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.

On Having Money

 

Peggy, our five cats, and I, live in a modest 69-year-old house in a slowly deteriorating neighborhood. In the past five months we’ve spent: $11,000 for a new roof; $12,000 for plumbing repairs; $4,000 for property taxes; $2,000 for cat care; $3,000 for rain gutters and gutter screens (we installed the screens); hundreds for house paint (we did the painting); and an uncalculated sum of money on four vacations that Peggy took. Neither of us inherited wealth nor did our combined salaries exceed a middle class income, but because we saved and were frugal, we have never bought anything—including four homes in three states—that we couldn’t have paid cash for.

My pilgrimages to the marble and granite cathedral that was State Bank and Trust Company, are among my happiest childhood memories for several reasons: my town didn’t have another building half so beautiful; I enjoyed watching my money “grow”; and the young women who recorded my fifty-cent deposits treated me like an adult and had smiles that dwarfed the sunrise.

My parents also saved, but Peggy’s parents saw things so differently that saving money was the only thing her father ever criticized me for because he interpreted it to mean that I was putting my faith in “mammon.” instead in of God. He advised that I should, in the following order: donate 10% of my income to the church; pay my “just debts”; spend the remainder as I pleased; and trust God for help if I ran short. I considered his words the stupidest and most unwarranted piece of advice I ever heard, plus it left me to wonder how he could be completely ignorant of the fact that his daughter hated his Southern Baptist religion and shared her husband’s values. In fact, mine and Peggy’s only significant disagreement over money occurred soon after we married when I decreed that we economize by drinking powdered milk. A three-times-a-day milk-drinker, Peggy objected bitterly, but because she still had a vestigial amount of respect for her husband’s intelligence and had been raised to believe that “the husband should rule the wife even as Christ rules the church” (not that it worked that way with her parents), she grumblingly went along for several weeks before staging an all-out coup during which she would toast my health with “real milk.” (I drink powdered milk to this day.)

Peggy’s father wasn’t my only critic. Most commonly I’ve been warned, “You can’t take it with you when you die” (three such people later asked for loans), but I consider frugality a virtue; I would loathe owing interest; I like not having to worry about how to pay for things; I feel more secure for having money; having money means not having to deny myself; and despite my critics’ argument that unspent money is wasted money, I feel good about leaving money to charity. While it’s true that the squirrel who stores nuts for winter might never enjoy the fruits of his labor, it would be a silly squirrel who refused to store nuts. But then a squirrel is not a grasshopper…

One December when I was eight, my parents put me on a plane to travel the hundred miles to visit my 19-year-old half-sister, Anne, who was attending college in New Orleans. Our mother expected Anne to drive me home, but because Anne had no car—and no money, for that matter—she borrowed one. Upon discovering that the car had no gas, she asked me for a loan. Despite her promise to pay me back when we reached Mississippi, I refused. I don’t know where she got the money, but her considerable anger didn’t prevent her from covering me with her coat when she realized that the car’s heater was broken. 

Despite her goodness, the wound I inflicted festered to the point that I don’t think she ever recovered. Because I was a child, perhaps the severity of her hurt can be partially explained by previous hurts she suffered over money. Her first hurt was inflicted by her father, Dustin, who, in the midst of the Great Depression abandoned his impoverished wife and two small children to pursue a playboy lifestyle. Upon Dustin’s death at age 36, Anne’s destitute mother entrusted her two children to Dustin’s siblings. Anne went to Dustin’s miserly brother, Ernie, who made it clear that she was a financial burden who wasn’t his real daughter. Worse yet, he interpreted Anne’s generous heart as evidence of improvidence, which he attempted to correct by sharing an Aesop’s fable entitled “The Ants and the Grasshopper”:

One bright day in late autumn a colony of ants were busy drying the grain they had stored for winter, when a starving grasshopper with a fiddle under his arm begged for a bite to eat.

“What!” cried he nearest ant, “haven’t you stored food for winter? What were you doing all summer?”
“I was so busy making music that I didn’t have time to harvest food, and before I knew it the summer was gone.”

“Making music!” the ant retorted as he turned his back on the starving grasshopper. “Very well; now you have the leisure to dance!”

When Anne later learned that grasshoppers are doomed to die at summer’s end no matter how much food they have, she condemned her uncle’s story as a lie.

My friend, Walt—whose death I described a few posts ago—had a Washington state friend who was beyond frugal. One day when Walt was vexed that Bob never visited him, he said, “Bob spends as little as possible on everything he buys, which is why he doesn’t have a car that will hold together for a trip to Oregon. When you buy, you buy quality. You’re frugal; Bobs cheap.”

Years ago, I won a trip to a luxury resort. That trip was the only time in our long marriage that Peggy and I lived like rich people are said to live. One morning while lying in our plush bed and watching ships on the Pacific, I had the thought that I would be enjoying myself more if I were lying in the bed of our van and looking through steamy windows while drinking coffee brewed on a Coleman stove. I don’t know if it was luck or intelligence that led me to marry a woman who has never once said, “My idea of roughing it is to stay in a Holiday Inn.”

I’ve known people who consider their purchase of new, trendy, name-brand items as proof of refinement, but used items cost less, off-gas less, offer a wider selection, and don’t deplete the earth’s resources. A 94-year-old American investor named Warren Buffet wears plain clothes and drive an old pickup despite being a billionaire 150-times over. If I were Buffet, I would give more to charity; buy flood insurance; replace three missing teeth with implants; and re-roof my patio, but that’s all I can think of, and I could do them now if I wanted.

Even so, I never feel completely secure because I believe that wealth consists of having enough money in enough kinds of investments that Peggy and I would have enough to live on no matter what happened. This is not true for us, so a flood, costly medical bills, an economic depression, a prolonged stay in a nursing home, or Oregon’s coming +9.0 earthquake, could really hurt us. Although most risks can be mitigated, such measures are often expensive and come with their own risks. For example, flood insurance would cost us $8,400 a year, and we’re not even in a flood zone.

A final factor in mine and Peggy’s spending habits is that after being frugal our entire lives, we’re not inclined to spend money simply because we can, and there are also charitable bequests to consider. People talk as though unspent money is wasted money, but because I already have everything I want, I’m happy to know that charities will profit from my death.