GHOSTS
Into The Future And Past
Playtime is not over, but it’s difficult to overcome the obstacles in the way. The places I used to live are obliterated. Erased. Overgrown. I can still see the outlines, but the form and function are gone. The lives lived have moved on. My ears just ring and ring as I strain to hear the echoes. The names have changed. I mean nothing to the wind.
The trees all just want to grow. It’s what the Western Oregon rainforest does best. I love to see it reclaim the land. Everything is temporary. It has its time. We have our time. Time is eternal. We are not. Time exists on a scale we can’t comprehend. It’s taking forever, a mighty long time, but we don’t know where it goes. Where will it go. And what does that mean. No question. We will not get an answer. The forest operates on a track that resists the short term industrial modus operandi. You can replant. But the land sets the time.
MODERN DAY GHOSTS
Wandering around the area I spent my childhood in has been a grounding experience, reconnecting me with the essence of my upbringing, and the circumstances I witnessed. I don’t long for the old days, for the times that were. I am happy that I lived when I did, saw what I did, and did what I did.
I wanted to get there earlier, but I got sidetracked. I wished I had the foresight to bring analog, a paper atlas. Way out in the boonies, cell phone internet maps lose effectiveness. Instead of traveling west, to Prospect and up the Tiller Highway, I kind of traveled Northwest, up towards the Crater Lake National Park. I accomplished my goal of seeing new territory, seeing the southern part of the park, and traveling west toward and linking up with 227 that way. But it cost me time I could have used in Tiller, and also equally compelling (to me) places I remember on the road to Canyonville.
Back To The Mission
I was here in this room 60 years ago.
It contained the first and second grade classes of Tiller Elementary School. Mrs Jennings presided. I could look out the window and see my house, across the Porters pasture.
Everything that seems so permanent when you are young only survives with attention. The attention of the living, of commerce, of being of use. Abandoned places are part of the world. They will return to the world. The fenced in pasture behind the Porter house still has utility. Except that the users are deer, grabbing a bite before and after a trip down to the river.
We only lived here for a few years. It’s where my first consistent memories reside. Now, like Tiller, the memories are ghosts, still visible in their original form, but decayed by time. My feelings about this are not what I expected. Tiller serves no purpose anymore. There is only the dimmest trace of the sawmills that once existed, two of them at least. They had departed by the time we lived there. Now, everything I remember is disappearing. The Porters house is still there, but the Porters are long gone.
THE PORTERS HOMESTEAD
We rented our house from the Porters, a connection Dad got wind of via the truckdriver grapevine. We had to get out of our Canyonville house for some reason. Possibly the floods of December 1964 to January 1965 rattled them enough to seek the higher ground, or a dispute with Old Man Mallory, the landlord, about a dairy cow, perhaps the hillbilly Carnes family, a feral group of unsupervised kids loosely overseen by a gum chewing mother and stock car racing father. They eventually cut their own road to their house, and I was forbidden to go near them.
As a four to five year old, I was not consulted about any of those issues, or any of the decisions made to ameliorate. I just remember moving in the middle of the night. Or, at least the finishing of the move. Driving back and forth with loads of furniture in what was still a 6 person household.
Reduction
The circumstances of our life were starting to reduce around this time. My father did whatever work he could find, whether it was being an overnight fire watch on logging units, or fixing equipment for other small time operators, he did what he could. I don’t remember us being particularly poor during this time. My brothers did odd jobs, Jim worked especially hard in my remembrance. He and Tom both felt compelled to earn so they could have school clothes. They also had cars. All of this I took for granted. At the same time, Tiller’s circumstances were reducing too. The two or three mills that were in town left in the fifties, leaving the US Forest Service guard station as the largest employer in town. There was a gas station and a store. The mill pond up the hill waxed and waned and eventually filled in. And things ground down eventually to today, when there is no-one living there, really. Our old home burned down in the 70’s. Today, there is little trace of our lives there. Only the ghosts that live in the memory of my siblings and I, warm memories of a place where we had little responsibility, clean air, and our lives in front of us.
I don’t know what I expected from my visit, but what I got was a reminder that we are temporary. That our lives are transient. And, that time exists on a scale that is beyond us.
Savor the ride, and acknowledge the ghosts.
THE MONDAY COLUMN
I published this on Monday, on a theme I explore periodically (like all the time, according to R!) I’m trying to keep this schedule up, but I don’t want to clog up your email box. My friend Andy says that is stupid, that people sign up for a reason, and my penchant for leaving breadcrumbs is annoying, not cute. I told him I am trying to leave a body of work, and that I didn’t really care if anyone read it. He told me to get over it.
So, thanks for reading. See you next week.