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. …

“I think you put too much contrast in my eye,” I told my eye surgeon at the one-week post-op visit following my first corneal transplant. Tony and I had driven that morning from Ashland to Portland, where the surgeon, Dr. Mark Terry, weaves his magic. The night before, the air bubble that had been holding my transplanted cornea in place …

Winter storms on the West Coast pack good with bad. In Oregon, where two years of insufficient rain have emptied reservoirs and fueled wildfires, we entered this winter praying for weather: rain in the valleys and heavy snow in the mountains with its promise of spring and summer melt. November, December, and January—typically the wettest months here contributing 9 of the annual 20-inch rain total—failed to deliver.

In the early 1900s, throngs of tourists would detrain at the Southern Pacific Railroad station at “A” Street in Ashland with bathing suits tucked in their bags. A 1915 Southern Pacific Railroad flyer heralded Ashland as a resort city on the “Shasta Route,” midway between Portland and San Francisco, with eight trains arriving and departing daily between the two cities. …