Back of Beyond

Sitting at my computer in the living room, having nearly made the transition from my beloved nearly 10 year old, much updated desktop PC, I am now pretty much committed to my laptop which has many advantages for speed, ability to take with me and continue working when on a trip, but I LOVED the energy of my old computer and only gave it up after something started happening that made writing fiction on it impossible-- sudden black screens and reboots.


Years ago, I remember writing with a PC that would do what was then called a blue screen of death. It was caused by various complications involving insufficient operating memory. This time there is plenty of operating memory, and I think instead the catastrophic failure has been caused by one of the updates from Thunderbird, Mozilla or Microsoft and something didn't work with my old machine. You can only update these machines so far maybe, possibly, who knows.


In short, neither I nor the local techie (Farm Boss) have any clue why it happened, but the second time, after a restore hadn't stopped it, I was outta there and onto this one, which in June got set up in the corner of the living room. No way am I going to voluntarily edit a chunk of text only to have it disappear before I can hit save. The second time is NEVER as good-- at least not in my memory, and since the first is no longer there to compare, my memory is all that counts.


For the last month, my high point emotionally was renting a house on the Middle Fork of the John Day River, a very old farm house with four bedrooms and one bathroom (they claimed it had an outhouse but turns out it only had the building part and no hole which means they did not have an outhouse-- besides which after our daughter related one of her archaeology field school experiences where, when they took down the outhouse after the dig, they found the bottom full of black widow spiders, I think there was limited enthusiasm for using one) and with ten of us at assorted ages from 68 to 3 one bathroom, even inside, felt like going back in time.

The experiences the kids got from being in that area, at that house, seeing the fossil beds, were, I think very good as it was a lot like stepping back in time with only some additions to what would have been there 50 or even 100 years ago. What we did next took is all even farther back.


Farm Boss and I took the upstairs bedroom even though that is about the last thing I really wanted to do. It made sense though as in the middle of the night I'd rather it be us getting up and going down narrow stairs than the kids. The owners had installed a window a/c; so it wasn't too bad for sleeping other than the necessary once during the night trip down the stairs hoping nobody else was in that bathroom.

The kids loved the two hammocks on the screened porch which ran around two sides of the house. They also had a lot of fun on a hammock type chair that was outside hanging from one of the locust branches. Basically they had fun doing what kids long ago would have had fun doing.


The house was not far off a main east west road through the middle of Oregon which meant traffic noise even up in the locust tree grove where the house set.

Conveniently, it was not far from the John Day Fossil Beds, an excellent interpretive museum, and the South Fork of the John Day River for swimming and fishing. It is in the middle of some of Oregon's prettiest and least seen country as it is five driving hours from our farm home and about that from anybody else's the west side of the Cascades.

With walking in the canyons where they have so many fossils and where this area has been preserved for future generations as a National Monument, with an excellent museum and talk explaining how life hhas shifted on earth as this is all from the Age of the Mammals, we also had time to swim in the South Fork (current just amazed me as the rivers have more water than they have had in years) and fishing, throwing rocks (ideally not in the same pools, drinking wine (not the kids), playing cards (not the oldsters), eating good food, and having lots of conversations, it was a good time I think for everybody.

When Farm Boss and I drove north from the house on an exploration of our own, we ran into a cattle drive down the middle of the highway. The photo above is the vanguard of the drive with the major part of what looked to us like 200 head of cattle being behind us. I always love those kind of experiences for photos, and the good feeling I get from seeing what looked like a family, of all ages, about fifteen of them on horseback and two with a pickup truck (likely grandma and grandpa), moving the cattle herd from one grazing ground, through the little town of Spray, and to a new pasture.


Cattle drives like that are part of the old West but very much a factor still in today's West at least in some parts of the country. I can relate because we have our cattle get out on the highway once in awhile which requires some of the same techniques to move them excluding the horses.


Anyway this family trip was the high point of my month from a positive perspective (although writing has gone very well). I also had what appear to me now to be a set of experiences that weren't so high but were emotionally powerful and will actually write about those too as part of what it means to live a country and ranching life.

So I am warning anybody who has a tender heart-- skip my next blog which will be for August 1st. I had debated not writing about any of it; but it seems it's part of at least my story for this summer and really for the life I lead and who I am as a woman. The warning comes because while it's what I experienced, it's not what everyone must.