Meandering on the Way — May 5 to 15, 2023

Friday, May 5

When we hike, we always like to have a small piece of chocolate and a little nip of something to finish off our lunch. You can imagine how stressed we were to discover that one of our two drink cups was badly cracked. We couldn’t just replace it from where we got it (Taco Time) because that source has switched to environmentally sound paper cups. Much as we applaud that change, it left us high and dry when it came to wee dram sized cups. What were we to do? We checked online and found that we could get either 125 cups for $2.55 (just over two cents per cup) or 2,500 cups for 27.99 (just over one cent per cup). Clearly, the large order would be a better deal. But what would we do with the 2,499 extra cups? How often do we go hiking with that many friends? Hmm. Fortunately, one of our local supermarkets has saved the day. E noticed that the store was giving away tiny samples of super expensive cheese and that each sample came in its own 1-oz. translucent plastic Solo cup! Whoopee. Now we have three good cups, the oldest one being slightly yellowed but still in good working order.

Saturday, May 6

Lots of yard work today. E replanted a succulent that hadn’t been doing well and also worked to keep her Russian sage from being smothered by the weird, super prolific blue flowered plants, the ones that go crazy this time of year. Here are some of them trying–hopefully in vain–to strangle our red rhododendron.

Sunday, May 7

M went out and tried again to drive between Harlan, just south of Highway 20, and the Falls Creek fish hatchery, just north of Highway 34. He had tried it from north to south last time but came out in the wrong place. This time he tried going from south to north, but didn’t get anywhere at all because Falls Creek Road was closed just three and a half miles in. He found some consolation by driving up into the Alsea Falls area and discovering a new way to get from there to Dawson.

Dawson, by the way, is home to the old Hull-Oakes lumber mill. For a long time, Hull-Oakes was the last steam powered sawmill in the country. It’s not primarily steam powered anymore, but the mill continues in operation and has an old-timey feeling. The steam power system is still in place ready to start up again at a moment’s notice. (Or maybe a day or two’s notice, but you get the idea.) There’s a nice video about Hull-Oakes here. You can follow the process from log truck to log pond, to cutting bed, to lumber yard. Incoming logs are hand measured and nothing is computerized.

E took a long walk in our little forest close to home and later worked on re-reading The Lincoln Highway, which is up for discussion in her book club this month.

Monday, May 8

We went on a tour of an area managed by Greenbelt Land Trust, our local land protection organization. The tour took place on a protected area of four hundred and four acres along the Willamette River about twenty miles south of Corvallis. It’s called Harkens Lake and is the result of conservation easements purchased by GLT from the owners, one portion in 2011 and another, smaller one in 2017. Both sections are former agricultural land that is being restored with the aim of re-creating a natural riverside forest that includes backwaters and seasonal wetlands. GLT estimates that this will not be fully achieved for another 150 to 200 years, but they’ve got a start.

In this satellite photo the conservation area shows up as a large, roughly triangular shape in the middle of the picture. Near the bottom of the photo, where two rows of trees come together to make one point of the triangle, there is a gate that now blocks the road. There were about two dozen of us on the tour and we all parked our vehicles in a wide space just in front of that gate. We had a brief introduction to the project from our GLT tour host, who then introduced Jim Cassidy, an OSU instructor, farm manager and soil scientist, who had agreed to come along and give us some information about soil: soil in general, local soils in particular, and the changes in soil that result from transitioning agricultural land back to natural forest.

Then we started off, walking around the gate and heading northeast paralleling the river. The small light colored area on our left was the most recently acquired easement area and had been replanted with native species just three or four years ago. Our road veered left, away from the river. Soon we came to a restored area from the oldest easement area. The horizontal line in the center of the photo marks the border between the old and new sections. The plants and trees in the older part are darker green in the photo.

At several points on the walk, we stopped to get mini lectures on various soil related topics. The basic nature of Willamette Valley soils is that they were deposited in the valley by gigantic floods that occurred at the end of the last ice age, from 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. These floods were caused by the collapse of ice dams that were up to two miles high. When one of these collapsed due to warming temperatures, a lake the size of Lake Superior would suddenly be released and go rushing westward toward the Pacific Ocean, carving out some incredible geologic features along the way. The floods eventually came down the Columbia Gorge–creating the Gorge as they did so–and most of the water and debris went west out to sea. The floods were strong enough to carry massive boulders along with them and it is now possible to find large pieces of stone from Montana and British Columbia on the ocean floor fifty miles west of the current mouth of the Columbia River.

On their way to the Pacific Ocean, the floods passed the mouth of the Willamette at what is now the city of Portland. At this point a small portion of the flood waters spread south down into the Willamette valley. This small portion was enough to carry so much silt and gravel that when the last flood receded, the original landscape was covered with a hundred or more feet of new soil and the formerly rugged terrain was dead flat. So the first thing to know about Willamette Valley soil is that it all comes from somewhere else. “See this?” asks Jim, holding up a rock he just picked up from a ditch bank. “This is metamorphic rock and the nearest natural metamorphic formations are in British Columbia.”

The small red pin in the photo marks the spot where we stopped and watched as Jim dug down about ten inches into the soil and brought up a shovelful for us to examine. To examine it properly requires running it through your hands to feel the size of the granules and get a sense of the relative proportions of the basic soil components of sand, silt and clay. To get a really good idea, you need to put some in your mouth and feel it with your lips and tongue, as he demonstrated.

Jim is a wonderful scientist and teacher, but he also has another gig. Before he went to college, he was a bass player and founding member of the band Information Society, which had a string of hits in the nineties and which has continued–in various incarnations, all including Jim–to make music unto the present day. That’s Jim in the middle of the photo below.

Tuesday, May 9

Partly cloudy today with highs in the 60’s–very different from yesterday’s cold and damp.

Wednesday, May 10

Lots of garden chores these days, much of it involving unwanted grass or removing unwanted length of grass.

Thursday, May 11

Tertulia, exercise class, gardening, all that stuff. But also, we took E’s wedding ring to the jeweler’s to have it rebuilt: new half shank, restored mill points, and restored flower design to the extent possible. It may not be done in time for our anniversary, but that’s okay. This has needed doing for a long time. The ring belonged to M’s grandmother, Hazel, so it has sentimental value in addition to its good looks.

We got a take-out dinner from Kahlo Naser, the new Syrian restaurant. The food was delicious, plus we didn’t have to worry about their disorganized service and we could comfortably have a beer with dinner. Nice.

Friday, May 12

Ack, more gardening. The weather is getting much warmer. We work only in the mornings. It’s too hot in the afternoon. And the forecast for Sunday is 90. Yikes. Fortunately, we’re planning to be at the coast on Sunday; and the forecast there is for just the high seventies.

Saturday, May 13

With the continuing warm weather, we have to transition to summer mode. Part of that is getting the patio into shape. We took the cover off our big umbrella and raised it up to where it needs to be. The mechanism is stiff from injuries stemming from a fall last year, so it wasn’t all that easy, but we persevered, in spite of our resident hornet who makes her nest in the top of the umbrella post. E also uncovered and cleaned the patio table and chairs.

For lunch we went to visit our friend J, who recently suffered a broken shoulder from a fall of her own, which happened while she was dog walking. She’s having shoulder replacement surgery next Friday and is going to be one-armed for quite a while. We took her a deli lunch and sat with her in her back yard in the shade. She has two big old black locust trees that are just now leafing out. Beautiful to look up through. If we had some actual trees in our yard, we wouldn’t have to mess with our cranky umbrella.

Sunday, May 14, Mothers Day

In the morning we went off to meet A for a Mother’s Day brunch at Local Ocean over in Newport. As we neared the coast we realized that the weather was not getting any cooler. Au contraire, at 11:45 in the morning, it was 92! So much for forecasts. This is close to the all-time record high for Newport. It’s definitely warmer than either of us has ever experienced there.

But Local Ocean was comfortably cool. And the food was awesome as usual. E and A shared a big bowl of LO’s famous Brazilian seafood stew with the coconut milk base. M had ling cod fettuccine with andouille sausage slices and melted manchego. Ooof. We had fun talking about Ze Frank and his True Facts videos, which we had all just discovered. The videos are very funny and very informative, occasionally too informative, showing you more than you might want to know. If you are not familiar with Ze Frank’s work, you should become so immediately. But do NOT begin with his video about hippopotami. Try owls instead.

After lunch we went to Ona Beach and put our feet in the river to cool off a bit. Later in the day we met again for dinner at a brewpub in the town of Depot Bay. The bay itself covers only 6 acres and is said to be the smallest navigable bay in the world.

By the time we got back to Newport, it was dark and we had some trouble finding our hotel. Was that because we are old and easily confused? Well…yeah. But you know…at a certain point we realized that it wasn’t just dark, it was really quite dark. Was that because we had somehow been blindfolded by evil spirit pranksters? Well…no, it wasn’t that dark. But there was a problem: the power was out all along the seaside part of the city. So, once back in our room, we had the annoyance of no air conditioning for a couple of hours…

Monday, May 15

When we woke this morning and looked out our window, we found a different world: fog over the sea and no sun anywhere. The local temperature was fifty-five degrees. Now that’s exactly what we would have expected in Newport at this time of year. It made the previous day seem unreal, as if it had been a dream. Or maybe just a brief vision of the future.