The Country Girl’s Gaggle

I am struggling.  I live off the grid, on an organic farm, eight miles up a dirt road and 30 minutes from “town.” I have lived here for four years and have yet to have a relationship, or even a proper date, with anyone that actually lives in my zip code. I have worked very hard to set up a lifestyle and an existence that allows me freedom and flexibility. It is beautiful here.  I have meaningful work, family close by, wonderful friends, and a playful community. Yet, I want someone to fool around with on Saturday night and wake up to on Sunday morning without wondering how did that happen, or will it happen again?  Do I give up all that I have built to move back to the city and date? Or, do I have confidence and trust that some day, the right bearded man is going to drive down my road in a pick-up truck to find me picking blackberries in a cute pair of cut-offs and cowboy boots?

For the past couple of years I have survived by developing a “gaggle,” the select group of guys in my life who play different roles, fulfill different needs, and can potentially help me identify what kind of relationship I would like to have next time around. The women who coined this term have laid out the different roles one might find in a typical urban gaggle. But no one ever thinks about what life is like in rural America, so I adapted their ideas to my country existence.

There is the “booty call” that I hook up with when I make my monthly trips to the city- seriously casual, and very hot sex. My gaggle includes the “non-date date” guy.  We go out for dinner and drinks, have adventures, and then we go home—alone, or I text my “booty call” and complete my night. The “guy next door” (who happens to be one of the only other single people in a 10-mile radius) offers small favors to help me out, and occasionally we make dinner for each other or sit down for a beer to compare notes about dating in our 30’s, but we could never date each other. My gay friends living down the road are willing to play “wingmen” and quickly remind me that there are always a million, beautiful fish in the sea when the one I want looks the other way.

Although it is rural, it is still a pretty hip place, so I can also include the “open relationship” guy who has a primary partner, but is interested in being my lover- three legs being more stable than two, you see. And then of course, I have all the wonderful men who live nearby with their wives and girlfriends. These guys help me fix my truck or run the chainsaw when I need them. Sort of like a handy ex-boyfriend that is still around, these are my “boyfriends on loan.”

This country version of the gaggle provides me with a way to get what I need in my life without having a significant other. It encourages me to get out there and see what men have to offer, even if it is not a romantic relationship. It allows me to be more accepting of what others have to give, because I can see that they may be able to fulfill a role or spot in the gaggle. Because of my gaggle, I can now differentiate between intimacy and sex, and understand that these two things do not necessarily have to go together.

But right now, my gaggle is missing prospects. I want to dwell in possibility, even if only for a minute or two. And that’s where the country falls short.  If you think the pickins’ are slim in the city, you should check this place out. There is a “hot sex prospect” once every six months at best. And, once you sleep with him, the whole neighborhood knows and you just ran the well dry. We do get some “possible prospects” in the form of travelers and visitors that are passing through. These typically younger men bring brief moments of excitement and some candy for the eyes, but little hope for an interaction that lasts more than a few weeks. Plus, the pressure to push a quick romantic encounter gets to be too much, especially when the twenty-somethings are so much faster than this ole girl. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what a man with “boyfriend potential” looks like; I haven’t seen anything like that around here.

This picture may seem a little grim, and sometimes it is. Everyone asks me why I don’t just move back to the city. What is a girl like me doing in a place like this anyway? But, I love it here. And, so much of my life is kicking ass. I have everything almost everything a girl like me could want. If I moved back to the city and gave up all that I have built and created to “find love,” what would I have left to share with that person, assuming I could even track him down?

This is the puzzle that keeps me up at night. It has me regularly driving 284 miles north on the I-5 so I can get some booty and flirt with strangers for a few days a month.  It breaks my heart and tests my patience. How do I live the life I love and have a love life when I am a member of one of the smallest sub-populations in the United State—a 33-year old woman who is single and lives in the country?

It’s All But a Dream

Posted by Melissa Matthewson

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.”                         -A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

I like to believe that magic still exists in the woods. Like it was when I was a child. Perhaps it never went away—or maybe it is just harder to find now that I don’t have much time for romping in the trees. I like to believe that nature cannot exist without magic, that mysterious forces are at play in the world. I like to believe that perhaps these forces even control the events of my life—why I’m drawn to a particular hillside at dusk when the light washes the apple trees in hues full of promise. Or why I choose a certain place to walk, or how a bird tangles into a rose just as I turn my head. Or when thunder and lightning split out of the sky unexpectedly, slicing the ground with hail and filling the creeks. Whatever nature provides, I like to believe it’s magic laid bare.

Shakespeare believed in the magic of nature. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, nature and magic are revered, intertwined, bound together—all of the language and action of the play celebrates the mystery of the wild wood. Too, all of the mixed-up love and foolery take place in the dark forest outside of Athens until mended by Puck and Oberon at the end of a long night of lovers, dreams, and fairy foolishness. Much of the play reminds me how dreams can guide our lives.

I recently took my six-year-old son to see the play at our local outdoor Elizabethan theater. The weather was warm and the new evening cast shadows on the stage. A plane flew overhead. A bird glided into the eaves of the roof. The trees shook in the wind. The cello sounded out across the seats and up through the air. To open, the fairies brought a moon on a sleigh made of wood and lifted it with a pulley and rope to hang above the stage. In their loopy shoes and wide dresses, they sang of the woods and herbs and all the mystery that nature provides. It was bewitching and my son drank it in. It was easy for him to embrace the magic. He watched the whole play, perched on the edge of his seat, spellbound, understanding the sequence of events not in an intellectual way, but more with his own heart, his own thin body fixed in place by the enchantment.

As an adult, I find it harder to access magic when I’m out in the woods. While I like to believe it is there, I often find myself considering the science of nature—weather, elevation, what species of bird or flower I’ve seen, and not the magic that puts everything in motion. I’m amazed at how my children can tune into the supernatural while sitting among the trees and grass of our backyard hill. What’s in those woods over there? They say, the wind, an urgent gesture created by fairies to spread seed. Or a dark place with little creatures running around and flying in the air.

Think back to when you were a child. Don’t you have places that enchanted you? Places of magic that are permanently stuck in the wild reaches of your memory?

Mine was a dark greenbelt of eucalyptus, cottonwood, creek, and grass that ran through my childhood home in southern California. When I went there to explore, the light tumbled through the trees. Each step took me deeper into a sort of filtered place. I’d follow the line and sharp roll of hill, step over stones, grass, through mud, water. As I walked, I knew I was not alone, or at least, I imagined the forest creatures that lived in the wood, tucked away in the branches, crags, or holes in the hillside. Everything about it was shady and uneven. It was a place of dark and enchanting dreams, as if it were too forbidden, unkempt, wild for anyone to experience it. Except for me and whatever else watched me. Laid out between the homes and yards of our perfectly formed suburb, shrouded in dim shade, it asked for nothing in return, except hope, chance, possibility, and irresistible magic.

While I watched the play and watched my son watch the play, I thought, give me this Shakespearean magic in my own woods. “Over hill, over dale/Thorough bush, thorough brier/Over park, over pale/Thorough flood, thorough fire/I do wander every where/Swifter than the moon’s sphere.” Give me the dreams of love just as Lysander or Hermes or Titania or Helena. Like them, I want to pick cupid’s herbs and cast spells under the full moon with the fairies pitching magic all around. Give me this in my Applegate country. Let this place swing me around in all of its mystery. I want to rub my body with its pine needles, ground the woods into my skin, mark my body with the Applegate earth, bed down in the dirt with the deer, just like Shakespeare’s fairies. Give me that midsummer dream, when the earth tilts its head toward the sun, way in the north with the fairies who make trouble when the moon rides high.

a.k.a 13–1

Posted by Kirsten K Shockey

In college, my husband Christopher and I would dream of a place in the mountains surrounded by government land.  We knew that we wanted to make sure a subdivision never moved next door, but that was about the extent of what we knew and did not know about living next to wide open spaces.

Fourteen years ago we met our neighbor, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), for the first time. The BLM manages the timberlands that surround us, which includes an amazing woodland of largely untouched legacy firs and pines on our west border. A few months earlier our family moved to a speck of land in the sub watershed of Thompson Creek, within the 500K acre Applegate River Watershed, that is within the Rogue Basin, all of which is within the Klamath Siskiyou Knot.

No roads lie beyond us to the west. If you hike up this ridge and walk south you reach the Pacific Crest Trail, the Red Buttes Wilderness and miles upon miles of unpopulated backcountry. Take the ridge north and you arrive at Panther Gulch, which leads west to the community of Williams.

At that time our four children were young, from five months to eight years of age. One day in early June was one of the rare times Christopher and I were confident that everyone’s needs would be met long enough that we might enjoy a walk in these woods. We never got close to the ridge top or any backcountry. Instead we walked along the historic ditch that clung to the hillside and made the only level spot on which to traverse. During the gold rush in the late nineteenth century Chinese immigrants dug this ditch to gravity feed high mountain water to hydraulic cannons that blasted away the hills in order to find gold.

On this walk we noticed many trees had been sprayed with blue stripes, one at the base and one at breast height. Naive to living near timber we wondered what those stripes meant. Now I think ‘Duh’, of course that means those trees are marked to cut.

The next day I was watering a new fruit tree when I heard what sounded like a lot of angry hornets. I realized it was chainsaws. I looked to the north in time to see and hear my first tree fall, whoosh, thunk and an empty spot in the canopy where that tall fir had stood. For the first week that’s all we heard. Soon we didn’t enjoy being outside. We had just moved from the Willamette Valley. The only logging we had experienced were clear cuts–the anticipation of the forest laid bare was too much. We did not know what to expect. This fueled our fear.

Then the helicopters came. The sound of trees falling could no longer be heard over the constant sound of rotors. The helicopters hovered over the forest, pulled back up into the open sky with three, four, or sometimes five logs hung below them like sticks. They flew over the open hill of our property. I envisioned the cable snapping and the logs rolling pell-mell down the hill to our little house. I kept the kids inside.

On the weekend, it was quiet. No logging. No helicopters. Enjoying the silence, Christopher and I worked together on the hill laying a reclaimed oak floor onto a round deck for a yurt. A young man trotted out of the woods. It felt like a stranger walking out of our back bedroom. We stared. He looked at the deck and smiled. “I see you enjoy timber products,” he said handing us his card. He went on to ask if his crew could use our driveway to access this unit behind us that was hard to get to. It would save “the boys” a lot of hiking.

We readily agreed. While we hated the logging we knew that our refusal wouldn’t stop the cutting. We hoped that our willingness would instead translate into their care of “our” forest.

When the logging was finished we walked through the cut section. We were pleased to find the forest still sang with life and bird song and most of the big trees still stood. We passed many piles of limbs and slash and noticed a burl that had been sawed off a fir log. It was a round flat swirling design of tree rings and bark. We brought it home, sanded, oiled, and carved little legs into the bark. Now it is a trivet and every night it still holds a hot pot or pan. It wears the patina of years.

“Yes, we do love wood.”

Fourteen summers later this grove is diverse, rich, and teeming with life. To BLM its moniker is 13-1, and one of many units in a timber sale named Pilot Thompson. This is an experiment of a different kind of forestry that emphasizes reducing fuels, increasing forest resiliency, treating overly dense stands, and retaining trees over 150 years of age.

Many of the stands in this region are terribly overgrown and require a careful, dry forest restoration approach. As the one who interacts and observes this forest daily, I don’t believe 13-1 falls into that bucket. Fourteen years is too soon an interval to harvest and disturb a low-density forest. I am allowed to be part of the conversation because the Applegate is an Adaptive Management Area, which means the BLM works more with the community and also can test new practices.

A few weeks ago I hiked another stand within the Pilot Thompson Timber Sale named 19-4. This unit received attention for already exhibiting the characteristics of a resilient forest. It resembles my friend 13-1; the difference is that 13-1 may be omitted simply because it is too expensive to access. This hike was for us, members of the community, who wanted to understand what Norm and Jerry would say about forest resiliency. They are forestry and ecosystem science professors that came down from their universities in the north to walk with the BLM’s scientists and decision makers, advocates for both timber and the environment as well as community members to clarify the guiding dry forest restoration principles.

Our homestead faces 19-4. We see it everyday, but this was the first time I was inside it. The sun warmed the tops of the firs and pines, releasing the oils that scent these forests. It was enchanting.

The trek down the ridge was a controlled slide, the deep duff of decay—composting needles, madrone leaves, twigs, bark bits and mycelium mats—held loosely onto the steep slope. Under our boots, at each footfall, the humus slid until it became a step. It was mid-May and already there was no sign of the recent rains in this soil. These dry conditions that scientists predict in the coming years are exactly why people are concerned. About thirty of us, many of whom I had not seen at the numerous meetings leading up to this sale, slide-stepped and descended through this bit of late seral forest. The grove is old and mature, but not ancient old growth. In this stand, yellow paint lines stretching around massive trunks means “save this one”. My eyes sought out these trees and tried to imagine the space with the remaining trunks missing.

The scattered group stopped and gathered under various sentinel trees. Questions were posed and answered—new roads, soil erosion, riparian buffers, wildlife—some questions were new and interesting and some had been gone over at every meeting. Many of us understood the bigger picture and the eco-system approach. Others of us could literally not see the forest for the trees.

It took us two hours to go a half-mile. The hike ended at a gravel pit, but the discussions concerning the intricacies of biological diversity and changing moisture levels continued. For three hours.

As the sun continued to shine, the heat rose physically and metaphorically. I was hot and tired and found myself getting frustrated as people aired their fears. Their fears that no doubt came from their past experiences and a place of not knowing what to expect.

Here and now I wait to see what will happen. I have hope. Any day now we will wake up to the hornet storm. Yarding machinery will replace the no longer economically viable helicopters. We will listen and wait and re-enter the forest when it is quiet and see.

 

Just 10 Minutes on the Ottoman Empire

Posted by Meganzer O’Toole

The geese honk as they fly overhead and the frogs are croaking. Raindrops from the storm earlier in the evening make their way from the trees to the ground. These are the only sounds I hear as I sit outside to take a few drags from yesterday’s half-smoked cigarette. After a few glasses of wine, the tobacco hits the spot. I am contemplating the funny day I’ve had and how life in this little valley never ceases to surprise and delight me.

Our writing group has just gone to a book reading at one of the nearby wineries. This seemingly innocuous, straightforward activity was not what it appeared to be. The author greeted us with purple socks, sandals, a barrette falling out of her hair. There was a whole table full of pictures and other books, but only a few copies of the one she has recently written. We received an hour-long history lesson on ancient Turkey instead of hearing an excerpt from her novel. Finally, we are able to break away. I never did really understand what the book was about, but I did learn a few things anyway. It just goes to show that you just can’t know what you are going to get in the Applegate.

In the past few weeks, I have been noticing all the things that make this place its own unique thing. The other night, world-renowned Reggae musicians played in an old Grange hall where the Waldorf Charter School sold baked goods next to the Crystal Salesman. The country store recently hosted a weekend music festival in their adjacent cornfield. Bunches of hippies were walking up and down the two-lane highway while all the Harleys drove by waving and honking and the old farmers stood by shaking their heads. At a fundraiser to protect nearby land from being logged, I got to slow dance with an old punk rocker turned superstar with a number one hit in the 90s.

You can buy a $30 bottle of local wine in Ruch, but you can’t find lottery tickets or gas.  Though, if you do happen to run out of gas, an old guy in a pair of overalls is likely to pull up behind you to push you up the hill with his truck so you can coast to the next town with a station. You may not have the same politics as your neighbor, but when it comes down to it, he’ll be there willing to lift, haul, or lend whatever it is you need, and he’ll probably have an extra beer for you too.

Now, I know that special little things happen everywhere—it is part of life’s magic. Recently in Portland, I saw a man riding a unicycle while playing the banjo and wearing a pink cowboy hat. So I wonder, does it happen more often in a place like the Applegate? Or do we just see it here more often because there is less hustle and bustle than other places, which makes it is easier to notice? Perhaps I am just trying to grasp onto little bits of fool’s gold to help me justify staying here when so many of my peers are out there in the glittery city?

I am inclined to believe, at least to some degree, that we do experience more of these bits of sparkle here. This is not because it is not possible in other places, but rather that choosing a country life puts us all in a similar position. Yeats explains, “They have imagined a place where men plough and sow and reap, not a place where there are great wheels turning and vomiting smoke… We wish to preserve an ancient ideal of life. Wherever its customs prevail, there you will find the folk song, the folk tale, the proverb, and the charming manners that come from ancient culture. We must so live that we will make that old noble kind of life powerful amongst our people.” We live in a place where we can study the arts of enjoying life, as well as practice the crafts that lead people to a good life.

I realize that I might be stretching a bit, but we can see this idea play out on a daily basis. We live it every day through our work and our interactions. We see each other at the Post Office, at the school play, and at the Grange. We fix each other’s cars, build each other’s houses, and grow each other’s food. And, even though some of us choose to display the American flag, or the Snake flag, or to burn the flag, we are still bound together by that expression of liberty. Ultimately, we must still rely on each other in a place like this because well, that’s all we’ve got. There is no pretense, no city molds to fit into, and people still make phone calls with landlines. This is just real life, which, in the end, actually doesn’t seem foolish at all.

In a world where things are moving incredibly fast, where access to information is overwhelming, and so many people are searching for connection, maybe it can be this simple—a place where everyone is connected, and there isn’t much fashion sense. And, maybe, if we want to think really big, this is actually what civilization is really about—to build a working and creative community in which fairness, acceptance, and helping each other are the dominant principles. Where interactions come with grace, kindness, an authentic connection, and possibly even recognition of our shared humanity. This can be a smile, a nod, a two-fingered wave over the steering wheel, a slow dance, a gallon of gas, or simply giving someone ten more minutes to tell you about the Ottoman Empire.