Postcards from the Rogue Valley

“Can you see where you’re going?” I asked Tony as we crept onto Interstate 5, our car headlights glaring back at us in the thick, night fog. Three minutes earlier, when we left our house (elev. 2,200 feet) and headed downhill to the Interstate entrance (elev. 1,900 feet), a crescent moon hung in the sky. Now, 300 feet lower, a dense cloud bank rising from the ground erased not only the moon but also everything familiar.

We were headed 15 miles north to the airport in Medford, intent on catching a 7 am flight to see the young family we’d left behind in Brooklyn nine months earlier (surprising even ourselves by our sudden decision to move to Southern Oregon).

“We’ll never make it,” I said. “Even if we do, no planes will be flying.”

Cautious when I’m confident and confident when I’m cautious, Tony said, “It will work out.”

It did. We arrived at the airport just before the gate closed (an hour later than planned), and minutes after take-off we burst into a blue sky sun rise. 

Friends had warned us about the “inversion layer” that invades the Rogue Valley, notably in winter. As night temperatures sink into the 30’s, the area’s high mountains and a relatively deep valley keep out winds, resulting in moist, cold air settling to the bottom. Gain a little altitude anywhere in the valley and the fog clears up. Descend to the valley floor, and the fog can be as thick as peanut butter, as it was that December morning two years ago.

Upending summer

Last week, I found myself in the same fog phantasmagoria as I headed to Medford for an early doctor’s appointment, arriving a few minutes late. “Be grateful that it’s fleeting,” my newly-minted dermatologist said. “Climate change will not be that kind in this valley.” He is right, of course.

Summer had always been the jewel in our crown. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) dazzled on three stages, indoors and out. Diners filled the restaurants in the downtown plaza. Galleries drew affluent tourists while wineries (35, in all) lured tasters across the valley. For the intrepid, Noah’s Adventures, a local rafting outfit, advertised a one-of-a-kind, class III-IV+ whitewater run on the nearby Upper Klamath River. For music lovers, the Britt Music & Arts Festival brought world-class artists in classical, jazz, blues, folk, bluegrass, world, pop and country music to its naturally formed amphitheater set among ponderosa pines.

In the past three years, unremitting drought and wildfire smoke have diminished the party. Indeed the lights dimmed soon after we moved here. In 2018, a trilogy of wildfires in Southern Oregon and Northern California thrust Ashland into the headlines —“Worst Air in Country is in Southern Oregon” — and kept residents indoors for almost six weeks. Wildfire smoke not only burns the eyes and throat, but like dense fog, it also sets the sun. 

The facts are indisputable: lighter than average snow packs coupled with long dry summers have reduced reservoirs to historic lows across the region. Almost all of our precipitation falls in the months of November – February, and this year we are short again. Nearby Emigrant Lake is barely 40 percent full; we have been warned to expect a short irrigation season.

And it is getting hotter. The 2010’s produced more 90 plus degree days than any on record. When our Brooklyn family visited this August for a COVID lockdown escape, the temperature hovered around 100 degrees. All but three days this past August were over 90 degrees; 11 were over a 100.

The disastrous Almeda Fire, which levelled the nearby towns of Talent and Phoenix last September, brought a new level of destruction to what had already been the second-worst wildfire season in Oregon history, with over 1 million acres burned.  

It is a question I cannot bear to ask myself: Would Tony and I have uprooted ourselves so substantially if we had known that we would find ourselves on a hot summer day creating a no-ignition zone around our house and, in the winter, scanning the skies for rain?

Negotiating the pandemic

Who knew a year ago that it would be a virus, not embers, that threatened to uproot our lives. COVID’s  presumed transience — though decidedly not for those who lost family and friends or belong to the “long haulers” — may be its saving grace.

The adaptations to COVID, unlike climate change, are within our grasp, however tumultuous: turning our homes into workspaces and schools (for those with jobs that can be performed at a distance and those with Internet access), separating family and friends, breathing masked, and so much more.

There are silver linings, too. Pandemic-induced cabin fever is sending us outside this winter. The hiking trails above our house are more crowded than ever (which isn’t a lot). When I do get together with a friend (which isn’t often), we invariably walk and talk, often through downtown’s gracious Lithia Park. We’re not alone and thus the dance: pulling up one’s mask when passing others, letting it drop when the coast is clear. The ski slopes on nearby Mt. Ashland, rarely crowded on pre-COVID weekdays, are now packed midweek. 

If necessity is the mother of invention, there is plenty of that as well. On Valentine’s Day Ashland’s upscale Cucina Biazzi, closed for indoor dining, offered al fresco dinner (four tables) in its covered patio. Although the evening temperature hovered around forty degrees, my romantic buddy Kathy and her log-splitting husband took a chance. “The small fireplace helped if you were lucky to be next to it,” she reported later. “We extracted every bit of warmth we could from a big teapot our server placed in the center of the table. The food may have been slow cooked but we were fast.”

The Ashland Independent Film Festival, which ordinarily draws 20,000 visitors every April and features over a 100 documentary and narrative films, streamed a smaller curated collection. It was the first of many film festivals nationwide to go virtual, a gift for those of us who have come to savor small independent story-telling. I watched more films on Doc NYC this November than I did when I lived there (which was zero). This year, AIFF hopes to pair its April virtual screenings with a weeklong summer outdoor festival where films will be projected on a wall at the city’s science museum. 

Live theater, on the other hand, defied re-invention. The Oregon Shakespeare Theater went dark six weeks after it started the 2020 season and experimented with offering video versions of a few of its past plays. Unable to rehearse for a new season, OSF will remain dark until Fall 2021 and, for the first time, perform through December (a year and a half after COVID brought down the curtains on “Peter and the Starcatcher,” the backstory to Neverland).

On a personal level, I sense that I will come out of our pandemic a different person from the one I was when I entered. Maybe you feel this, too. Hardly a day has passed without my recalibrating my dials or redirecting my energy; in a life built too much around gaining the approval of others, social isolation has pushed me to think more about what helps me feel content.

Generativity in reverse

When I was a freshman in college, I had the privilege of taking a course with the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, perhaps most famous for coining the phrase “identity crisis,” one of eight life stages in his framework for human development. At age 18, I had a hard time getting my head around his next-to-last stage, which he called “generativity”: a need to nurture and guide younger people and contribute to the next generation.

When I became a parent at 35, I began to glimpse this role. Now, at 73, my drive to nurture the next generation has passed from my children to their children. As a grandparent of a 6 year old (Lucas), a 16-month old (Timmy), and a 10-month old (Damian), I imagine kindling in them some of the passions that have sustained me: attentiveness to language, curiosity, social justice, savoring the natural world — from ocean waves and mountains to sunsets and gardening.

When I was part of Lucas’s daily life, when we lived in Brooklyn, my precocious grandson peppered me with questions: How many moons are there (asked when the moon kept changing positions when we walked one night)? What makes us healthy? Is life fair? When I read to him and he snuggled against me, we shared more than words.

I am finding contact-less grandparenting, with its scarce opportunities to make a contribution and express love, harder than navigating the challenges of climate change or securing a COVID vaccination. Zoom may work as a forum for connection among adults, but not for the six-and-under crowd. In our family “chats,” babies Timmy and Damian either stare dumbfounded or struggle to get their hands on the screen while Lucas pirouettes around the room. 

Happily, generativity has flowed in the opposite direction, from the daily iPhone videos that show our grandkids embracing life: Lucas sledding at night down a dimly lit pedestrian walkway over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway after a winter storm; Timmy pretending to brush his teeth with an electric toothbrush mimicking the sounds the motor makes; Damian holding on to his crib and dancing to Mozart as he wakes from a nap.

Sometimes I string the video clips together to make short films. Although separated by  six months and 3,000 miles, Timmy and Damian often mirror each other. In one of my constructions, they each, days apart, discover the pleasures of eating green paint and digging in the dirt, the trials of pulling oneself up to standing and steering a spoon filled with avocado to one’s mouth.  

Months ago, I developed a new bedtime routine: I turn the lights off, settle under the blankets with my iPhone, and bring my grandkids close. 

“Send YaYa a blow kiss,” Kidist encourages Timmy back in Brooklyn. In the dark, I return his kiss, feeling hopeful about the morning to come.

Driving in the fog, creating defensible space, adapting to changes in our environment (from drought to novel viruses), redirecting, recalibrating, connecting through space, caring across generations, blowing kisses: these are both the provocations and the openings of these tumultuous times. 

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