With my Dad

I traveled home to Ashland, Oregon to stay with my Dad while my stepmother Paula went to her Women’s Group in Colorado. They have been meeting for 50 years or so, and this trip matters to her, so I wanted to make sure she got to go. Also, amazing women and persons and inspiration. The following post shares some of my thoughts and experiences from that trip, but honestly, there is so much I will never be able to write accurately. I am thankful for Dad, Paula, Trish, Scherri, and Tucker.

J&B Days

            When I was a child, my father was a magic man, a man who could conjure chicken and dumplings out of a Coleman stove in a rainy campground, serving me in the Bus, or when it was hot in the valley in summer, take me to Mount Ashland for dinner and find snow to play in hidden in the shadows of the alpine meadows there. In my young childhood, I lived with my mother in Sacramento, 293 miles from Dad’s house in Ashland, and he would make that pilgrimage down the I-5 to see me, to take me out for adventures on a weekend, exploring the Gold Country, finding treasures and making a map to the best treasure grounds, always in the Bus, and in my memories, these were some of our happiest times. We spent so much time alone together, but it was always with a sense of adventure and my belief that my father was magic, never clearer to me than when he suddenly produced a giant dragon kite from under the bench seat in the bus or made a snowball in July.

            In those times, we had a tradition: J & B days (or sometimes we called them B& J days). My father was then and is now a man of lists, and I well-remember seeing his lists my entire life. These are elaborate lists, sometimes even lists of lists, and often festooned with decorative doodles and lettering. I was always excited as a child to see a B& J or J & B at the top of a list, maybe in one of his many notebooks or on an old matchbook or receipt. For us, the letter days meant that our activities that day would be dictated by the chosen letters, B for Bill, my father’s name, or J for Jenny, my name. On a J Day we might explore the almost ghost town of Jenny Lind, or visit a rock and mineral show and buy some Jasper, and even once we found a pot emblazoned with an abstract design of J-shaped forms that grew a prodigious spider plant in the dining room of our old house.

            Oddly, I have no specific memory of a B Day, and knowing my father, there may simply have been more J days back then, for I always knew that I was an important person to my Dad. I thought about those days again when I went home this summer to see him, and even tried to write a letter day list, although things like “picking up fresh apricots from Valley View Orchards” did not comply with the letter demands. And yes, I made my list (apricots, drive, dinner, Northwest Nature Shop,  ice cream), and we accomplished most  of the goals—but not the ice cream, so Dad, you owe me an ice cream!

And lists were another part of the visit, too. Stepping into Paula’s shoes was not easy, even though we have the same size feet. I needed lists to remind me of all that needed to be done for the house and for Dad: Pick raspberries, check tomatoes, fill fountains/pollinators, water that hydrangea, Tucker the dog, trash, compression socks, physical therapy…I was very thankful for Scherri-the-wonderful when she came over, and in truth, the lists did help me stay on track.

Macht Nichts: if it had an expression, this might be it.

            When I first arrived, my father kept repeating a phrase his father repeated, which I heard as “Mox Nix.” When I asked him what it meant, he said, “You know—Mox Nix!” But I didn’t know so Wikipedia helped me out:

macht nichts

1. (idiomatic) never mind, it doesn’t matter (it is not important) 

(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/macht_nichts)

            I don’t think I understood then or maybe even now why my father kept saying this—a memory of his father, perhaps—but I do think that we were talking about the past, old stories, and this may have been his way of saying “It doesn’t matter whatever  wrongs we have witnessed—let it go.” At least, that’s how I think of it now.

Turbulence

            Talking to Dad on the phone in recent months, I have heard him bring up turbulence more than once, and this was a theme in our conversations this summer. After watching a film about the landslide in Oso, Washington, Dad said confidently, “Turbulence,” and then explained in geologic terms I would massacre here why the great and horrible landslide related to turbulence. We talked about turbulence to in discussing the wind moving the enormous willow tree in the yard. The fire that destroyed my parent’s home in Talent, Oregon in 2020 was accompanied by a strange wind. As a denizen of Los Angeles, I am no stranger to a strange or malevolent wind—we call these winds Santa Anas. But Dad seems to have an understanding of turbulence and it’s force on the planet that I lack. Maybe I call it chaos. However, this was fun to talk about as most folks I know aren’t going to bring up turbulence as a topic in conversation.

Horses and Dogs

            For all the talk of turbulence, it was a very quiet time in Sleepy Old Ashland, as my father used to style it pulling into our old house on the hill. “There are the lights of Sleepy Old Ashland,” he’d say, looking down into the valley, shifting the Bus one last time to head to home. However, we had some exciting adventures even still. Our dear friend Trish offered to take us out by Emigrant Lake to see her horse Lily, and as I always love to shovel manure (really! Grew up with horses and love anything horse), we accepted. Trish assured us that we could pull Dad up in the car to a paddock and there was a chair for him there, and once we stole Tucker-the-dog’s bed from the car, it worked well enough. It was lovely to see the sun fading on the hills and smell the horses, and I remembered all the horse camps and trail rides my father indulged me with when I was 10 and obsessed with horses. Lily was in high spirits

—she is a horse with personality—and I am so thankful to have a wonderful woman like Trish in my life and in my family’s life—we are all blessed.

            And then of the dogs. I started the trip by walking Tucker bright and ugly, and while he was excited to go for his walk, at first he seemed to tire, looking back at me like, “Lady, are we there yet?” But by the third day Tucker was used to the walks. “The wind in your whiskers,”  I would say to him as we set out, and repeat my mantra to myself: peace, love, hope, joy, thank-full-ness. And then we were off to find treasures on the sidewalk, to check my favorite Little Library on Earth that I know of, to walk past the chickens with the electric fence and the creek, looking for wild sweet pea seeds and peeing, peeing, peeing.

            There is an old falling down barn on Hellman Street with pastures attached, the one property in Ashland I long to own, and Tucker and I walked by it every day. How many goats would we see? 1, 2, 3, 4? “Three goats today,” I would tell Tucker, and he would meet with his inscrutable gaze to acknowledge the necessary counting of the goats. “How many horses in the pasture today? “ I would ask Tucker:  1, 2, 3, 4. One day a mama deer protecting her fawn chased us the entire length of the property, and Tucker looked back at me, seeming to say “Oh, deer just do this.” And of deer the giant bucks came to feast on the apple tree in the front yard, and one night taking out the compost an enormous one made ominous noises at me and I made my retreat. Of deer: 1, 2.

            We also got to take time in the yard with Lucy, Trish’s dog, and spend time with squeaky balls, the lawn, checking the tomatoes, the green beans taking off, the zinnias, the morning glory and bind weed, and yes, Tucker got into the sunflowers and rampaged a bit, but it was all glorious summer with dogs and horses.

Dad’s Stories

            Dad told me many stories while we were in quiet times, me crocheting or just listening. I learned that the story I had always known of him deciding to leave the great central valley of California, to go to college and get out, was wrong. In my poem about my Dad I always described this moment as: “My father says he grew up

In these fields.

He says laying irrigation line was

“Hotter than hell,”

made him want to move away.

He planned his escape

On his back

Under the dusty vines, grapes hanging

So full of promise.

He planned the army, Berkeley, away.

Anywhere but on his back;

Anywhere but this valley.

But in hearing Dad’s stories, it turned out I had the story wrong. That moment had happened, yes, but it was when they were thinning grapes, using a special knife to cut what needed to be cut, to prepare the grapes to be raisins or table grapes. The funny thing about that is that we found my grandfather’s grape knife in the Bus when we first picked him up, the only thing in the closet besides a can of Engine Start spray and a roll of the plastic tape foresters use to mark trees for thinning, and when we found it, we asked Dad what it was, and he handled it with a strange reverence that makes more sense to me now: “It’s my father’s grape knife, “ he said, and we made sure to give it to him, but sadly it burned in the Talent fire.

            Dad also told me elaborate tales of his time with the apricots and the old Frenchman who had a story about his name and all the lovely girls and the heat of the drying ovens, and stories of his time in the Sierras with a pack horse, and many stories of New Zealand. It was a gift to hear these stories old and new with this man, my magic father.

The Drive

            One of the things on the list was a drive to see the town and the hills, and I have hesitated at even including this, but some part of me wanted Dad to see what scares me. You see, in the past the hills of Ashland were green with pine trending towards scrub oak forests on the north side, but in the last years I have been coming there, the trees have turned orange. The combination of drought and bark beetle have killed this once green fortress that guarded Sleepy Old Ashland, and in some perverse and likely misguided way I wanted my father of turbulence to see it. Of course, I know a man whose home was destroyed by wildfire knows, just as I know I was heartened to hear from Paula that the city of Ashland had stopped setting off fireworks for the 4^th of July and clamped down on those in town. And I am very happy that my parents do not live any longer on the forested slopes by town, but still, they live so close to where the wildfire started that eventually engulfed their home in Talent, so close you can see the fire scars, that I am never easy with fire there or anywhere.

            Grassfire burning has a particular and likely particulate smell that I recognize like a prey animal smelling a predator, perhaps because I have lived in burnable country for many years, and I recognize a threat. One morning on my trip with Dad I smelled that inescapable odor as I set out for a walk, and then soon enough I saw the white smoke plume rising, but they got it out right away. But still, I worried, just as Dad does when the wind changes or the heat gets high. As he should.

            So we took a drive high up in Lithia Park past all the swimming holes and duck ponds and into the roads behind our former home. We could see there was some trimming, some removal of dead trees, but still others stood, orange. An invitation to an almost unimaginable conflagration. And we drove through the town to the south, took Tolman Creek Road up past Bi Mart and Shop and Kart and where my friend Ambriel lived with her mother Arwen and Ed and the horse Sugar who was not sweet, past the culvert and the dirt piles where Ambriel and I once ran away from home, pockets of  stolen carob chips in our pockets to sustain us, and then into the tree line, and the same orange and dead pines.

            “Shit,” Dad said. “This is worse than I thought.”

And yes, yes, it is, for what we all face now, those who live in the Rogue Valley, no matter where, or those who live in LA or anywhere in the west, as concerns wildfires: shit, this is worse than we thought. And yet, I think it is worth pointing out that as hot is this summer is, and as much as those trees are stressed, this is probably a better place than the future will hold, unless we do something. To be honest, I use my grocery bags and recycle and compost and try my best, but I think the magnitude is so, so much bigger, than; oh, I can change this.

” I pretend there’s more time than I’ve got, I pretend there’s more time than I’ve got” lines by Utah Phillips “Feather Ben”

That said, I always believe in hope, and the kindness of humans, and despite my sea turtle friend insisting we are just a cancer on the planet, I hope for the best and aim for the windmills, and pretend there’s more time than I’ve got; I pretend there’s more time than I’ve got.

Meals/Sky/Saying Goodbye

            We had some lovely meals on the back deck, under the willow, watching the summer sky turn. “Mackerel sky, Mackerel sky, never long wet, never long dry” and “Mares tails, tall ships carry long sails” were the things I tried to share, but my father, while a Bus pilot, has never been a sailor. The sky there is so much bigger, and the nights are so much later that far north from where I live that it could be 9 PM and the sky going glorious pink and it seemed like 6 to me. Ashland and my father have a way of transporting me to another place, time and consciousness, and I like to think some part of this is imbued in his Bus, the Bus we use to take magical adventures even now and upcoming.

            Saying goodbye to my father is never fun, and at 92, I realize the realities of the situation, but as Paula pointed out, we have a lot of practice saying goodbye from all those trips in summers and weekends and my whole life, really. I left with this in my mind, from Richard Bach, who I know my father liked once: “Do not be sad at goodbyes; they are necessary for us to meet again.” And if all is well, we will be at some vineyard farmhouse in September to celebrate a wedding, and I am looking forward to hearing my Dad tell me about the grapes, the land, and all his stories…including: TURBULENCE!