An Afternoon in Heaven

Looking west from near the summit, source unknown

1,518-foot Mt. Pisgah got its non-Indian name 175-years ago when an early settler felt such joy upon seeing Oregon's Willamette Valley from its summit that he named it after the mountain from which Moses saw the Promised Land. The 2,363-acre park that encompasses Pisgah today offers oak prairies, fertile bottomlands, a dense conifer forest, 17-miles of trails, and a 209-acre arboretum, along with deer, rabbits, bobcats, coyotes, numerous hawks, and an occasional bear or mountain lion. We invariably see multiple large hawks and an occasional buzzard riding the mountain's air currents. On our last visit, we saw a colorful bird called a paraglider.

Pisgah was born 40-million years ago as a pool of subterranean lava that, over the millennia, hardened into basalt, diabase, and a smattering of snow white mesolites. The erosion which exposed the mountain continues to keep the depth of its soil shallower than the length of my hand. At the flat bottom of the mountain, the soil is deep and rich thanks to erosion from Pisgah itself and to deposits that were carried from the Cascade Mountains by the Coast Fork and the Middle Fork of the Willamette River. 

February through May are my favorite times to visit Pisgah because that's when leaves open, flowers bloom, and hundreds—perhaps thousands—of burbling streams bring beauty to the eye and music to the ear. I get a thrill from finding the very place where one of these streams breaks through to the surface.

In the photo, Peggy is relaxing on one of scores of benches that honor dead loved ones. A nearby bench commemorates the life of a 31-year-old murder victim, and another contains drawings done by the six-year-old girl to whom it pays tribute. I'll enclose a photo of one of the many dedications that touches me. The mountain in front of Peggy is 2,058-foot Spencer Butte, the highpoint of a 12-mile trail that will someday encircle Eugene.

After moving to Oregon in 1986, Peggy and I climbed Pisgah three times a week with a group of six to twelve friends. It was still a working ranch, and despite being afraid of the cows, Peggy called it my holy mountain, and everyone would sing The hills are alive with the sound of music...when we summited. We climbed year round in good weather and bad, although it meant descending in the dark of winter. Now, the rancher's cows are gone; the park closes at dusk; most of our friends have moved or died; and we almost never hike to the summit. 

We seldom choose to a destination, but when we do, it's often a mysterious labyrinth within an abandoned quarry. Because most visitors take primary trails, we usually have the quarry to ourselves, and we enjoy examining the offerings that were left since our last visit.

We recently spotted two coyotes. They were too fast for me to film, but I got a photograph of their scat and Peggy recorded their voices (turn your volume up and note the distant reply). Ten minutes later, we met a woman who excitedly reported seeing a bobcat. We later found bear scat.

A barn and a large Quonset-hut remain from ranching days, and we sometimes picnic in the latter while enjoying Fancy Cloud Friends' latest artwork: https://www.threads.net/@fancycloudfriends .

In January of 2024, Eugene was hit by an ice storm which closed the park for two long months. Its effects remain obvious in the form of downed limbs and broken trees--note the Douglas Fir Cone on the standing trunk of a dead maple. Soon after I moved to Oregon, a forestry student who has since died taught me to identify these cones by looking for the tails and hind-feet of scurrying mice. Each of these tiny cones can produce dozens of 330-foot-tall trees.

I'll close with an example of Mt. Pisgah's seasonal streams. While they might be less memorable than booming waterfalls hundreds of feet high, my life is far more enriched by these humbler members of the waterfall family. I am pleased to say that I have the good fortune of living but nine miles from the one place on earth that I most enjoy visiting. 

 

A Tour of my Refuge and Sanctuary

This is my bedroom. The walls of my bedroom are pink, and the walls of Peggy's bedroom are green. Every two weeks, we clean house, and it is then that I change out many of my decorations. It is for this reason that you might see the same item in two locations. We bought the silk painting atop the mirror in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in 1972. When silk-paintings of John Wayne and Elvis Presley became popular, Peggy wanted to discard our desert scene. I go along with most of what she wants, but on this occasion I demurred. The cat painting to the left of the mirror came from a St. Vincent de Paul Store in Eugene, and the wall-hanging above my BiPap is a pressed-plastic picnic scene that came from a junk store in Wisconsin. 

 

 

The brown heart to the right of the second photo was a gift from a British blogger. I call both Peggy and the sleeping squirrel to the left of the photo, Fluffy, Fluffer, or Fluffy Squirrel.

 

I used to have 44-plants in my bedroom, but am now down to the ones in the photo plus an Aglaonema that stays in the den. The white cat was a gift from an elderly neighbor named Helen who has since died. In front of the white cat are wasps' nests (I love wasps and bees), petrified wood, and ceramic pieces by the same British blogger who gave me the heart.

 

 

In January, my collection of Civil War books reached the point that I paid $50 for the above bookcase at a Habitat for Humanity store. When the ensuing book shuffle was complete, my Civil War books were in the hall, and my new bookcase contained books about cats, knots, and domestic plants. The poinsettia blanket is one of several bed-coverings that I use to keep cat fur off my spread.

 

 

Our youngest cat—five-year-old Harvey—is relaxing amid my cat library. His luxuriant ruff isn't visible, but his snarky expression is. He is so beautiful that I become the world's first bitch to a cat.

 

I bought the white rabbit holding the carrot at a junk shop sixty miles from town while on an outing with my friend Walt (https://snowbrush.blogspot.com/2023/11/invitation-to-suicide.html). Determined to maintain my manly image, I didn't buy it that day, and so it was that Walt had to drive me back for it the next day. The plaster-of-Paris animal to the right of the rabbit was so well-cuddled that it's identity is indecipherable. I love many damaged possessions. For example, I used to collect broken-legged horse knick-knacks because I couldn't bear the thought of the store throwing them away. I didn't realize that my father knew about my horses until he started crying about them the year he died.

 

The dark-colored cat below the stuffed cat is Bastet, my only overtly religious symbol. I bought the fox to the right of Bastet at the Jackson, Mississippi, zoo when I was seven in honor of a wolf that spent his nightmarish existence pacing rapidly back and forth inside a small cage. I thought my fox was a wolf until twenty years ago Peggy laughingly informed me of my mistake. The blue mug to the right of the "wolf" contains bookmarks that I cut from Christmas cards. 

 

 

My mother made the needlework tree as my Christmas present in 1976.

 

The wolf in snow came from a long-forgotten antique store run by a delightful lady named Penny who died of Alzheimer's. The rock on the floor fell from Symbol Rock, a 40-million-year-old Cascade Mountain basalt formation that an extinct Indian tribe worshiped, as do I.

 

 

I read in bed from 10:00 until 1:00 each night and am often joined by four cats (all four are in the photo). A fifth cat joined us until he got mad at me for swatting his tush when he attacked my defenseless girl cat, Scully (she's sitting in the photo). That dire event occurred five years ago, yet I'm lucky if he joins me twice a year. I have multiple nicknames for my various cats. For example, Scully answers to Girlfriend, Beauty Girl, White Whiskers, and Pretty Lady Cat. As is the way with men, my love for my male cats often wears a disguise. For example, Brewsky (the tabby at my feet) is Sweet Man, Patriarch of the Cat Side of the Family, and Lard-Ass; while Harvey goes by Sweetheart, Pretty-Pretty Cat Man, Most Beautiful Cat on Earth, and Shithead. 

 

Albert Schweitzer well-expressed my own delight in cats when he wrote:

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life, music and cats.            

Please Accept My Apology

Since Donald Trump's inauguration; the beauty of my bedroom; the solace of nearby Mt. Pisgah; and the affection of Peggy, our cats, and some of you, are like islands in a stormy sea. What I would like to do right now is to share a pleasant post that I have been working on for weeks about my bedroom. Unfortunately I feel ethically compelled to first apologize to you for what is happening in America. I'm especially concerned about the feelings and opinions of readers who live in Britain, Canada, Australia, India, and—prior to the invasion—Ukraine (https://dablogfodder.blogspot.com/). It is they who constitute nearly all of my active readership, and this is what I want them to know:

(1) I am ashamed of what my nation has become, and I am frightened that it will continue its hellish dissent into totalitarianism.

 

(2) I cannot divorce my personal identity from my national identity. 

 

(3) I worry that my non-American readers will also be unable to divorce my personal identity from my national identity, and that this will lead them to abandon me.

 

(4) Only a callous, arrogant, petty, and vicious nation, could elect a demon like Trump and stand passive while he destroys its democracy. Although offering you my apology might seem pointless, I don't know what else to do, and it is surely better to apologize than to behave as though everything were normal.