern Oregon Coast begins and Coastal California ends. We roll down the windows and breathe the cool air. A few miles later, the unique treasures of this region unfold: a world of rock arches and sea stacks, empty beaches, gentle surf, and forested promontories as far as the eye can see. These are public assets. Sixteen state parks hug the 83 miles of coast on Route 101 from Brookings north to Bandon, where Tony and I will head back inland.

For me, the “coast” has always meant the place where the land meets the ocean, where you hear the water move across the sand and salt hangs in the air. The California Coastline has been my soulmate for as long as I can remember.

When I was a child in Princeton, New Jersey, our family of five drove across the country in our old station wagon and spent August living next to the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, where my father earned a summer salary. We lived two blocks from Venice Beach and, air mattress in hand, I tested my eight-year-old body against waves twice as tall as me. I watched the sun set from the bluffs of Palisades Park. “It’s not over until the sky turns purple,” my mother always said. My brothers and I explored tide pools and hunted for abalone shells on the non-swimming beaches north of Los Angeles. (After Malibu, summer water temperatures along the Pacific coast plummet to the mid-50s, all the way to Canada.)

When our family separated and I moved to Santa Monica with my mother—she had fallen in love with a mathematician at UCLA—my ties to the places where the sand met the ocean melded with who I am. My first summer job involved tending preschoolers at a playground on the beach. Bikinis taught me most of what I thought I needed to know about my teenage body. I discovered the thrill of swimming in the ocean at night, especially when plankton lit up the waves at the end of summer, when the ocean was warmest.

One late afternoon in early September, just after I had moved from Princeton to Santa Monica and my heart broke with homesickness, my mother took me for a swim in the ocean, an ocean she loved as fiercely as I. There was an astronomical high tide and the water was unusually warm and calm, like an immense bath tub. I floated on my back, as buoyant as I’d ever felt, and remembered how lucky I was.

Years later, when I was a senior in high school, my parents left me alone with a friend of theirs and an unusual house guest: the brilliant and schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, made famous by the film The Beautiful Mind. He paced our small house, perhaps debating the voices in his head. Knowing the soothing power of a long walk by the ocean, I told our family friend to get his coat (it was a cold Sunday in January) and we drove to the beach. He and I walked separately in silence all afternoon.

Like the writer in a recent “Modern Love” column in the New York Times, I also fell in love with Big Sur when I was nine and the breathtaking views from the iconic Nepenthe, a family favorite on the drive up Highway 1 to San Francisco. I imagined marrying a rich man and living in a wood and glass house in Big Sur, down a steep dirt road marked only by a mailbox next to the highway. (The interest inventory I took in middle school had other ideas for my future: I’d live in a big city and be an orchestra conductor or a stewardess.)

I’d always heard about the beauty of the Southern Oregon Coast and it added to Ashland’s lure. When the first heat wave of summer descended in mid-June, Tony and I booked a room on the coast that morning and headed out. On the three-hour ride there, I searched my iPhone for not-to-be-missed trails and views and beaches. (Tony chides me about being obsessed with the “best.”) Quickly, it became clear that the best was everywhere.

The most cliff-bound section of this coastline begins just north of Brookings with the Samuel H. Boardman State Scenic Corridor, an 11-mile strip of land between the ocean and US 101. Within the park, the Oregon Coast Traillinks dozens of features, from Arch Rock and Thunder Rock Cove to Secret Beach and Indian Sands, where dunes roll across a bluff high above the ocean.

Annual rainfall here is a hundred inches a year (half that amount this year) and the moss and ferns grow lush. Fog is endemic. On both our trips, the sun and fog jostled for position. On our first trip to the coast, when we reached Cape Blanco Lighthouse, perched on wind-swept bluffs on the western-most point of the continental U.S, it was hidden in fog. An hour later, at the Cape Sebastian State Scenic Corridor, the fog suddenly receded to reveal 50 miles of coastline—a gigantic scroll of deep blue ocean and densely forested slopes giving way to precipitous rock faces and small deep-water bays.

When we woke the next morning at our seaside motel in Bandon, the fog seemed back to stay, not dense but damp.

All along the drive from Brookings to Bandon, we had seen the sea stacks for which the Oregon Coast is so famous. But at Bandon’s Face Rock, the stacks sit like giants half submerged in the ocean, not far from shore. Dark and brooding, they have eluded millions of years of erosion, marking former positions of the coastline, when giant plant-eating dinosaurs roamed the earth and the oceans were full of fish and squid.

For several hours, Tony and I walked in the fog among the ancient sea stacks and across the wet, grey sand in Bandon. We had come to escape the heat and smoke in Ashland and had found a land before time.

Back in the car, the radio buzzed with talk about the decade we almost stopped climate change but how we’re now losing the earth. Maybe when all else is gone, the sea stacks will remain.

 

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IT’S OFFICIAL. On July 23, Ashland had the worst air in the country. Smoke from at least one hundred forest fires blanketed southern Oregon, the product of more than 2,000 lightning lighting strikes from a rash of thunderstorms the week before. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) in Ashland’s air had reached the “hazardous” level. Local officials advised residents to limit outdoor activity and, if they must go out, to wear specialized “particulate respirator” masks.

In the days since, the air quality has swung between “unhealthy” and “hazardous.” The daily temperature has pushed 100 degrees. Precipitation for the year is half of normal (around 20 inches annually).

Fire season has come early to southern Oregon—indeed, to the West—on the heels of a brutal wildfire season last summer.

The view from Lower Table Rock, in the heart of the Rogue Valley, offers a high-altitude Eden. In the distance, the Siskiyou Mountains, home to some of the most botanically diverse coniferous forests on the planet, keep their counsel. Barely visible, the snow-capped stratovolcano Mount McLoughlin (alt. 9,493) touches the clouds. Below, the Rogue River snakes through a mosaic of green and gold pastureland, providing so much yet asking so little.

Tony and I lived in the valley for two months before we actually caught sight of the Rogue—yes, from Lower Table Rock. In many ways, everything about this Southern Oregon enclave opens eyes wide. You will see crystal blue skies by day and Cassiopeia by night, aging hippies—migrants from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond—rubbing shoulders with tourists from Arizona, cattle grazing near vineyards and pear trees flowering next to cannabis. Near the Rogue Valley International Airport in Medford, you will find a burger joint that also serves kangaroo, Himalayan antelope, and wild boar.

THERE’S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. In our deeply fractured world, Ashland offers an oasis, an alternate universe.

While the Supreme Court hacks away at our civil liberties, this southern Oregon town of 21,000 holds the Woodstock Nation tight. In few other places across America, I wager, will you encounter such a concentration of dream catchers, essential oils, women who have let their hair go grey and men with beards. Here, holistic medicine and spiritual journeys can raise hope, not eyebrows.

For many, it is the pace of life in Ashland that draws them in—along with the sweeping views across the Rogue Valley. “You gotta slow down, girl,” my best friend from high school, Kathy, said as we drove down Ashland’s main boulevard on my inaugural visit last summer. “This isn’t Brooklyn.”