On Board for the Ride in Everyday Ramblings

This is the area above the track across the street this morning just after daybreak. The trees are all stressed from the heat and lack of rain but the air quality is much much better.

It’s been overcast most of the day with a bit of a breeze and glimpses of actual blue sky with wispy clouds. The local fires are beginning to burn out but we still have a number of them in the state.

If you’ve been reading here for a while when I have talked about going hiking with Most Honorable in the summer, the place where we go hiking is in the burn area. If you have ever been here you have most likely been to Multnomah Falls. It was in the burn area too.

A lot of effort was put into saving the lodge there and they managed to do it but huge swaths of the surrounding forest, ridges and ridges were burned along our old Columbia River highway. They are saying over, 2,000 damaged trees will need to come down before I-84 can open again.

It is been like a double dip difficulty for most of us here because not only was the air quality really bad for days, the reason it was bad was because a place so many of us love was burning.

Even though it is all second growth in there and fires are a natural phenomenon there is no doubt that climate change is a factor here. The original settlers logged out the old growth forests. There are traces of old farms in the woods.

Early last summer I went with three other intrepid women to the Trails Club Lodge called Nesika for a holiday dinner and day hike. We had a good time and I got great shots of the surrounding woods. You may remember the Christmas Tree trail.

What I didn’t do was take too many shots of the lodge itself. It was originally built as a big log cabin back in 1924 and then rebuilt with great love by club members in the years to come.

They also built wooden bunkhouses for men and women and then there was the infamous loo with a view.

We found out yesterday from drone footage that the lodge survived the fire (at least externally) but all the out building are gone. The fire came right up to the porch but the walls are thick and cooled the onslaught.

The forest service is going to get someone in there by November to turn the water off. The road in is gone. The lodge is a four-mile hike up, and I mean up from Multnomah Falls.

I hope that in the spring I’ll be able to get out there and join a work crew to rebuild what needs to be rebuilt. The club owns the land.

This is a time to be grateful for the blessings that we have. Power and running water and access to food and relatively safe shelter for most of us.

The two islands of my heart in the Caribbean, Antigua and Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos were both in the path or Irma and just wow, imagining the difficulty the folks who live there year round are experiencing…

Tomorrow Most Honorable and I will take advantage of the local trails and hike here in Portland.

Our bodies are here, but our battered hearts are elsewhere. What a difficult time our world is having!

This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life and is part of shared human experience. May we be kind to ourselves and everyone else in this moment and may we give ourselves, and others the compassion we all so very much need.

And that includes you, crazed scared hoarder people in gas lines all throughout the south and the mentally ill people sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk two blocks from here.

We’re all on board for the ride.

Last updated September 09, 2017