Boreal B[l]og

I should be colder than this, I thought, standing on the frozen dirt road with a thin coating of snow. I’ve got jeans on, 2 shirts, and a thin windbreaker.  It was 27 (or -3 C), and I had my back to a brisk wind that so far had not worked its way through my balaclava or under my hard hat.

One way to Winchester Ridge Trail was downhill to to Swan Lake then climbing out, steeply in places, to the ridge. Others had told me the bushwhack from the parking lot directly to the trail was flat and we’d get to the ridge in about a half mile.  I looked upward at the route and had my doubts, as we gathered our tools and headed east on to a trail that quickly disappeared.  

My GPS showed several contours in our direction, so I assumed the worst—that the contours were real and what I had heard wasn’t—and noted my altimeter.  I estimated at least 400 vertical feet—120 meters— of climbing. Some think that sort of knowledge is not part of the wilderness experience, but I have long used an altimeter when I hike, along with maps, which most definitely are part of the wilderness experience.  I want to know where I am, where I am going, about how far it is, and how much I have to climb or descend. Altitude on a trail can often be a surrogate for one’s location, if there are good contour maps.  The trail was gone, the trees angled up, the bushes scraped my jeans and left a coating of snow. At least hiking uphill, I was staying warm, so long as I didn’t fall.  Fortunately, Winchester Ridge Trail came earlier than what my Gaia app told me, and I didn’t have to cross two more brown contour lines. We were on the trail, heading south towards Waldo Mountain junction, about 2.5 miles away.  We didn’t know what was out there, log-wise, but we’d find out in about a half hour, when we reached the previous stopping point.

I have my watch altimeter and my Gaia contours set to metric. My GPS reads English. My car speedometer and odometer is set to metric. I didn’t think I would keep it that way, but I do. Making a meter of elevation is a lot better than a foot (nearly 3.03 times as better), and I play around with the numbers on the trail, the way I look at the rocks, trees, sky, and wildlife. To me, being in the outdoors is a full mental experience. 

I had all my essentials except for a lot less water than I carried in summer, which was a blessing.  I usually carry a Pulaski without a sheath.  Sometimes, there is one, but it tends to come off if I am going through brush, and putting the sheath on and off again several times, I finally decide it’s easier to carry it without one. If I start to slip, I am supposed to throw the tool, assuming my flailing arm in an attempt to balance me is capable to doing that on short notice.  The first time I was hiking out with the Crew, I threw it on one bounce into the calf of the guy in front of me.  Fortunately, nothing happened, but I felt stupid and apologized. That’s why one should follow well behind on the trail.

We reached the first log, and as I in the rear approached, the two working on it waved us on to the next one, 20 yards further down the trail.  As I came up to the log, I scouted the area using the acronym OHLEC—Objective-Hazards-Lean/Bind (we weren’t tree fellers, so only bind mattered)-Escape route-Cutting Plan. The first log was across the trail, 12 inches in diameter, too long to try to pull it parallel to the trail, but it had promise that with one cut, we could pull the remaining end to the side.  There were no significant hazards, the log would probably have top bind, but not severe, the escape routes weren’t an issue for a log near the ground, and we opened the cut slightly to accommodate our later pushing of the log to the desired direction.  My partner and I, both of us newly certified to do what we had already been doing all summer— the previous year as well— for that matter, bent to the task, or the saw.  

The top bind or compression wasn’t enough to catch the saw, and we cut through the log quickly. I kneel a lot on the ground, because I prefer the ground to bending over, and I think I cut better with the saw closer to eye level.  Besides, my back is happier that way.

We stopped briefly to let the first cutter crew go through on to the next log, and then finished the cut, put a strap around the log, stepped back, and pulled the remainder parallel to the trail. It was done.  I now was quite warm and took off my windbreaker.

We headed on, leapfrogging, to the next log, 20 inches in diameter, in a pile of branches. I call these things a mess. In order to figure out what to do, we had to first remove the branches, some of which had 3 inch trunks of their own and were both difficult to cut and to throw aside. Once we got the area cleared, we looked at the log and decided we probably would get away with one cut, but might need two.  

As we started cutting, the saw moved well. Sawdust was being generated, I allowed my partner to take as much of the saw as he wanted, and I pulled back as far as I could. Each stroke counted more that way. Half way through, there was a little bind. I pulled a hard plastic wedge out of my pocket, stuck it in the kerf, or the cut, and pounded it in with the back of the axe.  The stuck saw was resting against my leg, and as I pounded it, I could feel it start to move, as the bind was relieved. 

We cut further, and as we got near the end, we slowed the cutting speed and shortened the arc. The sawdust became reddish, as we entered the bark, and we stopped sawing. While we could cut through, the log might take the saw into the ground, and dirt is one of the worst enemies of a vintage cross cut saw.  I removed the handle, and my partner pulled the saw through the cut, then replacing the handle. 

I finished the cut with my KatanaBoy 500, a one man saw, and while that shouldn’t touch the ground either, it is less easily damaged than a large crosscut and also replaceable, unlike the vintage crosscuts, which were handmade with different steel that no longer exists. The log dropped slightly.  Because of the ease of the cut, we decided to make a second cut, figuring that we could do it almost as fast as trying to rig up a way to move the log. I like moving logs and saving a cut, but I have my limits.

We would later have lunch on a splendid rock overlook with Waldo Lake in the distance to our east and the Eddeeleo Lakes below us.  We would finish the trail in sunshine—although still cool—and split up the crew on the way back, some re-taking the “shortcut” back down to the cars, others, like me, taking two trails, one that descended, the second ascending to the cars. 

Our way was 4 minutes faster.  

• 

Two days after the election, the Crew had a job up on Shale Ridge on the North Fork of the Middle Fork (yes, it is called that) of the Willamette River. This was just outside of the Waldo Lake Wilderness, not far from the Three Sisters Wilderness, so chain saws were allowed.  We had four crews to deal with about five miles of trail.

I knew a guy from the Club who had recently led a hike in that area and asked him what sort of condition the trail was in.  He mentioned rotting bridges over streams and big tangles of logs and brush over the trail. I’m amazed these days that I have “connections” to learn about who has hiked where, who hadn’t put out a campfire, who is doing what in the Forest. I passed the scouting information on to the crew leader, before we all drove up separately and had our “tailgate session” at Constitution Grove. That is where we discuss the day and safety. I was with two crew leaders, one with the saw, the other, like me, a swamper helping.  We started towards the river and soon found plenty of work.  Constitution Grove has many Douglas firs, about the same age as the nation, so they are massive, and have signs on them with the name and state of someone at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The area was named in 1987, the 200th anniversary.  I saw a John Dickinson from Delaware and wondered whether the high school in Wilmington was named for him.  It was.  I scouted a basketball game there one night, 55 years ago, my senior year in high school, when an injured player from our team spent the season as a scout and asked me to help him.  We’ve been good friends ever since.

It was nice out in the woods. Nobody spoke about the election, not a word.  The vine maples were shedding yellow leaves, when they weren’t slapping us in the face when we tried to cut them out.  Vine maples are small, but more than one guy has said his worst injuries out here were caused by them.  We had to use our arms and legs, logs as pry bars to move some of the cut logs, and I spent part of the afternoon on my knees crawling 30 feet, cleaning up enough branch debris so the sawyer could get in to cut.  As we were walking back to the vehicles at about 3, it started to rain. Perfect timing.  The drive down was almost magical in the rain, trees ablaze in color on both sides of the road, getting dark, the needed autumn rains here.

I needed that day, because I feel like I neither know nor understand America any more. I shouldn’t be surprised. I was alive during the McCarthy era, although I don’t remember, “Have you no shame?”  words that are every bit as relevant today as they were then.  We have endured the last few years with people who have no shame.  Nothing is sacred, and while political correctness has its flaws, there ought to be some verbal lines people in power simply do not cross.

I remember the Civil Rights workers (“outside agitators”) who were murdered and buried at another Philadelphia, in Mississippi.  Here in Oregon, outside agitators came in with guns and took over a wildlife refuge.  Got away with it legally, too, with only one dead, when he tried to run a police blockade and pulled a gun.  Whole thing was streamed.  I remember “activist judges” being decried by The Other Side, before the Supreme Court stopped a vote count, called corporations people, and other courts started practicing medicine.

We had Spiro Agnew, the first in a line of vice presidents so bad one wanted the president to survive: Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, and Mike Pence, although Quayle now thinks the president should concede. Agnew was the one who coined the “Silent Majority,” which was believed to truly be in favor of the policies promulgated by the Nixon Administration.. 

No, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all by our assault on the environment by James Watt and a host of others, reaching a climax now, when there are oil leases in ANWR, and they now want to log the Tongass. This is insane, but perhaps a majority of the country doesn’t agree with me.

The flag has long been co-opted in that if one wearing it or flying it, especially in the bed of a pickup, he (yes, he) is patriotic, even if he didn’t serve in uniform, let alone overseas in unfriendly territory, doesn’t know the words of the national anthem, the Pledge of Allegiance, can’t name the thirteen colonies, the first state, or hadn’t been to even half the states.  

I didn’t like Nixon, and I was glad to see him go, that August day in 1974, before I returned to the night shift at the Denver General ER.  But Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, and back then there was bipartisan legislation. A few Supreme Court justices nominees got turned down, and stupid things said, like Sen. Roman Huruska’s famous words supporting mediocrity, but by and large the Senate was an important deliberative body. 

Now, we have a rare few senators who think the president should concede, while the majority leader feels he should take all this purported concern about the vote to court and it isn’t clear if the Secretary of State really thinks there will be a second term. The President won’t tell the GSA head that Mr. Biden should now have his own office and get morning presidential briefings, as Mr. Obama did for Mr. Trump and Mr. Bush did for Mr. Obama.  

The guys in camo have already demonstrated in Salem, probably with a few more outside agitators, but I hope they don’t really think that Biden’s nearly 400,000 vote win here should be contested or any of the now six million plus margin of victory Biden had on the west coast and the five plus million nationally,  So far.

I am trying to find humor where I can. Knowing that there is now an unofficial unofficial (not a typo) Fraud Street run (to go with Philadelphia’s Broad Street Run) from Four Seasons Landscaping to the Four Seasons Hotel, is good for a laugh.  

As is McConnell’s saying it was a good election for Republicans, even though he thinks the presidential part of it should be decided in court.

As were the protestors shouting “Stop the Count” in Detroit and Philadelphia, even as they were shouting “Count the Votes” in Phoenix.  Can’t you guys make up your mind?

Part of me is worried that the craziness will intensify, but nobody seems to be counting on Covid’s increase to up the ante.  Maybe the current leaders aren’t concerned, but the people lined up in their cars at Autzen Stadium getting tested for it are. One in 70 in North Dakota is currently infected, 1 in 16 has tested positive, and Covid positive nurses are allowed to care for patients now.  A major hospital in Idaho was recently on diversion, and we don’t yet know how many long haul Covid patients there will be in the country, let alone what exactly they have, or whether it is treatable.  Right now, the country is giving up. I’ve got to be more careful, even in the woods.

During this time, the president said that doctors were making a lot of money off Covid.  Considering that many physicians have had to stop elective surgery, change their whole practice about seeing patients, and hospitals furloughed nurses, there may be those making money off the disease, but they aren’t wearing PPE and risking their lives.

Thursday, we go back up the North Fork to do trail work.  It may rain.  We will get wet and muddy, logging out the trail and repairing tread. Bridges are out, crossings may be dicey, and there are over 200 logs to take out. It will take months to fix.   I’m looking forward to it. It’s November up here, and maybe things are starting to be what they are supposed to be.  

One can hope.

• 

• 

We pulled up to the empty campsite on Knife Lake, just east of the Eddy Lake portage, and I hopped  out of the canoe to check it.  Mark and I were doing a sweep of the District during a week’s time, checking permits, people, campsites, picking up litter, digging new latrines and covering old ones, but mostly taking a long canoe trip and being paid for it.  Earlier that day, we came upon a group of seven young women and an older man leading the trip.  Mark said to the guy, “I want your job.”  When the guy heard what we were doing, he said, “I want yours.”

I saw something on the site that I still vividly remember, nearly three decades later: a fire was burning well outside the fire grate, the flames high, fed by the wind, and about to reach the grassy area nearby.  Fire inside the fire grate is almost friendly.  Fire outside the grate, burning uncontrollably, is not.  

We both used our hats to get water, shovels, and Pulaski to gradually get the fire under control and then out. Had the summer been much more drier, this fire would have been off to the races. There was no Knife Lake Fire that year, and we continued our trip uneventfully towards Fraser Lake.

Later that summer, I did a trip on the Kawishiwi River and fully a third of the sites we visited had a fire area with outright active fire or warm ashes.  

I was taught that a campfire burns itself out overnight.  We left sites that way.  Finally, one time I decided to check that proposition and burned myself on hot ashes.  I learned what has been said for a lot longer than I have practiced—put the fire dead out, drown it, and don’t leave until the ashes are cold to touch. 

Five years after the Knife Lake incident, I was on a volunteer trip with the late Mike Manlove.  We came into Good Lake, and at the first site there was a tent up but nobody there and a fire burning. I still remember the leader of the trip’s coming back to the site while we were there and apologizing. As Mike wrote him a $100 fine for an unattended fire, the man was upset and embarrassed, saying he had spent over four hundred nights in the Boundary Waters and nothing like this had ever happened. I wonder how many unintended fires he had during that time.

Back then, I was pushing 200 nights and knew clearly that on day trips, one was better off not building a morning fire. Drowning it would make it harder to start that evening.  Eat a stove heated breakfast and save the fire for evening.  I’m now over 300 days, will never hit 400, and I still canoe that way.

Three years ago, I took a backpacking trip to the coast with one of the premier leaders in the Club. The area was nice, but the trip didn’t work for me. I learned that the leader’s sleep schedule and mine must be in synch.  Ours weren’t. The leader sat around the campfire drinking whisky at night and slept until 9. By 9, I have been up for 3 hours, eaten breakfast, taken a walk on the beach and was ready to go somewhere else. 

That’s not a criticism of the leader. But when we were leaving the site, he kicked some dirt over where the campfire had been and scattered the logs.  I went over and put my hand on the ground.

It was hot.  Ouch hot. That is a criticism. Shameful. That is a criticism of the leader.

It wasn’t easy getting water, since we were on a bluff over the ocean. I did work my way down to a stream for two trips and got enough water to make the area cooler.  I had to move quickly, however, because others on the trip were leaving the camp for their cars, and I didn’t want to miss my ride home. I left the site better, but worried for a full day that maybe the fire had burned under ground and would come up somewhere.

I was stunned: how could a leader leave a fire area hot?  The prior day, we left the campsite about 10, and I realized that I had not checked the campfire, perhaps because I hadn’t sat around it and assumed the leader would have put it dead out.  Wrong assumption.

I haven’t been on trips with this leader since.  I invited a Club member on a canoe trip with me in 2017; he drank Canadian Club at night and slept in the next morning.  It spoiled the trip.  We got on the water late, and the best time of day had passed.  Paddling lakes in the early morning is special.  The wind isn’t usually up, birds and other animals are more likely to be out, and there is a stillness that won’t last but a couple of hours. 

Two weeks ago, I was with the Crew doing trail work in the Diamond Peak Wilderness when a two young women backpackers came by us, having hiked up from Corrigan Lake, one of several nice lakes on the west side of that wilderness.  They commented that they had put out an abandoned campfire that morning on their way out. They knew it was there because they saw it the prior night.

“Why anyone would have a campfire in these temperatures is a mystery to me,” one said. I thought there was a campfire ban, but it was beginning the following day. Still, talks of imminent campfire bans are a good reason not to have campfires.

We thanked them for their help and continued working our way towards the lake.  I then remembered that the Club had had a backpack into Corrigan that very week.  The same leader was leading that backpack, mentoring another, and I wondered whether it had been their campfire. 

When we returned to town, it wasn’t clear to me whether they had had a campfire.  I wrote a board member with my concern, not proof, because others could have been at Corrigan, although not many, since it is a small lake.  I mentioned my concern and the issue on the coast three years prior.  I also mentioned that I had heard that one fire almost had gotten away from that same leader up in the Cascades. That was hearsay, and I admitted that.  I got a reply that the board member had seen pictures on Facebook of the group with two different campfires.  He took that information to others and the Club now bans all campfires.  If one wants to build a campfire, we can’t stop them, but it is not allowed on a Club trip.  That may not stop people, but it protects the Club.  I can think of three other violations I’ve heard about on Facebook.  Be careful what you post.

And put the fire dead out when you leave the site. Fires start fast, and it only takes seconds for a fire to be high enough in a tree that you will never reach it.

A few mosquitoes flew around me as I left the Hemlock Butte area parking lot and started on the trail to Vivian Lake.  I was first; the other four workers were finishing getting their gear together, bug nets on, saws and Pulaskis together for the log out of the trail, clearing the path of fallen trees and branches that had accumulated over the winter.. I was going to the first blowdown, still outside the Diamond Peak Wilderness, and would wait for the chain sawyer behind me.  We would use the chain saw to clear blowdowns outside the wilderness, the first several hundred yards of trail; two man saws would be used further along, once we entered the wilderness.

We hoped to clear the main trail to the junction of the Divide Lake Trail and then clear the latter all the way to the Pacific Crest Trail.  If we had time, we wanted to clear a few miles to Vivian Lake, although that seemed like a tall order.

I got to the first blowdown, an 8 inch hemlock across the trail, and waited for the sawyer. The other three passed by on their way to the wilderness boundary, where a few big logs awaited them. We would be there soon enough.

The sawyer cleared the first obstacle and the next, and I threw the cut logs off the trail then moved on.  When I reached the third, an easy log across the trail, I kept my pack on, since I expected the cutting to be quick.  The sawyer arrived, and he looked at the log, planning the cut standing on the opposite side from me.

I looked up above the log and stopped cold.

There was a large log perpendicular to and resting right on the one we were going to cut.  I yelled over to the sawyer, telling him he might want to move to my side of the log.  He looked up at the larger log and nodded.  He moved over to my side, started up the saw and began cutting.  It didn’t take long.

As the small blowdown was cut through, two things happened in quick succession:

1. The small log dropped on the trail.
2. Immediately, the larger log dropped rolled down right over the trail, bounced, went airborne, and landed 15 feet below, against a tree.  

The whole sequence took maybe 5 seconds.  

“Thank you!” The sawyer called.  I nodded.  

That was the first time in nearly eighty times out in the woods with the group I can truthfully say I called a problem before it became one.  Most of the other times I had seen as others had, or there was no need for concern.  This one would have been nasty and might well have ended the day for us. 

The sawyer’s helper is called a swamper, which doesn’t exactly convey desire or respect, but it is the noun, and the verb is “to swamp (for)” someone.  Sawyers concentrate on logs, and they depend upon swampers to keep them safe from harm. It is another pair of eyes to look above for dead trees that may come down or tension loaded spring poles—small trees bent in a U-shape— that can do a lot of damage to one’s self-image if cut improperly.

• 

• 

A short while and two cuts later, we stashed the chain saw and entered the wilderness, dealing with two moderate size blowdowns (16 inches, 40 cm in diameter) using 2-man, 5-foot crosscuts. There were a modest number of blowdowns needing to be cut before we reached the junction of the trail to Divide Lake and the Pacific Crest Trail, and headed towards Divide Lake. Here, we had to cut out several large downed trees. We did some leapfrogging, where two would work on one blowdown and the other two worked their way up the trail. By the end of the morning, we had cleared the lower half of the trail.

We stopped for lunch.  Trail work is a special kind of hike. We don’t usually cover a lot of distance, but we see and hear much more in the woods, because we spend so much time in the same place. High in the sunlight were spider webs. There were signs of past storms, of trees leaning broken off, or cut in two.  There were shade tolerant wildflowers on the forest floor.  On wet days, there are small pools of water on low spots of the trail. Around us, we could see new growth. 

I have a special relationship with the ground, be it the forest or a floor. I often sit on it, kneel on it, lie on it.  When I saw patients and examined their legs, I knelt on the floor to do so. I had two chairs in the exam room, and often the patient and family member sat in them and I sat on the step stool.  I was closer to the ground and had eye-to-eye horizontal contact.  I didn’t try to talk down to my patients, figuratively or literally.

We do trail work because we like doing good, and we enjoy being out in the woods with a bunch of other like-minded people.  I still do “normal” hikes, but I enjoy helping make the trails accessible for everyone.  I enjoy eating my lunch without often snide comments about what I am eating, and I enjoy a day where we aren’t talking politics, only tension and compression, the latter causing saws to bind.  We approach a log, check how it lies, whether we can move it without cutting, or with a strap, or with only one cut, or needing two.  We look above, below, and around for dangerous objects. We try to anticipate what the cut log will do, where it is going to go, how to get it off the trail, and whether there is room for it somewhere else.

Only then do we saw.  The first time I did it, I lasted about 30 seconds. Half the time, one is relaxing, allowing the saw to be pulled by his or her partner.  The other half, one is pulling. Relax, pull, relax, pull, several hundred times, dealing with the bind, which pinches the saw and unless a wedge is pounded in, stops work.  

What was a first for me this day was when asked if I wanted a break, I said no, I was fine.  And I was.  I wanted to finish the cut we were doing, and then I would rest.  It was the first time working that not only did I have more endurance than someone, I had the most endurance of the small group we had, which I hadn’t realized, until somebody said they couldn’t keep up with me.  I had never heard that before. 

That sort of stuff doesn’t come easy. It requires a lot of work, good technique, pacing oneself, and time in the woods doing this.  I will not have days like this all the time.  I would suck wind sawing the following week, and I would learn that I don’t have the legs to hike, push logs, and be out in the woods 5 days out of ten, without taking a few days off.  But two weeks later, I would have my first “second wind” while sawing, and finished a 23 incher. 

I had called a hazard that otherwise would have been unseen, and I was able to hold my own sawing. I was doing my own definition of good and enjoying it.

• 

As I began to write this, Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, asked for a nationwide draft of doctors and other health care workers.

Ah, the draft.  I was number 56 in 1969; one brother was number 139; the other was a staff sergeant in the Marines at Da Nang. I ended up going to medical school, joining the reserves there, then spending two years’ active duty aboard the ‘Lou, the USS St. Louis (LKA-116), with two deployments to the western Pacific and having seen just about every country that bordered the Pacific north of the equator.  Just about.

The draft ended in 1973, so if I had not joined, I never would have had the experience of being a medical officer in an organization where medicine was not the top priority.  It had to be that way in the military, but ultimately that was the reason I left. But I never regretted my service. Not once.

In the interim, I have often wanted a draft, and we likely would have been a lot more cautious about entering conflicts if we had one.  A lot of young men—now women—need a time in their lives when they have to follow orders.  A big reason we got out of Vietnam was that everyday America was taking part in the war. People in the military weren’t heroes then, other than the real ones who got “The Medal” or one of the Stars. When I returned home, nobody spat on me, but nobody treated me any differently, either. I was just a young man in the military.  Just about everybody had to do it, unless they had bone spurs or some other often minor condition.  

It was a couple of decades later before Veterans Day actually had meaning for me.  I realized I was a veteran, not something that had often occurred to me for at least 15 years after my service. Really.  

Now we are in a pandemic, with doubling times of deaths recently in the 3 day range, starting to lengthen now to 4-5 days, having doubled 14 times total as I write this, with only four more doublings before we hit 100,000.  You can see why 200,000 (one more doubling after that) is on the table. And NYC needs help, badly.

From what I see and hear, there are times I am tempted to pull out my old bag and go to volunteer, since I doubt there will be a doctor draft any time soon.  Even as out of date as I am, I could certainly screen, talk to families, answer calls (with my upstate New York accent), help with intubations, and probably a few other things.  

But that’s more romantic—and a lot crazier—than reality.  I would likely get in the way, probably get sick, not unlikely become a ventilator candidate, which I would refuse, and die alone, my last days becoming part of the problem I wanted to help, 3000 miles from home.  I’d rather do it here, but as of this writing, we have had our 10th doubling for cases (1024) and our doubling time is about six days. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a huge outbreak by June, but the doubling time is gradually lengthening. Our growth factor (new/prior day) is often under 1, which is good.

I’ve never been a hero, and I am not about to be a martyr, either.  We need to have a solid volunteer corps where people can immediately go to where they are needed, starting close to home. I might be good talking to families who want information.  When I practiced, I did not shy away from talking to families of dying patients.  I didn’t like it a good share of the time, I certainly didn’t get paid extra for it, but that was my job, and I made sure I did it.  I’ve been on both sides of the white coat, and I know how important it is to actually speak to a doctor about an ill family member.  But I doubt anybody will be interested. I am good at knowing when care is futile and when there is no ethical reason to continue, but many others know that just as well and are current.  

That leaves me one other spot on the left coast: the USNS Mercy. After all, I once served on a ship.  I know how to enter and leave one (if not in uniform one faces aft, where the flag is, then one faces the officer of the deck and requests permission to come aboard.) I know the numbering system on board, so if something is deck 2, frame 46, I know it is two decks below the main deck, port side and up forward to frame 46.  This is not rocket science.

I would have a place to stay, no worries about commuting, would be available for all sorts of duties.  After all, that stuff is not easily forgotten.  My hair is short, I line up my buttons with my zipper, I can say “Sir” easily, and most of all, I have this skill.

The Navy wants no COVID aboard the ship. That is impossible.  It will happen. And I recognize that.  But with hundreds of thousands of retired military in southern California, my ending up on the Mercy is not going to happen.

So, the days run together. I have lengthened my morning walk from 3 miles to 5, much along the Willamette River, which is flowing well if a bit low from another dry winter.  I wear a mask now—just a balaclava, so long as the mornings are cold—and count the number of wildflower species I have seen.  I hit 23 today, which is good for this time of year in a limited habitat. The towhees are zzzzttting, the scrub jays calling, with an occasional Steller being seen, cormorants are on one of the river islands, herons are close by, and there aren’t a lot of people out there.

It’s a good time for those few of us who dislike crowds.  I feel sorry for those who can’t be in large groups, especially because life may change after Covid.  I don’t know whether I will ever tutor again in person; I won’t be carpooling to the high country for hikes or for work parties on the trails.  But I spent my first year here not carpooling, and lately, I have been hiking alone, rather than with the Club.  Those are my best hikes, my best snowshoes.

Up in the high country, it will be quieter this year. The new requirements for trail reservations at some of the busier trailheads are not going to be rolled out as soon as planned. The trails may get a rest from the crowds this summer.  I worry about fire season, but if few are in the high country, that removes a large risk.  

Coming home after my walk, I spend time checking the numbers of the epidemic, seeing if I detect any changes. I also do some algebra problems on line and go to zooniverse and pick a couple of projects to help out,  My lap is open for a couple of the lap cats.

I would love to help, and maybe I will get a chance to, but unless things hit the fan big time here, I am best suited to take care of myself and be one less problem, one less case.

Milton’s Sonnet 19:

“…“God doth not need

” Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best 

 “Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state 

” Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed 

 “And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest: 

 “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

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