Tree swallow nesting boxes, each with art work painted on the plywood, were spaced more or less evenly on my left, like mailboxes on an avian country road, which disappeared around the bend ahead. On our right was a pond from an old gravel pit where Jim told me occasionally he had seen otters, although there were none today. He said the pit would soon overflow from rain, flooding the brown grasses nearby. We were on Green Island, north of the confluence, and Jim, with extensive experience with the 90 nesting boxes, explained how he and others did a swallow survey. Both of us carried binoculars, because one does so in this kind of place. Jim was a good birder; I, not so much.
Jim told me that Kit, part of the survey crew, didn’t believe in the idea that touching a bird was bad for it. “Kit opens the door, and usually the bird flies out, so he counts the eggs or young and then closes the door. If he has to, he can lift the bird off the nest to do it.” In any case, the survey crew had been dealing with 90 nesting boxes and counting every bird there for a long time. They had useful data, and I was impressed with their skill and dedication.
My route to this spot was 15 miles and 8 long months with biopsies, prodding, a PET scan, and bad news, for I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, the same disease that killed Barry Lopez. I began androgen deprivation therapy in July, rendering me chemically castrated, estrogen side effects that made things on my body too large or too small, and gave me hot flashes. Only one knew my disability when I was doing trail work in the wilderness, my plantar fasciitis being a silver lining why I couldn’t hike as fast as usual. My 45 radiation treatments occurred from mid-October to Christmas Eve. Each day I had treatment, I left an outdoor essay, appropriately numbered, in the waiting room. The essays were for anyone to read, but they were my daily therapy as surely as the photons that were shot into my pelvis.
I discovered that hormonal changes seemed to improve my observational skill and ability to find beauty in unexpected places. I removed encroaching brush on Lowder Mountain trail in the Three Sisters Wilderness, eschewing trail work rules by refusing to remove a clump of Cascade asters I found, moving cone flower and tiger lily stems out of the way rather than cutting them, as I wrote in my essay “Not Quite by the Book.” I slept poorly during my treatment, but many of these nights I had a useful revelation I could later use in my writing. Jim arrived at the radiation center my 42nd treatment day. I acted like a welcome wagon host in the waiting room, totally foreign to how I perceived myself, perhaps again an effect of my mixed-up mischievous hormones. I introduced him to our small group who had similar times for treatment, how we all supported each other, our camaraderie. These were without question the best 15 minutes of my day. I went early to my appointment, just for those minutes. Jim found interesting my then 42 essay pile in the room for those awaiting photon beam treatment, figuring the author might be interesting as well. I had been about to take the essays home after I finished at the center. However, the prior day the techs told me that many were reading them, so I left the essays there. I told Jim he could take them home as long as he brought them back. He must have realized that even in this short time, I might be interesting enough that it might be worth showing me Green Island, so here we were on a gray day that promised drizzle but not much else.
Back near the river a couple of miles north of the confluence, there was a red tail hawk that flew over along with a couple of flickers, some robins, and my only contribution, a spotted towhee. Jim said he was interested in my story about iron in heme and magnesium in chlorophyll, the only difference between the two structures in their central part, adding he needed to do a lot more reading.
We continued walking, not seeing much this time of year, until we reached the Willamette, with what looked like a 2-3 knot current with significant erosion on the east side where we were. While I was nautically investigating, Jim spotted a pair of eagles on a tree across the flow. It’s been a while since I have seen a pair of eagles. He got closer to the edge of the river than I, who thought the water looked cold with no easy egress if one went in. We talked about radiation. Jim had finished his sixth treatment and told me he now had fewer than forty to go. I liked his attitude. I counted up my treatments on my essays. Jim felt like he had some changes he needed to make; I told him what I did, but we both knew that each of us has to find his own way.
We finished our walk with a good look at many wigeons in the distance and then returned to the vehicles.
I went out to Green Island not knowing what I would see, remembering the North Country writer Sam Cook’s thoughts that “you don’t go out looking for cool things to happen, but you go out knowing that cool things could happen every time. I just tell people, just go, just get out… You never know what you’re going to see, but you aren’t going to see it in the living room.”
It wasn’t until afterward I realized the connection I was destined to find that day was not with plants, the sky, or even the eagles, but with Jim, from the welcome wagon and essay writing side of me to his welcoming me into an important part of his life. When I by illness was unable to find connections in nature, I developed others in the radiation center. I wasn’t going to find it in the living room, but I could find it in the inner waiting room of a radiation therapy center.
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Boreal B[l]og 
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