Pandemic Diary — November 9 to 21, 2021

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Had a bit of adventure at lunch today, in the somewhat peculiar town of Philomath. This little town (whose name is pronounced with a stressed long ‘o’ and a schwa ‘a’) is partly a bedroom community for Corvallis and partly a rural lumber town with a very different flavor from Corvallis. We went to a restaurant called the Tap House, which opened recently in the space that used to be the town hardware store. (The hardware store has moved into larger quarters where the food market used to be.)

We walked in to find that the place was crowded and that there was nary a mask in sight. Of course masklessness is normal around here for restaurant customers once they have taken their seats. We’re used to that. But this was the first time in a coon’s age that we’d seen staff without masks. We’re pretty sure that’s a violation of state rules. On the other hand, the staff were friendly and efficient; the whole atmosphere of the place seemed upbeat; and the food was not too bad. Staff masking and table spacing make a difference though. We won’t be going back there.

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Another adventure today, a drive up to a mall near Portland. E’s favorite shoe store was having a Ziera sale. And what a sale it was! And even more amazing was the great variety of shoes in stock in E’s size. The final haul was three pairs of Zieras for a total of $116. In the reckoning of the friendly shoe salesman, that was a savings of $400. But wait, how can you save by spending?

E then celebrated having saved so much money by spending some quality time at J Jill, where she also found items of interest. M spent this interval in the Bridgeport Barnes and Noble, which is really quite nice.

Friday, November 12, 2021

E has decided that she wants to have oak trees in our front yard. She has been told that they are the single most important species that one can plant in support of other native species of all types. She has also heard that they grow best in groves. So an oak grove we will have. This raises many questions. How many oaks constitute a grove? We’re thinking three. Must we use acorns or can we plant oak seedlings or saplings? The latter. Where do we find these? One seedling is already growing near the house in an inappropriate place. We’ll move it to our grove area. That’s one. We’ll have to go to Garland Nursery to get two more. What kind of oaks exactly? Oregon white oaks, of course, Quercas garryanna. Are we sure that the volunteer in the yard is a white oak? No, but it’s an oak and it can’t stay where it is and we can’t kill it, so it has to go into the grove. Really? Yes. So are we going to the nursery now? Yes. But if we go to the nursery, won’t M be tempted to buy more bulbs even though he is running out of places to put them? Hmm.

Saturday, November 13, 2021

Morning: We marched out and finalized the location and design of the front yard oak grove. E dug holes at selected spots and discovered a couple of pieces of plastic that had broken off of the lawn mower. M went around to the back and planted bulbs. 

Afternoon: M enlarged the holes and planted one volunteer seedling, one purchased seedling, and one purchased sapling. Oh boy. We’re going to have oak trees! There will be a majestic mass of foliage that from a distance might look like just one tree but when you get closer you’ll see that it’s actually a whole grove of oak trees. Yes, we can see it already in our mind’s eye…which is good because oaks grow so slowly that there’s no way we’re going to live long enough to see them with our real eyes. (But as a good book says: The Land of Illusion and the Paradise of Truth are one and the same.)

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Partly sunny and 63 today, a good day to rake a few leaves and mow the back yard grass. Plus, we had raspberry coffee cake for breakfast. For dinner aloo gobi, raita, and naan. We’re planning an excursion to the town of Prineville. We’ll stay there tomorrow night and, weathering permitting, we’ll hike on Tuesday. 

Monday, November 15, 2021

It was raining as we left Corvallis at 1:30 and headed east. The trip took a little more than three hours and the rain was with us almost all the way, sometimes just a little, but usually quite a lot. The storm was moving from west to east just as we were, so we had time to get to be friends. The drive through the mountains was beautiful–the low gray sky, the dark green trees covering the mountainsides, the few remaining spots of fall yellow from the understory plants along the road. It’s never really fun to drive in a hard rain, but on this day the road was almost empty and the blanket of clouds made everything quiet, insulating us from the rest of the world. After two hours, as we got out of the mountains and onto the high plains, the storm broke apart and the rain lessened. By the time we entered Prineville it was hardly there at all. 

Euro-americans first entered the area in the 1800’s. They found a land of abundant grass and year round water. It struck many of them as an ideal place to raise cattle and make a home. Of course there were some non-Euros already living there. Accordingly, in 1855, the U.S. government decreed that 500,000 acres of relatively poor land would become the Warm Springs Reservation while 9,500,000 acres of the good stuff would be open for settlement. By 1877, when the city of Prineville was incorporated, there were dozens of ranches in the area–and plenty of conflict between cow people and sheep people.  

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

We woke up this morning to find the sun shining with the temperature in the high thirties and rising. We’d been a little worried about the idea of going hiking in this area in November, but it turned out to be the perfect day for it. (Masterful planning on our part….or luck. Whatever.) After a leisurely breakfast, we set off to find the trail to Chimney Rock, which we had picked out from M’s new hiking guide. Chimney Rock looked to be a short and fairly easy climb, not too far from town. Getting there is easy, just go south on Main Street, which turns into Oregon Highway 27, which follows the Crooked River up Crooked River Canyon. The canyon is lovely and the river is small and placid at this time of year. This is high desert country, so most of the rivers are small. It’s 17 miles from town to the trailhead and for most of this distance the road just meanders along beside the river. At one point, though, the canyon narrows and the road rises up above the river and runs along the top of a palisade. 

Once we were through that stretch, the road descended back to the river level and we found Chimney Rock campground on our right and the trail head on our left. It was just a little after 10:00 at that point and the hike was only three miles long, so we decided to leave our lunch in the truck and have it when we got back. (A foolishly optimistic plan, but it worked out okay.)

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

The skies over Prineville stayed mostly clear overnight, and the temperature dipped into the twenties. When we went to breakfast, it was up to 31 and we had to scrape frost from the windshield. We hadn’t done that for a while. We were headed home, but first we did a short walk around Prineville. We found that there is a nice multi-use path along a creek that runs from east to west through the length of the town. We saw two big herons along the way. One was shy and flew away from us. The other regarded us silently from the top of a pole as we passed.

Lastly we took a look at the Bowman Museum, which is located in a very nice old stone building at the corner of Third and Main. There were a series of displays on various aspects of the city’s history, including one on the rags-to-riches story of Les Schwab and his tire store empire. Schwab was born in 1917 and went to primary school in a boxcar parked at a timber camp. At fifteen he was orphaned and had to go out on his own. In 1951, at the age of 34, he scraped together enough money to buy a tire shop in Prineville. By 1971 there were 34 Les Schwab tire stores and by the time he died in 2007 there were 410. Schwab’s management policies were notable for their focus on employee loyalty and included full health benefits, a generous profit-sharing plan, and a policy of only promoting from within. Schwab’s maketing focused on fast, enthusiastic service and free flat repair. 

Schwab outlived both his children. The eldest, a son, was being groomed to take over the business when he died in a car accident at the age of 31. In the end it was Schwab’s daughter, Margaret Schwab Denton, who stepped in to run the business when her father retired from day-to-day management in the late 1980’s. This she did very successfully until she died of cancer in 2005 at the age of 53. Her father passed soon after.

There is of course a lot more to the Bowman museum. We especially noted a long glass case with a collection of at least two dozen vintage and antique mouse traps. We regret not asking the person at the desk how that particular exhibit came to be there.

Oh, and one final note, the City of Prineville once owned a small railroad, one that was so profitable that for a period of years in the middle of the last century, city residents paid no property taxes. 

In the middle of the day we stopped for a nutritious lunch of donuts from the Sisters bakery, then retraced our route over the mountains and back to the Willamette Valley. In the highest parts of the trip the rain-soaked forests that we had driven past two days ago were now dusted with a bright layer of confectioners sugar…or something.

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Tertulia this morning at Coffee Culture. It’s not as cold as Prineville, but we still got a little chilly sitting outside under the big white tent. 

These are somber days. A long-time friend has died. A family member is in difficulty. Spouses are being forced to somehow get by on their own. You wonder how you can help. You wonder about your own demise.

Sunday, November 21, 2021

Sometime way back in the early summer E picked blueberries in her friend P’s back yard. Some got eaten, some got frozen. Some got used today making blueberry pancakes. Later on, M took advantage of the weather–cloudy but dry–and took the Boxster out for some exercise. There are some nice country roads out east of I-5, where he saw lots of bright green fields covered with shoots of new winter wheat and seed crops. Green fields in November are a normal sight in these parts, but every year they still surprise us. While M was out, E worked on the family gift exchange, figuring out who gives to whom and sending out messages informing the givers of their recipient’s snail mail address–quite a task. She took a long walk in the middle to clear her mind. 

In the evening we watched the Season 1 finale of Velvet, a Spanish series on Netflix. Such drama! Such beautiful clothes! Such complete lack of politics. There are even some beautiful cars.