The waters

by Rain Trueax

Yellowstone is one of those special places with so much to see or take in that a lifetime wouldn't let a person know it all. Most of it is not reached by roads. In this trip, with only five days, we went to places that are, where even the old or handicapped could enjoy. Many of the photos were taken from the truck or a few feet away.

To share some of it in the blog, I decided the only way was to break it into subjects-- first the small geysers. Then the wildflowers. Today, the waters-- not so much the famous ones but ones many miss in their rush to the scenic spots. These are the ones that just are and let us just be.

Yellowstone takes me to a place of beauty and creativity, but it also is a place of violence and abrupt changes. Maybe the latter is part of what makes it so special. It's not just the pretty, innocent kind of beauty but the risky, savage kind, from which each moment could be the last. You know, the kind from which real creativity is born.

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.

Estuaries

The first photos of an estuary are all where the Salmon River hits the Pacific Ocean in Oregon. This is a place that is always beautiful, to me, in every season. I especially like it when the skies are moody as they were on Sunday.


Cascade Head is mostly protected now by Nature Conservancy with many possible hikes that overlook even more scenic vistas than the road. Sitka Center, which sits on the slope overlooking the ocean, offers workshops and seminars for those interested in the arts and ecology.

If a person had to pick a place to live that offered the most survival possibilities (assuming ocean levels don't rise too much), an Oregon estuary would be a good choice because there is easy access to building materials, always fish, deer, elk, and birds, the temperatures tend to be more moderate for growing gardens or gathering berries, and you are close enough to the ocean with more possible sources (like shellfish) for food.

Estuaries are very oriented to nature and those who live along them must accept that as part of the blessing and the problem.


This last photo is where the Siletz River meets the Pacific Ocean and forms a small bay. When the tide is in, the bay looks more 'impressive'.

John Day rivers and a high mountain lake

For me, the greatest appeal of the John Day rivers would be their beauty against the hard lines of the land. There are the cliffs, the rock formations, the rich colors, the uplifts and then these beautiful, peaceful little rivers. Their water is what makes the John Day country possible for agriculture.

The John Day country is more or less created by upheaval, volcanic and river action. The center of Oregon is drained by four rivers: the North Fork of the John Day, the Middle Fork of the John Day, the John Day and the South Fork of the John Day.

One thing about rivers in this high desert country is they look innocent and innocuous but they are not. They can abruptly change into torrents. Three times the town of Mitchell has been badly damaged by a flooding Bridge Creek which was so nearly dry at this time of year that you'd only know it was a stream because of the indent and trees.

In the high desert, even the smallest streams have caused catastrophic floods as this is not a country of dams and it is a country where a fierce rainstorm can settle in mountains far away, eventually sending a torrent of water down the gullies to wipe out homes and towns.

The hard part, especially in the 1800s was you wouldn't have any way of knowing the flood was coming. When such a flood hit the town of Heppner, Oregon (to the north of the John Day country, in 1903, 250 people were killed. Story of Heppner Flood. This experience was and can still be repeated many places throughout the west.

The John Days are beautiful rivers, famous in Oregon for their fishing and rafting, but they are as tough as the land through which they flow. Even the photos of the lake don't tell of the avalanche of rock that formed a natural dam making it possible.

John Day rivers and lake

Since there was no way to cut the number of these photos down to anything reasonable, I created the above slide show. The music is Chopin from On Classical which if you listen to the whole thing, you will hear their blurb at the end. It is free for non-moneymaking sites and has beautiful versions of many classical compositions.