Four chapters are included here as samples of this book.

                          Somewhere in an Oregon Valley

Chapter One:

Whitney Valley

      February 27. I kept two kerosene lamps turned up high on my work table and wrote into the early hours of the morning. About three a.m., I took my guitar from its case and played and sang several songs, softly, because my wife, Laura, slept in our bed six feet from me, and our daughters, Juniper and Amanda, nine and seven then, five years into our time in Whitney Valley, slept in the next room, twenty feet from me.

      I built a song about spring coming to our mountain valley, and I wrote down the words and chords. I fed wood to the fire in the back room heater, walked through Juniper and Amanda's room, and fed the front room heater. I walked out onto the front porch and shone my flashlight on the thermometer. Ten degrees below zero.

      A waning moon hung high in the clear sky. Snow two feet deep covered the wild mountain meadow around our old, ramshackle house. The meadow sloped 150 yards from our house down to the north fork of the Burnt River. The other side of the north fork, the meadow rose to the base of the ridge, about a quarter of a mile from the river, where the forest west of us began. Soft moonlight reflected bright from the snow. Densely growing willow bush along the river shadowed the iced-over stream black in moonlight.

      A killdeer's insistent call carried across the snow covered meadow and startled me. The bird had come north too soon. Surely it would freeze.

      My breath condensed to ice in my beard and mustache. Cold drove toward my bones. I walked back into the house and checked my daughters. They stretched out straight in their beds. Had they been too cold, they would have curled up tightly, and I would have added more blankets.

      The next night, the first Canada geese returned from south and flew above the meadow, calling loudly. Two days later, four killdeers circled above the snow, calling. These small, long-legged, grey, black, and white, gentle birds of the phalarope family, are misnamed. Their distinctive, high-pitched, two-syllable call doesn't say, "Kill deer. Kill deer. It says, "Shakespeare. Shakespeare," though at times, I'm just as sure it says, "John Donne. John Donne."

      Migrating birds arriving in Whitney Valley when nights were still quite cold seemed to do very well. A hundred yards below the house, a seep spread water over a wide, marshy area on its way to the river. The warmth of the water from that seep melted the snow. Grass sent up green shoots. Willows opened bright green leaves. More than a dozen marshy seeps and springs surround the meadow. Birds make their living in the melted off areas below the springs and seeps until the meadow clears of snow.

      More birds flew back from their winter homes as spring greened and softened Whitney Valley. A robin perched in willows in warm sunshine early one March morning. Two geese stood face to face on snow by the marsh below the house and honked at each other as if each thought the other hard of hearing.

      Juniper, square-shouldered, with short brown hair, our tomboy, and Amanda, feminine even then, thin and tall, with long, golden red hair, explored the sun bright day.

      Their personalities and interests often contrasted sharply. Amanda liked dolls and dresses, but Juniper wouldn't have anything to do with either. Juniper sought adventure, and Amanda tried to keep up, though she sometimes wished for a more conservative existence centered more in our home, concentrating more on quiet observation and a little less on active participation.

      But Juniper and Amanda shared their lives with each other on the remote ranch in Northeastern Oregon's Blue Mountains. Through the eight and a half years we took care of the ranch, they knew few other children. The children they did know, they seldom saw, so they worked through their contrasts in personalities and interests and stayed best friends and constant companions. They shared their education at home, their interest in acting out some of their wide reading, their interest in drawing, painting, and writing, and their interest in the natural world around them in Whitney Valley.

      I watched them walk across snow to the edge of the marsh. I called them, and they stopped and waited for me as I crossed the garden on the crust on two feet of snow and stepped over the fence. "Did you get water in your boots?"

      Juniper said, "No. On our boots, but not in our boots."

      "Part of that marsh is deep, soft mud. You could sink way over your boots. You should stay out of there."

      Amanda asked, "Is it quicksand?"

      "Very like quicksand, for quite a ways down. I sank over my short waders once, to here. It was messy and cold, with my boots full of water and mud. I had a hard time getting out of there."

      Amanda said, "If you get in quicksand, you should lie down and wiggle to the edge."

      I broke through the crust on snow and sank to mid-thigh. I lay down and rolled to the side to get out. "You mean wiggle out of quicksand like this?"

      Amanda looked into the hole in the snow I left when I pulled my leg out. "Look, there's grass down there." We all looked into the hole. An open space between the snow and the ground harbored grass as green as spring.

      I said, "That's the vole's winter world. They stay active under the insulation of the snow." Wind rose and carried some of the warmth from sunshine away. "I'm not dressed for cold wind. I'm going to go back to the house and write. Are you two going to be warm enough?"

      Amanda said, "Except my hands."

      "You can use my gloves. They're too big, but they'll keep your hands warm. Will they work?" I handed her my gloves. She put them on and held her hands out in front of her. Her hands looked huge. We laughed.

      "They'll work. As long as I don't try to pick anything up, they'll work."

      "How about you, Juniper? Are you warm enough?"

      "Yes."

      "I'll depend on you to get more clothes or come in if you get too cold."

      "Okay."

      I walked around the edge of the marsh, back into the house, sat down, and wrote at the table in the back room. I wrote about the threads of meaning that knit together our daily existence. I wrote about wild animals we saw in Whitney Valley. I wrote about our existence without plumbing or electricity, about Juniper and Amanda learning at home rather than in public school, about our existence almost outside the consumer culture. We lived close to poverty in material terms, but we harvested rich rewards daily. Our family stayed closely-knit in a culture where strong, positive values centered around families seem to have some difficulty surviving.

      Because of our circumstances and our beliefs, Laura and I accepted the responsibility for educating Amanda and Juniper ourselves. Our approach to education worked well for learning about all of existence, taught all of us how to learn effectively, and reinforced the closeness of our family.

      I looked up from my writing, out the big south window next to my writing table. Amanda and Juniper watched birds in and around the willows. Killdeers kept up a constant serenade of the sunny morning and ran through the marshy area and over the snow, not far from my daughters. Juniper and Amanda ventured through densely growing willows whose tight spring buds started opening into green leaves. I couldn't see anything of them but glimpses of color, Amanda's hair or Juniper's pink cape blowing in the wind.

      Early in the afternoon, the wind died. I picked up the camera and tracked my daughters. They had crossed the road to the sagebrush field behind Willy's hunting cabin. They sat on a wooden structure that stuck up above the snow in sunshine. I said, "I thought this would be a good time to get some pictures."

      Juniper said, "Take pictures of us on the transporting machine."

      "Where does it transport you to?"

      "If we can poem it right, it will take us to Middle Earth, Hobbit land."

      Click. "Will it bring you back?"

      "Don't know yet. First we have to see if we can get there."

      Click. Click. "Right. If you got there and had trouble getting back, someone there could probably help you with it."

      "Probably."

      "Would you want to come back?"

      "Sure. Eventually."

      Click. Uneasiness catches me for a moment. How powerful is imagination? Should I caution them not to get too serious about seeking Middle Earth? Respect for freedom, for the power of creativity wins out over my possessiveness, and I decide to let them journey to Middle Earth if they can.

      "Okay. I have some pictures. Be careful."

      Amanda said, "We always are."

      March progresses across the mountains. The days warm up. Snow melts. New, green grass grows on the meadow.

      Early afternoon of a warm spring day, I spade composted horse manure into garden soil behind the house. Laura brought wet laundry from the laundromat in Sumpter, and she hangs it on the clothesline below the garden. I lean on the handle of my spading fork and watch her.

       She picks clothing from the basket on the ground, shakes it out, and pins it to the line. She works outlined against the meadow. The forested ridge rises behind her, across the meadow, across the river. She looks like part of this ranch and our way of life in this mountain valley, usually at peace with our existence, though sometimes still troubled by questions about why we live the way we live. A long time ago, I decided Laura would have questions about any way of existence she is involved in, moments of uncertainty, and I'm better able to accept those times of apparent upset as just the way the world works.

      My perspective shifts a little. Laura could be a deer, lithe, graceful. Not long after we met, she came from the Sacramento valley up to the mountain where I lived then. We walked to a mountain meadow and picked apples from an abandoned orchard. Laura wore a grey shirt, faded jeans, and my battered grey felt cowboy hat. She reached up into a tree to pick a ripe winesap apple above her. I was shocked by how much she looked like a deer standing on its hind legs, reaching up into the tree for an apple.

      Hunting season had opened on the mountain. I hurried to her, pulled my bright yellow raincoat from the small backpack I'd brought, and handed it to her, "Put this on."

      "It isn't raining."

      I said, "No, but it's going to in about a minute."

      She smiled at me as if I amused her, and she put the rain jacket on. Within a minute, rain poured from the clouds close above us.

      When we lived in the Sacramento Valley, I drove tractor for a farmer. Laura was pregnant with Juniper. She drove out to where I disced the dusty field, and she started across the broken ground, carefully placed one foot, and shifted her weight forward. I saw her, lifted the implement, and turned the tractor toward her. Grey skirt, grey top. She reminded me of a pregnant doe stepping carefully across broken ground.

      She shakes out a towel and hangs it on the line. Sunshine shows red highlights in her shining, brown hair. Red patterns in her shirt stand out against the green and brown ridge far behind her.

      Springtime sunshine does strange things to the way I see the world. I like the way my perspective shifts and includes new images, new ways of seeing.

      I push my spading fork down into the ground, and break more soil loose.

      Juniper and Amanda swing in the swings I built for them of dead lodgepole pine trees, ropes, and boards our second year here. They sing, make up poems, and laugh.

      For the first time this spring, we hear the two sandhill cranes who live in Whitney Valley. They call from Camp Creek Valley, impossible-to-describe trumpeting, so loud we hear them from more than a mile away. We stop and listen. We see them flying toward us, close above the willows along Camp Creek. Majestic, grey, red-crowned birds, they power their huge wings down in slow, curving strokes against the clear mountain air, stretch their long necks straight forward, and trail their long legs behind. They cross the highway and fly above the barn and then over us, not more than twenty feet above us, calling all the way. They fly across the river, across the meadow, land by the edge of the timber, and fall silent as they begin to eat.

      It takes us a while to remember what we were doing before we heard the cranes. Laura says, "They came to say hello, to let us know they're back."

      Yes. It does seem like that. We feel knit into the rhythms of the seasons and part of the life in this valley.

      Birds who thrive in semi-arid land inhabit the sagebrush areas in Whitney valley and east and north of the valley. Birds who like dense forest live on the ridges rising west and south. Birds live close to the streams and on the streams running through Whitney Valley. Marsh birds inhabit irrigated and marshy areas. Eagles and hawks include the wild meadows in their wide range. Very shy, rarely seen small rails hide in the lushly growing grasses.

      Brilliant sun arcs across the mountain blue sky and shines our spring day full of warmth.

      Laura walks down the graveled county road toward the south end of Whitney Valley for a time away from responsibilities as mother, wife, main teacher, cook. She finds an interlude of solitude. She finds early wildflowers.

      Juniper, Amanda, and I stroll and chat together closer to the house. We watch two geese on the seep below the house speak to each other in stentorian tones of spring, love, and the continuation of all life. These are branta canadensis moffitti, the largest Canada geese. They take to wing and fly up the meadow and back. One banks and lands on the peak of the barn roof. The other circles once and attempts to land. Something goes wrong, and it doesn't stop on the peak. It slides down the metal roof, wings spread, feet backpedaling. The scrape, scrape sound of its feet on metal picks up tempo, faster and faster as it accelerates down the long roof, trying to stop and talking to the roof-stander about what is happening.

      The sliding goose honks and takes to the air just as it plummets over the eave and the snow piled under it. The big, black, white, and grey goose flies above snow on the meadow, gains altitude, circles back and lands on the peak of the barn roof.

      Geese honk their way down Camp Creek Valley, turn west, and fly up Whitney Valley, above the north fork of the Burnt river, and part way up Greenhorn mountain. They turn and fly back, dark forms against the sky.

      Juniper asks, "Why is the sky so brown?"

      "Smog."

      "How would we have smog here?"

      "Well, the highway's right here. County roads. Logging roads. Chain saws, all the machinery when we hay. And the smog from industrial areas doesn't just stay there. It spreads around the world."

      Amanda says, "It isn't good for the geese to fly through that, is it?"

      Juniper says, "Where else can they fly?"

      "Why don't they just stop it? It isn't necessary."

      Their suggested solution for environmental problems is simple: "If it causes damage, don't do it. Find another way to get what you need."

      I talk about the complexities of our economic, political, religious, and cultural structures. I tell them implementing their solution to the problems caused by pollution would require a difficult, basic change in society's approach to the Earth.

      After the explanation of the way the world works, my daughters return me to our starting point. Amanda says, "I know all that, or a lot of it, anyway. All I know is, if it can be stopped, then it should be stopped."

      I agree with my daughters that all mankind's needs could be met in peaceful community with all life. The techniques needed to make the changes, the tools, the knowledge, all are part of the culture and available for use.

      Juniper says, "What will happen to the world by the time we grow up? Will there be anything left for us?"

      She asks to express her wonder. She knows I can't answer her questions. We live as clean an existence as we can. We try to help, even if we only pick up trash by the road or support an organization that helps animals. We limit our use of machinery and energy, and we exercise our economic and political power to try to bring about change.

      We are caretakers of this 1,200 acre ranch we live on. I irrigate the meadows, and we harvest wild meadow hay late in summer. The major thrust of what we do for a living is not destructive to the earth nor to the habitat of the wild animals around us. We expect everyone to understand we can be benevolent, intelligent caretakers of the Earth. We expect humankind to overcome the desire for material accumulation beyond need and inordinate power over others and to get on with the job. As Amanda says, with upturned palms and raised shoulders, "How many worlds are there? Just this one, right?"

      I look again at the wild birds and at my daughters. There may be no guarantee that everything will always be in balance, but they go on with their daily living. They don't hesitate to invest their entire energy in the good that is the life force.

      I think they provide a good example for me, and I get on with living.

Chapter Ten:

Bob O’Link, Rabbit-Eared Girlie, and Education

      Amanda, Juniper, and Laura worked at school together at the kitchen table in the mornings. When Juniper and Amanda finished with classes, they drew, painted, wrote, read, sculpted, took care of their daily chores, explored the country around, played with their toys, and made more toys.

      Mix a cup of flour with half a cup of salt, and add water. Mold the resulting dough, and bake it in the oven, and you will have a permanent form. I have a snake, several cats, and a groundhart my daughters made and painted for me. They made many toys of this material.

      Juniper picked up a small, oval-shaped rock, glued clover blossoms all over it for fur, added a seeding-up head of timothy for a tail and paper cut-outs for ears and eyes. She had a very cat-like toy cat. Rocks or pieces of wood sometimes look like people or animals. Paint, crayons, charcoal, or a knife can add detail and emphasize the similarity.

      Some of their most active toys are plastic, factory-made toys. Meet Bob O’Llink, a two inch tall, red cowboy. Along with several other small, broken toys, he cost a penny at the Salvation Army store. You can't shake his hand, because he doesn't have any, nor any right arm at all, nor any legs below the knees. That doesn't keep him from being an active, obstreperous, obstinate, horse-owning, horse-training, marrying cowboy, who will tell you he is in charge of the stables, even though he isn't. Silver, his horse, is.

      None of us approve of the fact that Bob has seven wives, but our approval or disapproval doesn't influence him at all. The stables house many horses and several other people, including Lank, Bob's brother, Maize Cowboy, and all Bob's wives, to whom Bob is kind, though his obtrusive personality often entangles him in troubles with them and everyone else.

       Marilyn, a plastic woman about Bob's size, became concerned about all the parentless baby toys and started an orphanage. The orphanage and the stables are interacting communities. Both communities face chronic shortages of money. Marilyn charges a five dollar adoption fee, and that helps. Rabbit-Eared Girlie opened a store, and she will sell anything that is not essential to the community. Though they don't like to do it, sometimes they have to sell horses to keep the operating money coming in.

      Some adults disapprove of our daughters' wide and sometimes wild range of imagination, as if imagination, in some way, is dangerous. I ignore the criticism. Imagination is a powerful positive force, essential to education and essential to the world.

      Amanda owns over a hundred dolls, some three dimensional, and some two. She brought me a magazine and showed me a full-page, full-color picture of a well-dressed, glamorous doll, advertised as a "collector's item." She said, "This is the most expensive one yet, almost three hundred dollars."

      "My goodness. Three-hundred dollars for a doll is almost unimaginable to me."

      "I know. May I have this one?"

      I looked at the back of the page, which had more advertisements on it. I said, "Sure. Go ahead."

      She skipped into the kitchen, but she came back soon. She said, "I'm out of cardboard. Do you have anything I can use?" I gave her cardboard from typing paper boxes. Then I followed her into the kitchen and watched.

      She cut the page from the magazine and glued it onto the cardboard. "I used to cut them out and then glue them, but that was much harder to do. Now I glue and then cut. That's a lot easier." She smoothed the picture onto the cardboard and set it aside to dry before cutting it out.

       Juniper never has been interested in dolls, but she uses pictures of animals and of people for cut-out toys. She draws many of the pictures she uses for cut-outs.

      This evening, Juniper draws. Amanda builds a magazine on the other end of the kitchen table. The drawing moves, but all the magazine materials would be hard to move without upsetting the careful order of Amanda's work. We eat around, in spots we open up on the table, or from plates on our laps. To some, our house seems disorderly. We experimented, hoping to achieve a more orderly existence. We picked up and put away all projects at the end of each day. It didn't work, so it didn't last. Gathering all the materials and putting them away interrupts the orderly continuity of a project. We decided our definitions of orderly and disorderly were wrong. If a work area progresses toward order, not in the appearance of the area, but in that the work in the area will achieve a desired goal, then that work area is orderly. Any appearance of disorder is in the perspective of the viewer.

      Our definition of "education" evolves. School is the structured part of the girls' education, which takes place at the kitchen table according to a schedule. School is the study of standard subjects, such as history, geography, science, and mathematics, in an attempt to have that part of our daughters' education roughly parallel to that of children enrolled in public schools. Education is all of learning and growing, and a lot of that happens outside of school. I would have skipped the school part of it almost entirely, had the decision been for me to make alone, but that wasn't the way it went, and now, several years after the beginning, I have no regrets about the way it did go.

      Structured schooling consumes a small part of the day. It has taken as much as four hours of the day, rarely. That many hours of school leads to rebellion among the students.

      Some who hear of our approach to our daughters' education are concerned. Aren't our children missing opportunities children in public schools have? I'm sure they are. Amanda would like to have singing lessons and dance lessons. Juniper wants to participate in sports. They both want to learn at least one language in addition to English. Our daughters also have many opportunities most other children miss.

      Early in the spring, when sun shone warmly into the valley, Amanda and Juniper and I drove to the sawmill field and parked the pickup on the shoulder of the road, two hundred and fifty yards east of the long-abandoned mill.

      I said, "See the cranes down on the field? to the right of the mill? They're grey, and those grey logs are directly behind them, so they're hard to see, but they're there."

      They studied the mill field until they found the cranes against the ancient stack of grey logs. Juniper asked, "Are they sandhill cranes?"

      "Yes."

      Amanda said, "Then those are the same ones that fly right over the house sometimes."

      "Yes, they are."

      "How close can we get to them?"

      "We'll find out, because I have to work on a ditch near where they are."

      We crawled under the fence and walked through sagebrush to the place where Dry Creek flows into several ditches. I left the plastic dam there, and we started down the ditch toward the old spring house, walking slowly. Behind me, Juniper said, "They're already getting nervous about us." We stood still, then took a few slow steps, then stood still again, but it didn't help much. When we were more than a hundred yards from the cranes, they began calling and walking away. We stopped and stood still, but they ran and jumped to get into the air and flew across the river, away from us.

      Amanda asked, "Do you ever get closer to them?"

      "I've been closer in casual encounters but never by trying to get closer. They're very wary birds."

      "Are they rare?"

      "Not as rare as whooping cranes or trumpeter swans. But we usually only have one pair in this valley. "

      Last time we walked to the mill pond, we were overconfident. We didn't realize a dozen whistling swans floated on the pond, concealed from us by the high bank, until they took to wing. We were so close to them, we heard their wings creak through the air.

      This time, we cross the field above the pond, headed for a place where we can see more of the pond from farther away, but six Canada geese honk and take off. I say, "I guess I'm still overconfident. I'm used to them being more used to me."

      Amanda says, "They're probably nervous about us. We aren't usually with you."

      We walk down the field, south of the pond. Then we turn and walk toward it. I say, "There still are geese on the pond. They're behind the bank closest to us. They're dark heads against a dark background, so they're hard to see, but you can see the chin straps. Look for the moving white spot just above the bank." That pair takes to wing and flies past close in front of us, up the field, and glides back to the ground. Juniper walks away, toward the mill, and explores the banks of the mill pond.

      I open the ditch with my shovel to get water onto the field south of the pond. Amanda finds a tightly curled orange caterpillar floating on the water. We try to decide if it is dead or just dormant because it's so cold, but we don't reach a conclusion. Amanda puts the caterpillar carefully into a willow bush. She says, "If it's alive, it will be all right after it dries out and warms up. That way, it won't drown." Then she helps me clean dead grass from the ditch. Juniper walks along the built-up bank of the pond, exploring new territory.

      When the water runs right, we walk back up the ditch. Juniper rejoins us. Amanda asks, "Are the cranes shyer than the geese?"

      "Yes. You were much closer to those two geese yesterday than we were to the cranes today, weren't you, Juniper? Do you see those two geese ahead of us? Look. See that tallest willow bush at the edge of the field? They're right in front of that, but closer to us."

      "Oh. One of them just raised its head. Now I see them. There must be something wrong with my eyes. I didn't see them until one of them moved."

      "Do you still see them, now that it put its head back down?"

      "Yes."

      "There's nothing wrong with your eyes. When they're down flat like that, they blend with their background. They don't want you to see them. Look away from them and then find them again. The more you see animals hiding from you in appearances, the easier it is to do."

      I set the plastic dam into the ditch. Amanda and Juniper bring me rocks and I weight it down. We watch for a while. Water flows over the ditch bank, runs through spring grasses, and begins to soak down into roots. "That's just about right." We walk back to the pickup and drive home.

      Juniper and Amanda wash dishes while I cook supper. Laura worked her way through a particularly busy morning this morning, getting ready for company coming for the week-end and getting ready to go to a lecture at the Baker church this evening. Amanda and Juniper didn't have their usual morning classes in history, geography, math, and science. But they had a class in wildlife observation and identification this afternoon, in analytic vision, in deportment in other species' territory. Our class continues this evening.

      We talk about scientific names of species. We talk about cranes' nests. I know where the cranes nest, but we agree we won't go there, because the book says they might abandon their nest if they're disturbed on the nesting ground. Juniper says, "If anyone asks us where their nest is, we can just say, 'Somewhere in this valley.'"

      We talk about how some birds let us get quite close to them and others don't. I say, "You saw how the cranes ran and kicked away from the ground as they were taking wing. It takes some time and some distance for them to get airborne and then to get higher than a predator can jump, because they're such big birds. I think they're very aware of that, and that's why they start to fly when we're still a long way from them."

      Juniper and Amanda take care of our home library. They arrange the books in the bookcases and keep track of what we have. They make a list of what we need, and we shop the library on our trips to town. We exchange boxes of books at the library every time we go to town. The librarians know us and the voracious reading appetites of these girls, curious about everything in the world, from what poisons a murderer in Sherlock Holmes's world might use, to stage devices used in William Shakespeare's plays, to mythology of cultures around the world.

      The librarians know we drive forty-five miles to town as seldom as we can, and they suspend all rules limiting how many books we can check out. If we can carry the books out to our pickup, we can take them home. The lady who runs the bookmobile saves discarded magazines for us, and we make connections in Sumpter when we can.

      This evening, Juniper and Amanda search through books and find what information they can on the questions we're trying to answer about some of the wildlife around us. They share the information with me, reading aloud to me or summing up what they find in various books.

      Ingrid came out from Sumpter parts of some days, the winter after Juniper launched into reading and writing books. She tutored Juniper in spelling, grammar, and structure of the language. Ingrid needed to fulfill a requirement for a college class, and Juniper found the lessons interesting and helpful. She liked Ingrid quite well, and the time together was good for both of them.

      Learning to read was not difficult for Juniper and Amanda. It didn't take years of slow, patient, repetitive work that used a major part of their time. I wanted the rest of Juniper's and Amanda's education to come to them as easily. What they encountered around them would spark their interest. Motivated by their own interests, they would study what they wanted to learn.

      Laura thought we should attempt to duplicate what the schools did rather than risk doing too little and leaving gaps in their education.

      I thought we would be more effective if we did too little and left gaps in their education rather than attempting to duplicate what the schools did, because it seemed to me the schools turned out mass-produced, job-oriented education to fit the needs of the industrial society. I thought we would be most effective if we encouraged creative imagination, analytic ability, and a broad understanding of everything around and let concern for earning a living come later. Specific educational needs for employment build well on a broad foundation of knowledge and on ability and practice at learning.

      Learning to read and having a constant supply of good reading material was the first step in their education. Learning how to use a library was the second step, so they could find what they needed. The third step, it seemed to me, would be to avoid interfering in their education, to be available to help when Amanda or Juniper asked for help, and to supply needed materials, but beyond that, to stay out of their way.

      We compromised. Part of Laura's desire to use some of the standard curriculum came from fear that our children would be tested by the schools some time. If the tests showed deficiency in their knowledge, the state might have the power to dictate how we dealt with our children and their education. We read news stories about the state taking children from people in Idaho because the parents refused to put them in public schools, so I couldn't argue too far for my wish to have them free of structured education. Though the law protected us where we were, we might move. Legislators could change the law.

      Laura used notebooks, exercises, color inside the lines, all those things that come out of the schools, for as long as they were helpful or for as long as they worked as entertainment. If the materials got too repetitive, or didn't challenge, Amanda and Juniper wouldn't do them, and we used them to start fires.

      Juniper and Amanda are, in some ways, outsiders in this culture. After their visits to schools and sometimes after playing with children outside of school, they said the children they had met seemed to lack imagination. "They play t.v. They don't make up their own games and plays. They just play what they see on t.v., and we don't know anything about that.”

      Maybe they never will know much about what comes from television. During one winter's visit to a heavily televisioned home, I returned from errands, looked for our daughters through the house, and eventually found them in the back bedroom closet (it has a light), reading.

      They had sampled television. They weren't interested in Sesame Street, the muppets, animated cartoons, or the Festival of Roses parade. Even wildlife programs, they said, were not worth their attention if there were commercials, because the commercials were unsettling, insulting, or at least irrelevant. Also, they said, people narrated or played music during the programs when they should have played the sounds of the animals or let the film run in silence. They explained that the adults in charge of the house wanted the t.v. always on; Amanda and Juniper had received permission to use the closet, which, after exploration, they knew to be the most televisionless spot in the house and comfortable for reading. If I was leaving, would I please shut the bedroom door and the hall door as I went? I shut the hall door, then the bedroom door. I sat on the bed and read. I could see there wasn't room for me in the closet, so I didn't ask.

      We got some idea of how it looked from the other side one June when two young men celebrated their graduation from high school at their grandfather's cabin near our house in Whitney Valley. They came to visit us several times, and their question each time was, how do you exist up here with no t.v.? They had trouble finding enough to do.

      Laura said, "Walk. You can walk on the county road or out across the meadow. I walk out there a lot. Every time I walk across the meadow, I see wildflowers I've never seen before. So many wildflowers bloom in this valley, you can't believe it unless you begin to see them yourself. You could get a book and start learning their names. Look at the wild animals. You could write. Write a letter or a story. Write an essay or a poem."

      Amanda said, "Draw. Paint. You don't have to be good at it to have fun doing it. You always discover something new if you draw or paint. Pieces of driftwood look like animals sometimes. We carved a piece of driftwood from the river just a little bit, and it really looked like a horse."

      Juniper said, "You could walk down to the river and go swimming. One day, I sat on a sandbank by the river, and a mink came up from the water and walked across the sand and looked at me up close. I sat very still. It went back to the river and disappeared underwater. Then it came out again and walked across the sand and looked at me again. It did that four times. I got to see an animal I've never seen before and be really close to it. We've seen herons and cranes all different kinds of ducks, geese and snakes and fish at the river."

      Amanda said, "Is there a difference between a fiddle and a violin? We were wondering about that yesterday. We haven't found out the answer yet. You could find out the answer. You could learn to play a musical instrument. You could sing. You could sing together. That's fun."

      Juniper said, "We go outside at night and watch the stars and the moon. At night, we listen to the coyotes singing. Elk whistle. Lots of times, just before it gets dark, elk come down onto the meadow, and they run and jump and play and whistle like crazy. Daddy usually calls them wapiti. Wapiti is the Indian name. You could watch them and listen to them. They're intelligent. They have a lot of fun, and it's fun to watch them. They have concerts in Baker sometimes. You could drive down to Baker and go to a concert."

      I said, "Use real life all around you and your own imagination to build the visions that power you through your life. Accept no substitutes. Television has no power you can take into your lives to guide you through living."

      The two young men found what we said interesting, like a view of an alien culture. Amanda and Juniper said more about what people can do in the world without television than Laura or I said, and I think that amazed the two young men, that Juniper, ten then and boyish looking, stocky, square-shouldered, brown-haired, and Amanda, eight, slim, feminine, with long golden red hair, could be so articulate, outspoken, and educated about what the world offers us. More than once, the graduates said they didn't quite believe what they were seeing or understand what they were hearing about a world without television. What they could see, hear, and experience in the flesh meant little to them compared to what they could receive from television. They went home earlier than they had planned, to see some of their favorite programs.

      I'm pleased with the way having most of Amanda's and Juniper's education in the family has worked out. They read a lot. They have excellent comprehension and memory of what they read. Their reading leads them far and wide. Juniper read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. She recruited Amanda and Laura, and the three of them acted out the play. The three of them, or sometimes, all of us, read together and acted out other plays. Juniper found biographies of Julius Caesar, Nero, and other Romans. Reading Julius Caesar led Amanda and Juniper into reading about Roman and Greek mythology. They read about myths and legends from all over the world.

      There have been some subjects I attempted to steer conversations away from when our daughters listened. War, and nuclear war in particular headed that list. My attempt was not to keep the information from them entirely, but to avoid putting the whole story in their laps at once. They came into their awareness more gradually, primarily through their reading.

      Juniper read about nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and radiation. She talked about what she was learning, and Amanda asked her to edit most of what she said on the subject, because hearing about it led her into more nightmares than she wanted to try to handle yet.

      Books with sexual description don't concern me as much. Amanda and Juniper have stopped part way through some books, "That shouldn't be in the children's section. It has too much romance and sex. I'm not ready for that yet."

      They have well-developed critical ability. They go through magazines and revise advertising to make it more truthful. Their corrections of cigarette advertisements are particularly acute and amusing.

      Our foremost goal through all our attempts at education has been to allow them their childhood, to guide their education somewhat, to try to furnish what they need to fulfill their interests, and to nurture and support them. Encouragement has been a powerful force in their education. If we can't always say, "That piece of work is beautiful," we can say, "You're doing really well. You show progress, and you can achieve what you want to achieve if you continue pursuing it diligently."

      We all support each other in the pursuit of what each hopes to achieve.

      When I think of enriching children's environment, I don't think of presenting them with colors, gadgets, and mechanical routines of learning. I think of enriching their environment with love, with the parents supporting, teaching, being there to fulfill the children's needs, and to help assure that interest brings results rather than atrophying from lack of fulfillment.

   Everything we teach our daughters and everything we learn is undergirded with an understanding that the universe does make sense. Clear moral imperatives guide us to the highest quality of existence, to living in a way that will leave a habitable environment on the earth for our children and grandchildren.

      There is no moral relativism in our school. This almost entirely modern idea, that nobody knows what life is about or what we are doing here, is too debilitating to give to a child.

Chapter Thirteen:

Making a Living Cutting Firewood

      Pine beetles bore through the bark of pine trees and eat the cambium, girdle the tree, and the tree dies. Some trees drown the beetles in pitch and survive the attack. Most trees don't survive.

      Along the west boundary and the south boundary of the ranch, beetle-killed lodgepole pine trees shared the ridge with live lodgepole, second growth ponderosa pine, widely spaced western larch, and a few Douglas fir trees. Some dead lodgepole blew down. Some falling trees hung up in standing trees. More trees fell every time the wind blew and sometimes when there wasn't any wind.

      Standing dead trees needed to come down so they wouldn't continue to blow down on fences and in ditches that brought water through the edge of the timber onto the grass-growing meadows. I set to work clearing out dead trees.

      I had no one to show me how to fall standing trees. I read instructions, added falling wedges and a heavy single bit axe, to drive the wedges, to my tools and approached dead lodgepole pine trees. At first, it was a time of trembling, because there is a great gap between instructions printed on the page and a tree tipping from its stump, falling with a rushing sound through the air, and slamming with great noise of impact and breaking branches to the ground.

      But no large gap separates fear and caution. Throughout my eight and a half years of falling trees in Whitney Valley, I felt no shame at staying a little afraid of the work I did. I thought most workers who cut themselves with chain saws or got hit by falling trees had been overconfident.

      At first, I selected trees clear of thickets, with a slight lean. I cut a notch a third of the way through each tree, close to the ground, facing the way I wanted the tree to fall. Then I cut toward the notch from the opposite side of the tree. Each tree started tipping before I cut all the way through, and the remaining hinge of uncut wood held the tree to the stump until its fall in the arc it had started was assured. In a correctly cut tree, the hinge broke before the tree hit the ground.

      A tree with no lean will still fall into the notch, because its support on the stump in that direction is gone. Falling wedges are for poor judgement, "I thought it would tip that direction, but it won't" or for trees that must fall in an unnatural direction.

      I drove the wedges into the cut behind the tree, behind the bar and chain, or after I removed the saw from the cut. The wedges opened the cut wider and wider as I drove them in, tilting the tree toward the face notch until the tree tipped far enough that its weight started the falling arc. I worked from the book, and everything worked exactly as the book said it would, except... dead trees are unpredictable. The brittle wood breaks in unpredictable ways. Sometimes, the wood low on the tree rots; the predictability provided by a strong hinge the tree pivots from disappears; and the tree falls wild.

      I tried to see everything that could happen, plan alternate escape routes in case my predictions weren't accurate, and watch everything until all motion ceased. Several times, brittle trees broke as they fell, and the tops came down behind the stump, where I had been standing.

      I worked my way up the big ditch that ran down through the edge of the timber. I dropped dead trees, cut them into firewood lengths, and piled the tops and limbs for later burning. On the high bank of the ditch, I aimed a big lodgepole straight across the ditch. I walked away as it tipped, then stopped and watched.

      The brittle hinge broke too soon, and the tree turned from the path I had planned for it. It hit another dead lodgepole on the opposite bank. That tree broke at the base, fell directly away from the first tree, hit and slid down a third dead tree, which broke at the base. I watched the escalating action with a sense of wonder and walked rapidly down the ditch bank so I stood in the clear when the top of the third tree shattered violently on the ground where I had been standing.

      Hoo, ha. I put my saw down, flexed my arms, did a little dance above the ditch, bowed this way and that, to the trees and whatever other wildlife might be interested. I was a man of power, falling three trees with one cut. I thought of sewing it into my suspenders, "Three at one blow." Indeed, indeed. That brightened my day. Also made me aware of how careful I needed to be to stay in good shape through this dead timber clearing project.

      I picked up my saw, walked up the ditch bank, and started reducing my trophies of the day to mundane lengths of firewood.

      As I had time, I cleared more fallen trees from the big ditch through the edge of the timber, and from the fence above the ditch. I cleared access to the fence and the ditch. I dropped and cut up standing dead trees so they wouldn't fall and start the hard work over again.

      Friends and relations came out and cut firewood. We piled leftover limbs and tops for later burning.

      Bernard came up, hunted elk in the fall, and stayed in the phone cabin down the road from us. He asked me what I would charge to cut him five cords of firewood if he picked it up where I cut it. I said twenty dollars a cord, and he told me when he'd be up to get it.

      Snowstorms hit Whitney Valley. In three days, working part of each day, I cut five cords of wood and bunched it up so it wouldn't get lost under snow. Part of the time, I worked in a snowstorm. It wasn't the first time I'd worked in snow blowing in the wind, so I kept cutting wood. I liked working in the storm, just me, the work, and snow flakes floating down densely, closing out the world beyond my work area.

      Bernard showed up early in the morning. Snow lay eight inches deep on the meadow, and more snow drifted down from a dark sky. Bernard brought his son-in-law with him. I volunteered to help load so they could get out before the snow got too deep. We forded the river and crossed the meadow. Bernard backed the truck into the timber, and we loaded wood for about three hours. Snow kept falling. We filled the truck and rounded the load as high as it would go without wood falling off, and we climbed into the cab.

      Bernard drove back across the meadow. On the way down the bank into the ford in the river, he locked up the brakes, and we slid toward the opposite bank when we should have started into a sharp turn. I yelled, "Get off the brakes," and he did. With the wheels rolling instead of sliding, the truck turned as we wanted it to. We roared through the shallow river, up the east bank, across the meadow, around the barn, and onto the road. I relaxed. We made it. I had wondered several times if we would.

      Bernard made me out a check and added five dollars a cord. I didn't object. I thanked him, and we said our "see you next year"s. Bernard, son-in-law, truck, and five cords of wood drove away down the road. I took the check into the house and showed it to Laura. "Gas money. Grocery money."

      It was too late to cut and sell more wood that year, but I was ready to go the next year as soon as we cut the hay and cleared it off the meadow. I phoned Mike and asked him, "Why don't I get off the payroll for a while and see if I can make a living cutting firewood from the dead lodgepole?"

      He consulted with John and then said, "Sure, go do it." So I did. Cutting and selling wood made the difference between making a living and almost making a living.

      Bernard passed the word that I had sound, dry lodgepole firewood for sale. People showed up late summer and early fall and bought firewood. Most of them farmed or ranched in the Treasure Valley and owned trucks that would haul five cords of wood or more. My price, that second year, was $25.00 a cord, and I sold all the wood I could cut as fast as I could cut it.

      I like cutting firewood. I usually don't like working with noisy machines, and a chain saw is very noisy, but I use ear-protectors, and that helps. I like looking behind me, where I've taken out the firewood and piled and burned the tops and limbs, and seeing what looks like a park. Grass grows green. A few green trees still grow, and lodgepole saplings, where, a year before, even getting through the area on foot was a job, and not much grew under or up through the dead wood jackstrawed on the ground.

      I also like it because I make a good wage cutting and selling wood, and it's been years since I've been able to make a good wage. In an area with large trees, with trunks clear of limbs for a long ways up the tree, so I don't use a lot of my time cutting limbs off the trees, I sometimes cut a cord of wood an hour. It's an exciting goal to shoot for, and even in much worse cutting, I cut more than two cords in a six hour workday.

      Having more money allows us to buy a few things that make it easier for Laura. If the necessary chores are easier for her, existence is easier for all of us.

      I meet people who come up to buy wood. We talk about how we live, what we think about, and how the world looks to us. The same people come back the next year and the year after that, and I get to hear about changes time brings to their lives and their perspectives. It's an interesting way to keep in touch with some of what's happening in the world.

      Bernard sent Mike and Tammy up to buy firewood late summer. They brought a stock truck with a sixteen foot long bed, and they loaded five cords of firewood. They said they had a friend who owned a Peterbilt diesel, with a twenty-eight foot bed. He wanted to bring it up and get a load of wood. I said, "Bring it up. We'll go up the fence line, and you can load it all in one place up there."

      I've seen hundreds of trucks like that on the highway, and they are big, but until I saw the truck off the highway on the narrow, rough dirt road alongside the fence, I didn't know just how much bigger than a pickup or a stock truck they are. I quaked a little. I had cut my turns wide all the way up the fence, and I had been confident anything under eight feet wide could pass, but when I actually saw the huge truck beside the fence, I wasn't so sure. I didn't betray my sudden doubt. "Follow me," I said, and I climbed on the tractor and drove up the road. The truck rumbled along behind me.

      I turned around and looked at the truck coming behind me. Wow. Right there, where it's coming through, I broke a mirror off the pickup last summer because the road was too narrow then to squeeze through. And where the truck is now, a month ago, four dead trees criss-crossed above the fence, and a small pickup couldn't pass under. And I hope I made this next turn wide enough.

      Scrape. Wires squealed. I got too close to the fence and scraped it with the tractor. I didn't break anything, but I stretched wires and bent steel posts. I have to watch where I'm going and quit looking at that truck so much. Boom. I ran the front wheel of the tractor into a small tree, bounced back, and almost threw myself off the tractor. It's a good thing I was going slow. I sat down and forced myself to watch the road ahead of me. I hope nobody saw me hit that tree.

      They got all the way up the road to the wood and loaded eight and a half cords. I cut several stumps so they had enough room to turn around, and they turned around, drove back down the fenceline, across the meadow, forded the river, drove up onto the county road, and headed home. I don't think they were particularly impressed with the feat of getting that huge truck to the wood, but they didn't know the history of clearing that road the way I did.

      Two days later, I forded the river at daylight to cut wood. Two ravens took off from the gravel bar and flew up the river. A coyote saw the pickup emerge from the willows onto the meadow and loped up into the timber. Frost crystals on tall grass along the edge of the timber separated the light of the rising sun into spheres of rainbow-colored light, each radiating rainbow colors. I drove onto the hill as about fifteen wapiti left my work area. They eat the dark green and black moss that grows on dead trees. After I've gone for the day, they browse the newly-down trees.

      When Cheryl worked with me cutting wood, we drove into our work area when the wapiti were still there. Newly fallen trees, jackstrawed across each other, limited their passage, and they ran back toward us. Going by so close to us put them panicky as they galloped up the dirt road along the fence. One young bull tried to take a shorter route through the fence. He hit the four tightly-stretched barbed wires at a gallop almost parallel to the fence and bounced away from it, hit it again, harder, and bounced farther, still in a full gallop, hit it again, so hard, it threw him off his feet. He rolled all the way over, regained his feet, hardly slowing, and galloped away from the fence, up the hill. I missed any potential the spike's battle with the fence might have had for humor, because I had some idea what pain and injury running into a barbed wire fence could cause. The herd hits barbed-wire fence at a head-on gallop when panicked and breaks all four strands. That must injure the leaders. So I move slowly and give them time to clear the area in a leisurely fashion. I'm not in any hurry to go to work. I'm still looking.

      I drive into my work area and unload my tools. I start the saw and drop several trees, limb them, and buck firewood lengths. Two black and white, red-headed woodpeckers fly in close, within a few feet of the screaming saw, and pick fat white grubs from the stumps and butts of trees I've just cut. I wear ear protectors. I tell the woodpeckers about ear protectors, but they don't hear me over the sound of the saw, or they don't care. A bird who hammers its head against tree trunks might not be sensitive to some of what I'm sensitive to. I finally have to say, it's up to the birds. They could harvest their meals when I shut the saw down to pile limbs and tops or to work on the saw.

      Carpenter ants build rooms, passageways, and communities in dead wood. They aren't aggressive, but if they do bite, those large, wood-chomping mandibles make a deep and painful job of it. When I eat lunch, I watch them walk around on me, but I don't let them get where they might feel trapped.

      Some days, I start late and quit late, because I see different animals, lighting, and happenings in the evening than I see in the morning. My hours are my own. I need to work enough to make a living, but, since I usually can't work all the daylight hours anyway, when I do the work is up to me. "A living" means more than just earning enough money to pay for needs. Earning a living includes seeing some of the wildlife living on and near the meadow. Earning a living includes participating in my family's adventures, education, and dreams. Earning a living includes sitting under a tree and thinking. Earning a living includes lying down in the sun on a cool day or in the shade on a hot day and sleeping for an hour so I'll feel like working more in the afternoon.

      I'll remember these experiences when I'm three score and ten, while a lot of what I do just to make money will fade from my memory.

Chapter Eighteen:

Wapiti on the Meadow

      We finished fixing fence. Jim went back down to the Rouse brothers' home ranch and rode grazing allotments. Then he cut hay down there, late summer. We needed to let the meadows in Whitney Valley dry, so we could harvest hay without getting machinery stuck. I took apart the dam I had built in the log-crib and let the water run down the river. I turned aside the ditch east of the river, so the water ran out on the ranch above the Rouse brothers' ranch, and I turned the water off the Camp Creek field, back into the creek.

      The Canada geese have left the meadow. They leave when the goslings learn to fly, and we usually don't see them again until a few flights tour the valley briefly in the fall. The sandhill cranes stay here through the spring and summer and into the fall. I see them as I ride the motorcycle around the ranch and shut off irrigation water.

      I'm up near the top of the ranch on the motorcycle. The cranes walk through tall grass between me and the west boundary fence. Several red-winged blackbirds fly close and peck at the cranes. The smaller birds outmaneuver the large birds, and all the cranes can do is leave the area. One of the cranes walks over to the edge of the timber, and the blackbirds let it go.

      The constant attack from blackbirds apparently confuses the other crane. It walks one way and then another. I shut the motorcycle off. The crane walks purposefully toward me. Blackbirds dive close to its head. I keep expecting it to turn away, but it keeps coming. It walks to within twenty feet of me, and the blackbirds fly away from it. The other crane calls from over by the timber, and the crane approaching me turns and walks over to it. A little later, both cranes fly across the meadow.

      The next day, a hot day, I ride the motorcycle down to the mill field and divert the water from the buck pasture springs into a drainage above the road. Then I ride onto the mill field and park the bike above the spring that irrigates part of the field. I walk down the ditch and shovel out dirt dams that turn water onto the field. I work my way to the bottom of that ditch and dig through grass roots and mud to get the water to run into the drainage ditch better, so we don't have a big wet area to get stuck in when we cut hay.

      I finish digging the sticky mud and look up. One of the cranes watches me from halfway across the field, about a hundred yards away. I jump across the drainage ditch and walk into the lower field to work on the ditches there. The crane doesn't like me walking toward it, so it walks down the field and diverges slightly from parallel to my line of travel. We walk far enough apart, it doesn't take to wing, but it does walk faster. I walk faster. Soon, I'm taking as long strides as I can and walking as fast as I can without running. The crane outpaces me. Its long legs carry it rapidly across a lot of ground. I've fallen into a crane-walk without thinking about it. I step forward. As I shift my weight onto my forward leg, I lean into the motion. As I move through the step and begin to bring my other leg forward, I swing my upper body back. I bob forward and backward in smooth, rhythmic motion as I walk.

      Ah. I almost am a crane. This is a marvelous way to walk, totally involved with the stepping motion. I run out of field. The crane turns at the bottom of the field and walks directly away from me, toward Camp Creek.

      When I stop, I'm more than fifty yards below where I intended to stop, but I don't mind covering the distance twice. I want to thank the crane for this experience. I already felt good, this fine day. Now I'm glowing all over with pleasure at being alive and being where I am, doing what I'm doing. I shovel ditches until all the water runs into drainages instead of running onto the lower field.

      Eight cinnamon teal ducks float on the mill pond. I'm far enough away, they don't fly but close enough that they're nervous and thinking maybe they will fly. Many phalaropes swim on the pond. I can get much closer to phalaropes than to ducks, especially to fledglings. They swim or walk about, with high-pitched peeps. They're really too trusting.

      I return home. Everybody stays indoors, out of the hot sun. I walk out behind the house and work in the garden. Amanda comes out and pulls weeds with me. After about fifteen minutes, she says, "It's too hot for me."

      I say. "It's just about too hot for me, too. I think I've done enough for today, and I think we should go see what's interesting to do indoors."

      The sun drops toward the hills. The afternoon cools down.

      Wapiti come down from the timber onto the west edge of the meadow most evenings. Just at dusk this evening, they come down, more of them than I've seen before. I count seventy before I give up numbers in favor of just watching. Some of the elk eat, and some of them gallop back and forth, leap, buck, and rear into the air. They eat clover along the edge of the meadow. In some places, they eat it down to bare dirt. That doesn't bother me. Let them eat it.

      But the first year I worked here, I wanted to do the job right; I wanted to do what the bosses wanted me to do. John and Mike came up to see how it was going. The hay was about half-grown, and everything was going pretty well.

      John asked me, "Are the elk coming down onto the meadow?"

      "Sometimes, a while before dark, they come down out of the timber. There were about fifty of them along the edge of the timber Tuesday evening."

      He shook his head. "If they keep coming down this early, they're gonna eat a lot of hay before we get it cut."

      "Well, what do we do about it? Should I try to keep them off the hay ground?"

      "Sure. Keep them out of there if you can. The Department of Fish and Wildlife will furnish carbide cannons to try to scare them off. They go off every once in a while and make a hell of a bang."

      Mike said, "They get used to them pretty fast. They come down and eat the clover all around them after a few days."

      John said, "They work better if you move them around and change the timing every day or two."

      I said, "Okay. If you get some, I'll move them around." Neither of them had much faith in the cannons. They left it to me to see if I could come up with some way to keep the elk off the hay ground.

      Gene Hale ranched this country more than forty years. I thought he might have an idea about what would work. He did. "If you ride a horse out there and take your dog, keep him right by you and just go slow and easy. They won't spook off as quick from a horse. Get as close as you can. When they start to run, go after them for all you're worth. Put the dog after them, and run them as far into the timber as you can go. Do that two or three times, and they won't come back. Deer will; you can't run them out and keep them out, but the elk won't. Oh, sometimes a cow and calf will, or two or three, but the herd won't come back."

      I told John and Mike what Gene had said, and I asked, "Can you bring me up a horse for a while?"

      John said, "Well, we don't have a horse to spare right now."

      Dawg was off his feet after tangling with a passing car, so I figured I'd see what I could do, just me and the motorcycle. Late afternoon, about sixty wapiti came down out of the timber onto the west edge of the meadow. I started the motorcycle and took off. I rode around the barn and headed down onto the meadow, still nearly half a mile from the wapiti. They understood what I was up to and trotted back up the ridge into timber.

      I cranked the motorcycle wide open, bounced across ditches and ground squirrel mounds, and roared into the timber, right up their trail. Half a mile up the ridge, dead trees had fallen across the trail. The machine won't jump like wapiti; so I headed back down. I rode to the next trail into the timber and roared up that as far as I could go, about a mile. I shut off the motor and listened. I didn't hear wapiti. I figured they were miles away and still on the run.

      I started the motorcycle and rode back down the ridge, confident they wouldn't come back for a while. The trail runs a ways just inside the timber, parallel to the edge of the meadow. By the time I approached the meadow, most of the light had gone from the day. At first, I thought my vision was fooling me, the way I imagine all sorts of things in dim light, but then I realized I was fooling myself. The wapiti really had returned to the meadow ahead of me.

      I rode onto the meadow where one of the ditches branching from the big ditch coming down through the timber spreads water. The wet ground was slick. I gave the motorcycle more throttle, but that didn't do anything but break traction so the wheel spun without gaining speed. So I rode onto the meadow just fast enough to maintain my balance. The wapiti trotted across, less than a hundred feet in front of me, into the trees and out of sight in the dark shadow of the timber, except for two cows, who stood at the edge of the timber and watched me until I was within fifty feet of them. Then they followed the herd up the hill.

      When I got back to the house and shut off the machine, I heard the elk whistling as they galloped up and down the meadow, charged each other, bucked and jumped, and then spread out in the heavy clover on the bench ground and ate.

      After that first effort at keeping the wapiti off the meadow, I learned more about cattle, grazing allotments in national forest, and about wapiti, and my perspective changed.

      Cattle eat the largest part of the available graze in the national forest range land around us, where the wapiti would eat if we could keep them off the meadow. Wapiti leave four-fifths or more of the meadow hay. There's plenty of hay to feed the cattle through the winter after the wapiti take first pick, so why get greedy?

      Elk are intelligent, highly social animals, with a sense of humor, a love of play, and considerable understanding of the changing environment where they live. I walk a disputed line between, on one side, over romanticising and anthropomorphizing the animals around me as I see intelligence, love of life, and reasoning ability in them, and, on the other side, falling in too readily with our scientific, rational culture's half blind approach to other life forms.

      We distrust intuitive perception, our own, and that shown by other forms of life. We have become insensitive to the endless subtleties of wildlife's existence and the manifestation of intelligence in all the life around us.

      I walk that disputed line well, informed of opinions both sides of me but tuned to and drawing conclusions from the life in front of me and around me. I've observed the wapiti on the meadow playing together and eating together, and I've seen and heard them up in the timber as I repaired fence or cut and loaded wood.

      I left my tools in the timber and came to work the next day and found hard hat, shovel, axes, and gas cans scattered by elk. I put a tarp over my materials and weighted the tarp heavily with firewood. Elk worked the tarp off and again scattered my tools and materials. I didn't know if they played, or if they attempted to tell me something. I did know that much of their activity is not concerned with basic survival.

      I wonder what we might have discovered about elk, about ourselves, about life and intelligence, if we had not chosen to be predators of the prey animals, elk. I think we might walk harmoniously among all the wild species if we chose harmonious existence with them as our first priority.

      I see a difference in intelligence between elk and deer and a difference in their understanding of their environment. Deer often are killed on the highway, but I've rarely heard of a wapiti being hit by a car. I watched a mother elk watching the highway while she was 200 feet from it, down in the willows. When it was safe, she and her calf trotted up and crossed. They climbed a hundred yards up the ridge before the next truck came roaring around the curve.

      In a deer's mind, it is sheer, unfortunate coincidence that cars suddenly appear out of the woods and whiz by them or hit them and take their lives. But when I watched the mother wapiti watching the road, I knew she understood how it works. The vehicles stay on the highway and safe intervals appear between them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight:

Gardening Where Few Dare

      April 18. Whitney Valley has been very good for us. According to the numbers I read, our monetary income is still well below the poverty level. We don't own much. We have the pickup I bought from Guy, which is now in good shape. Laura's mother gave Laura a '73 sedan, with air conditioning and a tape deck, which has given her freedom she needed, to go where she wants or needs to go even when I'm using the pickup for work. Laura, Juniper, and Amanda go to church in Baker much more than they did before they had the car. I go with them sometimes. We attend more concerts in Baker than we did before we had dependable transportation.

      Monetary poverty means little. I think of Jim touching his forehead and saying, "My treasure's in here." Yes. And I would touch my chest and add, "and in here." We have had rich experience with the earth, with wildlife, with a closely knit, deeply supportive family. Infinite material wealth can't buy the wealth of meaning and the sense of positive fulfillment that comes from our experiences.

      Amanda's and Juniper's education has gone well. They know far more than I did at their age. They know far more than most people I know did at their age. The desire to keep learning consumes them. They're happy, with a cohesive, sensible view of the world. They're both very creative. I admire their ability to apply critical thought to everything they encounter, their ability to think through their relationship to the world around them and make sense of it.

      Laura still encounters people who attack her verbally and accuse her of negligence for taking the responsibility for educating her own children. Her confidence in our ability to take care of most of our daughters’ education within our family isn't strong enough to withstand these sometimes vociferous, vitriolic attacks without emotional upset. I've become good at wiping away tears, reassuring her, and helping her regain confidence that what we are doing is for the greatest good of our family and for each member of the family. I say, "The people who attack you haven't even known you five minutes. They don't know who you are. They don't know what we're doing here. You need to remember they aren't really attacking you. They're reacting to their own thoughtless prejudices.

      "They attack you because they're afraid they've chosen wrong for their own children. They've chosen the paths the culture dictates, a house, a new car, a wealth of material goods. Suddenly, they're looking at someone who's doing it completely different. Suddenly, they're afraid, 'Maybe we've done it wrong. Maybe we chose the wrong values. Maybe we haven't given our children the best we could give them, because we allowed the consumer culture to sell us a shallow set of values.'

      "They can't face that fear. They can't deal with those questions about their own lives, so they lash out at you to blot out the fear, the questions about how they've chosen directions for their own lives. Why else would people who would walk by an adult striking a child and never interfere because it isn't any of their business jump in feet first and total fury the instant they hear we're educating our own children, when they haven't any idea what we're doing, whether it's working well or not, whether our children are getting a good education or not?"

      I often regretted that Laura was the one people attacked verbally, rather than me. She was the one most in contact with people. Then again, it might have been best that I didn't meet these people and receive their anger, since I had little inclination to cloak my certainty about what we were doing in diplomacy, my angry reaction to their uncalled for reactions in careful, well-tempered responses. It's easy to say I'm against violence, but escalation of verbal fury could land me in the middle of violence, with nothing at all achieved.

      We're ahead of our time. We'll hear of more and more people who teach their own children, and we'll see growing acceptance of the practice, but the numbers are few so far, and acceptance is thin and widely spaced.

      Wind roars down the mountain, whistles, and pounds across the valley. Loose metal on the shop roof slaps up and down. I should nail it down, but it's too windy to get up there. When the wind dies, the metal won't make noise.

      None of us want to be outdoors in the cold wind. Thirty-two is the high temperature all day. The sun shines now and then. Clouds scatter from Greenhorn, then bunch up over the valley, and it looks like we will get rain or snow, but so far, no precipitation. After lunch, I walk through the garden area. I've landscaped and raked. The garden is ready to plant, but I'm not in a rush about it. Some crops, seeded now, will germinate, but they won't grow much until it warms up.

      Last winter, I promised Juniper I would add a room to the house, spring and summer. She needs her own room. I start digging a hole south of the south wall of the house. It seems to me the easiest and most conservative way to build another room is to dig most of the room, then line it with rocks. I'll use the excavated dirt to build the walls higher. I'll build windows into the width of the south and west walls, at the tops of the walls.

      Building the room into the ground will set the roof of the room low enough to join the rest of the house under the south window of the kitchen, so the room doesn't cut off any light that shines into the house. A subterranean room will be easy to heat. I can use the shape of the dirt and the rocks I line it with to make beds, shelves, and places to sit. I can get enough free, used metal roofing to roof the room. I can use beetle-killed lodgepole for the structural wood.

      I hauled in more rocks for landscaping the garden the first year we lived here than I needed. If I use big rocks to brace the dirt, I won't need much mortar to bind the rocks together to seal the inside of the room. I'll build a wood-burning heater into the dirt and rock structure of the north wall, so the heater is under the part of the house already there, and it will help heat the rest of the house.

      I don't make drawings of what I intend to build. I don't take very many measurements. The hole I dig and the rocks I line it with will define the room. I'll bring everything into square when I've built the walls high enough to add the wood-framed top of the room. I move big, flat rocks close to where I'm working and into the part of the hole I've dug deep enough. I start building the walls and part of the floor. I still need to move a lot of dirt.

      I think if I get the room well started and then tell John about it, and if he looks at it and sees the sense of the structure, he'll say go ahead with it, and I might be able to get him to pay for the whatever materials I have to buy.

      We'll garden the mound of earth under the windows of the new room. We'll landscape the room and the garden together. I'll build a small exit into the garden from high in the southeast corner of the room, and I'll build another exit from the room into the house.

      I started this garden that I now visualize blending into the structure of the house two days before we moved to Whitney. I drove out, spaded ground, and removed grass from the surface. Northeastern Oregon has a short growing season and frequent summer frosts, but I intended to grow as much of our food as I could. I hoped to grow enough that we could sell some produce. Selling produce never happened, but we had plenty for our own use, and we gave vegetables to friends and relatives.

      After we moved, I worked manure and hay into the ground, added dolomite, watered it heavily, let it stand a few days, and planted. I planted vegetables that withstood some frost. I planted fifty strawberry plants, four dozen raspberry plants and thirty-two fruit trees, all of them varieties advertised as very hardy, including cherries, plums, apricots, and apples.

      During the beginning of fall's cold weather, I covered the garden with hay. All through our first winter in Whitney Valley, I walked out to the garden, shoveled the snow aside, moved the hay, and harvested carrots, onions, kale, and lettuce and then covered the garden again. When warm weather of spring melted the snow from Whitney Valley, we were still eating fresh vegetables from the garden.

      The second year, I planted large areas and covered them with hay when cold weather started. We harvested and stored vegetables in the keep house, and I didn't begin to dig through snow and hay after vegetables until well into winter. Voles, mice, ground squirrels, gophers, some or all, had discovered the bounty and had been harvesting. I found only three or four pounds of carrots, a few onions, three bulbs of garlic, no lettuce, no kale.

      We already had two cats, but when Laura, Juniper, and Amanda came home from a trip to town, told me about two cats needing a home and asked me if they could bring them home, I said, "Sure. Bring them home. Maybe they'll thin the rodent population so we can keep vegetables in the garden in the winter."

      People abandoned cats along the road. Winter settled into the valley, and cats showed up at our door and asked for help making it through hard times. Cats had kittens. By the time snow began to fall, we had eighteen cats, more than I wanted in my most generous moods. Laura set up feeding stations on the back porch and in the shop out behind the house. She cooked stews of leftovers, grains, whatever we had, to feed the cats. We didn't have money enough to feed them store-bought cat food. They immediately ate what she cooked for them.

      She put several boxes with rags in them in the shop for cats to sleep in. We allowed only a favored few in the house. I'm sure it seemed unfair to the always outdoor cats, but allowing more than a few in led to cat fights and other messy problems in the house. We had messy problems around the house and shop anyway, since the cats wouldn't go far from their shelter, and there was nothing to dig in but snow. When the snow melted, it was an odoriferous place for a while, but we still had vegetables in the garden.

      We thinned the ranks. The people at the animal shelter said they could usually place kittens in homes, so we left some of the kittens there. We gave cats to anyone who would take them. Some cats left voluntarily. Spring puts voles, mice, and ground-squirrels into action, and some of the cats were more willing to try to make it on their own than to stay in a place where there were so many cats.

      Half the fruit trees and three fourths of the raspberry plants died the first winter. One crabapple tree and two raspberry plants survived the second winter.

      After the next winter, we had one fruit tree and no raspberry plants. Only the trunk and two branches of the crabapple tree lived. The next winter, which dropped to fifty-six degrees below zero, killed the rest of the tree.

      Strawberry plants did well, but frost settled into Whitney Valley often through the summer, and strawberry blossoms frosted and wouldn't set fruit. Sometimes the time between frosts was just right, and we harvested a few ripe berries. Amanda and Juniper, impressed by a bowlful of berries from the garden asked me to plant more. I said, "I will if you'll help me with it."

      Juniper said, "Sure. We'll help."

      We hauled manure and decomposing hay, and I tilled 2,500 square feet across the driveway from the house. We cut runners from the plants we already had and thinned mature plants and planted all of them in the newly tilled area. The plants thrived. We watered them thoroughly and mulched them heavily with rain-spoiled hay just before I had to shut the ditches off for haying, and the plants came through dry-off in fine shape.

      In August of the new strawberry bed's second year, I thought we had well over a gallon of ripe berries on the plants. Pick them tomorrow, I thought, when they're at the peak of ripeness. The temperature dropped to sixteen degrees that night, August 18, and the berries froze and were no good. The frost killed the blossoms and ruined the developing fruit. There wasn't time for another crop to mature, even if the weather was ideal. I let Jewel eat that strawberry patch, and I trimmed our other patches.

      There are techniques that can help trees and shrubs make it through severe winters, but we also face frosts every month of the year. Trees surviving the winters would be unlikely to set fruit, so I didn't replant.

      Cloche gardening protects plants from light frosts. I thought of building a greenhouse so we could grow tomatoes, peppers, melons, and other frost sensitive plants, but I can only achieve a finite amount of work after ranch work, cutting firewood, helping teach and raise the girls, and writing.

      We grow fine carrots, cabbages, onions, garlic, lettuce, spinach, kale, kohlrabi, beets, parsley. Peas about half the time. Sometimes a heavy frost comes and kills the peas, but I always plant them and hope.

      We lost the garden to grasshoppers one year, late in the summer, though I don't blame the loss on the grasshoppers. I cut hay too many hours every day. I couldn't bring water down the ditch, because it seeped through the banks out onto the meadow, and the meadow had to stay dry until we finished haying. I dug a well near the garden, but the pump I had then was very difficult to prime. Laura couldn't manage it at all, and only with a lot of work was I ever able to get it pumping. So we hauled and siphoned water from the kitchen, and we didn't get enough water to the garden.

      Where there are other things to eat, grasshoppers won't eat thoroughly watered plants. But if a garden dries out, they will attack in force, and that's what they did, until we didn't have any garden. Where onions had grown, the grasshoppers left perfect, onion-shaped holes. They ate every surface crop level with the ground. They ate roots of any size two or three inches into the ground.

      The next year, I didn't plant a garden. I had plenty of work to do, and feeding the grasshoppers once seemed like enough. All summer, every time I walked through the garden area, I felt sad, and I missed the vegetables, especially the carrots and lettuce.

      So the next year, I bought a small, self-priming pump. I discovered a spring above the barn that fed the ditch into the garden enough water to help keep the garden irrigated. I planted a small area, with excellent soil, close to the house, and we had a productive garden. We still had to overcome problems, but that is as it should be when gardening in Northeastern Oregon. We had all the vegetables we could eat.

      I dig more dirt and place more rocks for the new room, but irrigation work is urgent. I have fence to repair, garden to plant, and wood to cut. I don't want to rush the new room anyway. When I have a week or two clear, I'll put enough form to it so it shows what I'm going to do.

    Somewhere in an Oregon Valley is $15.00. Add $3.00 shipping and handling and send a check for $18.00 to Jon Remmerde, PO Box 8569, Bend, OR 97708. Please allow two weeks for delivery. 204 pages, 6 X 9 inch paperback.

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