Postcards from the Rogue Valley

The persistent heat here in Southern Oregon this summer, combined with wildfire smoke, has created its own peculiar lockdown for local residents. Come early afternoon, it’s best to hibernate indoors as the heat and smoke reach their crescendo. Night offers little respite. The peak temperatures of late afternoon linger well into the evening. 

This past Sunday, the lockdown began early as smoke cloaked the landscape and an acrid smell hung in the air. I figured this was a good day to write, my ballast in this topsy-turvy world, and I ended up with this account of the day before.

Cre-ee-ee-eeek! Cre-ee-ee-eeek! Ribbit!

For the past four months, a chorus of Pacific Tree frogs in the fish pond ten feet from our bedroom has kept us company.

At first there was just one frog, then two (or so it seemed), then three (maybe). Mating or not, they’d sing alta voce for several minutes, then stop all at once as if following a conductor’s baton, then resume their cacophonous melody, again and again, night and day.

Don’t they ever get hoarse? I wondered. 

Two inches long, experts at camouflage, hidden by the lily pads in our pond, hibernating in winter — the frogs lived incognito with the goldfish colony who were there first. They moved in three springs ago, when a young boy walking up our street asked if he could toss the tiny frog he’d just found in our pond.

“Sure, why not,” I said.

Last spring, the young girl who lives across the street from us contributed a frog she’d just found in her backyard. This spring she added another. We’ve never been sure of the frog census from year-to-year. Throw in mating and the few eggs that may have metamorphosed into frogs (we suspected the goldfish ate their fill), we’ve only spotted one of our amphibian guests, despite our best efforts. Binoculars didn’t help. 

Early yesterday morning, out of the blue, Tony and I woke to an eerie silence. Was our frog chorus sleeping in? Two hours later, the pond remained silent.

Had they vanished, just like that?  When dusk fell fifteen hours later, without a cre-e-e-k or a ribbit, we had our answer: they were gone.

Did they pack up in the middle of the night and head for another home? Had they lost their voice after more than 10,000 hours of singing? Had a month of daytime temperatures above 100 degrees cut short their life (which averages eight years)? Might the frogs re-appear to disappear again at the end of September, when the frogs in our pond normally quiet for the season?

We’ll never know. 

A morning hike

Heat and wildfire smoke make poor hiking companions. 

Ordinarily, Tony and I hit the mountain trail a block from our house by mid-morning, earlier in the summer. For the past month we’ve taken a different tack. 

On days like yesterday, which promised temperatures in the high 90s and a smoke-drenched landscape, we drove to downtown Ashland at 7 a.m. to walk the forested trail through Lithia Park, the city’s crown jewel.

This past May the Ashland Creek, which forms a canyon the length of the park and up to its headwaters near Mount Ashland, offered a cascade of water. Winter snowfall, above normal March rains, and a spring heatwave that melted the snowpack in a flash, had sent water hurtling down.

Yesterday, we could barely hear the creek flowing as the water meandered instead of rushed against the boulders. (When I asked Google later on whether the Ashland Creek had ever gone dry, stories and videos of the New Year’s Day in 1997 when the creek flooded the downtown with three feet of water filled the screen.) 

Nor did we hear the pops of plastic balls bouncing off the pickleball courts that flank the trail. A favorite hangout for Ashland’s early-rising, athletic elders, the courts were empty this August morning.

We watched a doe with two speckled fawns drink from a shallow pool in the creek. Mother does, we’ve observed, don’t keep a close eye on their offspring and, as we watched, mom moved on with one of the fawns, leaving the other behind. Five minutes later, the left-behind was still searching for its kin.

Like the day before, the resident ducks in the pond at the entrance to the park were nowhere to be found. The warning sign, “Don’t Feed the Ducks,” had no call.

Air conditioning and popcorn

For the past six months, Tony has been a mentor — a weekly friend — to 16-year-old Alex who lives with his adoptive mother in Talent, five miles north of Ashland. The day before, Tony and Alex had agreed to escape the heat and catch a matinee at the city’s remaining theater (COVID killed the other). Landon’s pick: “Despicable Me 4.”

I decided to join them.

This time of the year, through-hikers from the Pacific Coast Trail populate Ashland, taking “zero” (a.k.a. no mileage) days to pick up mail and supplies, clean up, rest, and catch a break from freeze-dried meals.

At the Varsity Cinema, two groups of backpackers bought tickets ahead of us — also to “Despicable Me 4” — and then loaded up on huge tubs of buttered popcorn. The theater was otherwise empty. 

When I’d had more than I could bear of “Despicable Me’s” slapstick gags (starring the “world’s favorite supervillain-turned-Anti-Villain League-agent”), I headed to the lobby to clear my head. There I ran into Claire and Jeff, two of the backpackers we’d encountered when buying our tickets. 

“How do you like the movie?” I asked.

“Oh, we’re not really here for the movie,” Jeff said. “We’re here for the dark, the air conditioning, and the buttered popcorn. I guess you’d call it a mini-vacation from the Great Outdoors.”

“What brings you?” Claire asked me. “Not sure,” I answered.

“Postcarding” with the Olympics

I have a lifetime addiction to the Olympics and a recent commitment to sending 100 postcards to Montana voters plugging the re-election of Democrat Jon Tester to the U.S. Senate. 

Looking for a way to chill out from this hot and smoky day, I spent the evening catching the US women’s soccer team’s final match and the women’s 400-meter relay race while reminding Montanans of Tester’s contributions to the Inflation Reduction Act.

Truly, I have watched the Winter (my preferred) and Summer Olympics since 1960. In the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, I remember the Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila running barefoot and becoming the first Black American Olympic Champion and Wilma Rudolph storming the gold in the 100m, 200m, and 4X100m relay, earning the nickname “The Black Gazelle.” 

Eighty-seven percent of the 5,347 athletes at the 1960 Rome Olympics were male. At the time, I was much more tuned into race than gender.

For me, the stars of the 2024 Paris Olympics were, hands down, the women. For the first time in Olympic history, the male-female split among the competitors (10,714!) was 50-50. Of Team USA’s 40 gold medals, 26 were won by female athletes, meaning women were responsible for 65 percent of Team USA’s gold medal victories.

The excitement of watching the U.S. women’s soccer team win their first gold medal since 2012 and the women’s 4X400 team hug at the finish line surely eclipsed the closing line in my postcarding: “Let’s re-elect Tester to the U.S. Senate so that he can continue working to lower costs for hard-working Montanans.”

I never cared much for politics as a sport.

(This morning, I commissioned the girl across the street to find us another Pacific tree frog or two.)