As I write this, a Red Flag Fire Warning hangs over the Rogue River Valley. Distant thunder and dark clouds, a rare presence in our resolutely blue summer skies, raise the specter of wildfires sparked by lightning strikes. Last summer, a rash of thunderstorms one weekend in July set in motion 163 wildfires across Oregon, with Southern Oregon bearing the …

The far-flung  town of Burns in Central Oregon, is not, strictly speaking, where followers of Ammon and Ryan Bundy took over a federal building and plotted the overthrow of the American government in 2016. That is 30 flat and lonely miles south. Still, Burns is out there, in the middle of nowhere. It’s the population hub (at 2,800) of Harney County, the largest …

Today, I became a sponsor for a draft horse named Gandalf, a rescue horse who lives at the Equamore Sanctuary three miles from our house. He’s black with a white spot between his eyes, stands almost 16 hands (5.3 feet), weighs 1,700 lbs., and believes in second chances. As a girl, I never went horse crazy like my nextdoor neighbor, Eliza, …

We sat in a circle, eight of us, listening intently as the distant calls of moose in the Hoh Rain Forest filled the small room. ”Silence—the absence of manmade sounds—is an endangered species,” acoustical ecologist Gordon Hempton explained. “Quiet is the think tank of the soul.” This spring I taught a class on podcasts at the nearby Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) …

My husband of almost forty years has become a step-counter, a serious step-counter, with 10,000 his daily minimum. As I write this, he’s making his way up the Mike Uhtoff trail in the mountainous woods behind our house, logging his first 5,000. The app in his back pocket, when he carries it, keeps track. Often, I’m a partner. When we …

“What is it like growing up in front of a video camera?” an audience member at the Ashland Independent Film Festival (AIFF) asked 12-year-old Jonas Brodsky. His mother’s documentary about his being deaf, Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements, had just filled the big screen at AIFF’s opening night, after debuting at Sundance in February. The film shadows Jonas from …

“It was love at first sight,” Ashland sheep farmer Kent Erskine told me as we watched two ewes and their ten-day old lambs frolic in his pasture. “I liked sheep right out of the gate,” he said. “I liked the way they go about life—they don’t have an attitude, they just do what they do and they do it well. …