“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
WILLOWS ARE SHORT-LIVED TREES. From my desk, I see a large redwood tree, 25 feet from our house, that may live 2,000 years (barring the end of the planet). The tall birch tree, whose white trunks fill our living room window, may last well into the 22nd century, unless it succumbs to the bronze birch borer. Willow trees, on average, live …
“Are you game?” my best friend Kathy asked, wondering if I would accompany her to the Klamath Independent Film Festival (KIFF) in Klamath Falls, a 65-mile drive through the mountains east of Ashland. Her short doc, The Road Between Us, was on the program. “You lead and I’ll follow,” I said. Over two days, Kathy and I would watch three …
IN THIS CORNER OF THE UNIVERSE, the sensibility is just, plain different. “Is that part of your job description?” I asked the cashier at Bi-Mart, our go-to, employee-owned discount store down the hill from us. “Yes Ma’am,” she answered. I was checking out when a woman approached the cashier. She had come back for a receipt for purchases she had …
I DON’T KNOW which my mother liked better: Brahms or fresh corn and peas. Farm stands and farmers markets were her holy grail, even if it meant driving 15 miles for three fresh tomatoes picked that day. I learned how to tell if an ear of corn was sweet and tender long before I knew how to make a bed.
The first Tuesday after Tony and I landed in Ashland, we headed to the weekly Rogue Valley Growers Market, a mile from our house. It was early April and asparagus, kale, and ramps were the stars. Foraging on his own, Tony found a cache of shiitake mushrooms that joined risotto on the dinner table. I discovered Early Purple Sprouting broccoli, a delicacy whose season came and went in a snap.
As spring ceded to summer, the weekly bounty grew larger and more colorful. Tony and the mushroom man became good friends and I got to know Red Russian kale and Mustard spinach. In mid-July, the smoke and heat dimmed the market and the festive spirit that brought neighbors together. The moment the smoke cleared and the heat abated, the market sprang back. Tables filled with tomatoes, eggplant, and pears shared the runway with humanely raised beef, goats milk, honey and more. Locally sourced tacos and empanadas vanished by noon.
The Rogue Valley Growers Market is one of almost 8,000 farmers markets nationwide, the fastest growing segment of the food marketplace. The Greenmarket Tony and I frequented in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, stocked by large farms in New Jersey and Long Island, was all about fresh produce—but not community. With over 80 vendors, the Ashland market aims for more: to create a public square around local, organic food and food artisans.
These are small farmers—in a state where 97 percent of the farms and ranches are family-owned and 1,100 farms have been operated in the same family for over 100 years; where agriculture is a top economic driver; where 80 percent of the Oregon’s agricultural production leaves the state and 40 percent leaves the country. Mirroring national trends, the average age of a farmer in Oregon has risen from 50 in 1982 to 60 in 2012. In the next two decades, two-thirds of agriculture property will be transferred from its current owners to someone new, with no guarantee the land will remain as farmland.
Earlier this week, I interviewed several farmers on my weekly trip to the Growers Market. They were eager to talk between helping customers.
“As farmers, our challenges vary from year to year,” Josh Cohen of Barking Moon Farm explained. “We don’t get to pick our challenges.”
Raising robust crops without pesticides and fertilizer is not one of these challenges, though smoke-filled summers bring new adversaries. Nor is dirt, grit, and long hours. The days when rosy-eyed city slickers saw a future in farming have passed. Twenty-four percent of all Oregon farmers in 2012 were beginning farmers, down from 32 percent ten years earlier. Finding and retaining workers—legal or illegal—willing to work long hours in isolated areas has always been a challenge; immigration raids only add fuel to the fire.
“For us, the toughest challenge has actually been scale,” said Josh, who started Barking Moon Farm with his wife, Melissa, 13 years ago, he with a degree in environmental studies and she in agriculture. The prevailing paradigm for new farmers is “get big or get out,” Josh said. He has taken a different tack. “We maxed our acreage [10 acres] in our fifth year, but it didn’t pay off financially. We decided to flip the paradigm and half our acreage.” Profits climbed.
Like fellow farmers who worry that hot, smoke-filled summers are here to stay, Josh has invested in cold weather crops. (Barking Moon grows over 50 varieties of herbs, grains, vegetables, and fruit.) “Winter is now our biggest quarter,” he said. He is riding a year-round, eat-local groundswell: names of small Oregon farms, like Barking Moon, now appear on local restaurant menus and in grocery stores, and families “subscribe” to weekly boxes of produce from community supported agriculture (CSA). Every school district in the state has a local farm-to-school program.
At Fry Family Farms, in business since 1990 and comprising 100 acres spread throughout the Rogue Valley (making it the largest local farm), diversification has been key. “People are hungry to know more about where their food comes from,” said Sianna Flowers who works for Suzi and Steve Fry. “But few will pay what it actually costs to produce the best fruit and vegetables. We make it up in other ways.”
Like Barking Moon Farm, Fry Family Farms counts on restaurants, schools, and CSA for revenue. It recently started a farm store, open every day year-round, which includes products and goods from other local growers. It has a processing kitchen that turns produce into jams, pies, and more. It runs a wholesale cut-flower farm (70 percent of cut flowers in the US are imported).
“Farming never rests,” Sianna said as she rang up mustard greens for a customer. Two of the Fry’s five young daughters have returned to work at the family farm. Sianna dreams of becoming a journalist. “What authors do you like?” she asked me, adding, “I really like Joan Didion.”
Lanita Witt and her partner Suzanne Willow have operated Willow-Witt Ranch since 1985. At their stall at the Growers Market, larger than most, there’s pork and goat meat for sale—also raw milk herd shares—along with eggs and a range of vegetables. Lanita, age 68, dispenses recipes along with produce and news. Visitors to Willow-Witt Ranch, 445 pristine acres at 5,000 feet, will find restored wetlands and forests, accommodations for farm stays, education programs, and wildlife, in addition to a model organic farm and ranch.
Witt’s parents were both children of South Texas farmers, displaced by the Great Depression. Until 2016, Lanita was a practicing ob-gyn physician along with a farmer-rancher. She now works two days a week in a clinic for the poor, a three-hour drive from Ashland. “It’s tough to work the land without a second job,” she said. These days, she’s hoping for a third: Jackson County Commissioner.
Food activist and author Michael Pollan says that farmers markets are more than places to buy food. “They’re important parts of the community. I meet my neighbors there, and I meet farmers,” he writes. He cites a recent study in which participants reported having ten times as many conversations at the farmers market than they did at the supermarket.
At the Rogue Valley Growers Market, civility is palpable. When I asked Josh Cohen about migrant workers, he quickly corrected me: “I prefer to call them Latino workers. They’re our neighbors.”
Farmers markets nationwide welcome shoppers with food stamps (today known as SNAP). At the Rogue Valley market, single mothers with young children inspect the tomatoes alongside Prius owners. When I asked May, with a toddler in a stroller and an infant in a sling, what brought her to the Growers Market, she replied, “Healthy food for my babies.” She paused. “And respect.”
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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.