Sunday, July 18, 2021

Searching for the Skyline - Prologue

 Where has this Green Cascadia Bob been?  Is he still kicking?

YES!!!

It has been a monumental couple of years, with a tragic pandemic and a rash of fires.  It feels like we're all dealing with so much change and loss and new things.  I have wrecked and restored my beloved Bus.  I'm no longer married but grateful for the love shared in my life.  I have been visiting the forests of Oregon every chance I get, but of course it is never quite enough.



Through it all I have never stopped writing.  I am happy to announce the completion of my novel, "Searching for the Skyline".  The nonfiction story is about the 1921 Oregon Skyline Trail, once famous but now abandoned and lost.  That is, until my daughter Eva and I discovered 50 miles of the old route through the Mt. Hood National Forest.  The book is with a professional editor as I type this!  

Below is an unedited preview of the book.  I hope you find it enjoyable!  Thank you for being there through it all.

Prologue

    “Haw-OOOOO” howls the skinny old lady cat, cinnamon-black with a patch of pure white on her chest. “Heyyy-WOOOAHH!!!” she cries like a weird high-pitched banshee, calling an otherworldly “hello”. My dear constant companion, she intuitively knows that I will be leaving, off into the unknown and doesn't like it one bit. The jays are still fighting with the crows in the backyard, for territory, for dominance.

    A reluctant summer has suddenly descended upon Portland. It has baked away all traces of the past six months of constant rain and fierce gray. Suddenly, the wet weather is gone. “I have never felt the raindrops,” claims the toasted Earth in a dull monotone, and of course lying the whole time.

    It is almost noon. I'm restless and alone in the empty house, nervously pacing around and breaking up the sunbeams that illuminate the wood paneled room. In my insane but methodical way, I have been planning this trip of a lifetime for months. It is finally time to go. I am itching for it. All of the details, the unfinished business and many loose ends, it is time to let go of it all and leave on a great adventure. I must be especially careful out there. In the wild will of these infinite conifers, a broken leg could mean death.

    Somewhere far away from the screaming cities, something dark and mysterious lurks in the forests of Oregon. Shaggier than Sasquatch, more lonesome than a solitary cry in the wilderness, a tangled old path is trapped in 1921. It is from another time altogether, a gilded age and long silenced. Locked in a time capsule it still sleeps.

    Imagine for a moment you are a red-tailed hawk soaring high above the Oregon Cascades, thousands of feet in the air riding the hot summer thermals rising into the sky. The rumpled peaks and valleys stretch out below. Emerald green hides all that is secret under a deep canopy of trees. Far off on the horizon are the massive points of snow covered volcanoes. They suddenly thrust from the green like pale fingers through an old quilt. These are the Mother Peaks of the great Cascades, dazzling in the Solstice Sun and scoured with glaciers. In places, entire squares of forest have been removed, leaving a patchwork of burned out scars behind. Suddenly, the hawk detects a bit of movement on the forest floor. With a shrill screech she plummets, and the wood rat dies instantly. Here under the deep green, only a bit of dappled sunlight scatters through the forest in golden rays, dancing in the hot summer breeze. A deer bounds off effortlessly into the dark on stick legs. On a branch high above, a spotted owl ruffles his feathers and goes back to sleep.

    If you are reading these words, it is likely that you live in or near a city. It is sometimes hard to imagine a world without cars or noise, the lively bustle that goes along with human life. I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, the Windy City and the Land of Lincoln. It's about as far from the Oregon Cascades as you can get. My grandmother was born in Chicago, and she spent her entire life there. Irene loved to tell stories about her childhood, adventures that are still with me. We are visiting a forgotten time, but she is taking us along and instantly brings it back to life. Suddenly you have been transported a hundred years into the past.

    “Wateeeeee-Mehloooooonne!!” shouts the Italian vendor in a thick accent, his wooden pushcart is almost overflowing with fat green melons.

    He shouts it into the crowded streets, cobbled and bustling with early century life. Other vendors are crammed along the dirty sidewalk, it is a crashing of joyful humanity. A red and cream streetcar clatters by, clanging a happy warning and spitting sparks. You are there too, it is fresh and alive and you can feel the nickels rattling around in your pocket, for the cool dark of the movie theater and a day of adventure.

    Often I have wondered about the thin veneer that separates our ages, this transparent membrane that seems to pass through time. How can you stand in two places at once? A rocky trail that climbed to some distant peak. Photographs in books called out with that weird shade of Cascade green that is only found in the jungles of the Pacific Northwest. The first time I stepped foot in these vast forests I knew I had finally come home, as tear streaked cheeks melded with the rain.

    The past winter has been especially bleak, even by Oregon standards. These are long and dark days that are chilled with constant damp and the houselights must remain lit all day. Life has become a comedy of tragic pain and personal loss, beyond anything I've ever experienced and I'm not really equipped to deal with any of it. Sudden cancer has taken away my adopted Mother, quick and without warning She is gone. A twenty-year marriage lies in ruin, crumbling away and it will soon end. It is raining, raining, “Raining? Again?” you wonder in disbelief.

    As the winter rain rolls down the window in streaks, I sit hunched at the dim dining room table surrounded by a flurry of books and paper. There are maps all over the place, falling off the big table and circled all around, 1921 or 2006 all given equal footing and still making a mess in the dim amber glow of the lamp. These are just small pieces of a very mysterious puzzle folded upon our current time. We have only a few clues to go on, a few faded dotted lines on a piece of paper recorded long ago. A past that seems so close at hand.

It has become a deep compulsion. To find the Oregon Skyline Trail – or what is left after 100 years. The elegant Skyline has haunted my imagination for a long time. “What is out there?” is the real question. The maps are beautiful with detail and burnished with time. If you are patient with them, the maps will tell you a story. They speak of ancient volcanoes and meadows formed from ice-age glaciers. The dotted lines contour around a ridge, sensual in their purpose. Each inch of a Twenties map is a solution to the mystery of the Skyline. But what is left out there in the forest, on the ground? What changes have been seen in the last hundred years since the passing of the Jazz Age? For this, they are silent.

    Raindrops patter on the windowpane and then abruptly stop. All is silent, and a dazzling beam of sunlight makes the entire room glow, so sudden that it makes you squint.

    An idea begins to form, a summer like the ones of lost youth. “Let's find the Skyline, Bob,” I say to myself quietly to the empty room.

    The Pacific Northwest is famous for our vast expanses of fir forests growing on foggy mountains. In the Northwest part of Oregon, you have the Mount Hood National Forest. as it is known officially and Oregon's “working forest”. It is a big place, over a million acres and eight wilderness areas. Timeless meadows and craggy volcanic peaks peer out over a blanket of ancient forests. It is a land born of firey explosions followed by eons of deep peace, when the trees can get a foothold until the next cycle of chaos. Mount Hood herself dominates this national forest, the ghost of a triangle on the horizon. If you're lucky, that is, and it's not raining. In 1921, the Skyline Trail began her journey here on the south flank of this immense volcanic cone. For fifty miles, the trail lazily wanders a dense and mountainous terrain, along high ridges that have been forgotten. A few scattered pieces of the Skyline are still in use as other trails, but much of it has been abandoned for a very long time, for decades at least.

    Despite over a hundred years of human intrusion, it is still a wild land in these Oregon Cascades. I want to live rough and ready this summer, as close as possible to a early century Forest Guard on horseback. I need to see what it feels like to float anonymous into our ancient land. It has been a dream for a very long time to see these places unfold firsthand, to embrace the shy splendor of a forgotten wilderness. To grasp at dream-smoke, perhaps only vapor. Does the route of the original 1921 Oregon Skyline Trail still exist, between Mount Hood on the north and Mt. Jefferson to the south? What does it even feel like out there, today in the far reaches of the Mt. Hood National Forest? It has been a long time since someone has walked the 1921 route of the Trail. A century has passed since a traveler has followed the original route, or even thought about doing so. This is as much of an inner journey as one of geography. What will I find out in the summer Sun, those lost pages of the Northwest? Who am I?

    It is ironic that you are coming along with me, out there into the deep solitude. For most of my life I really haven't enjoyed talking about myself, but here I will attempt to be bare and honest. I hope we are both enriched by the experience.

    It is time to go. Eva hugs me tenderly, wrapping her arms around my neck so tightly I almost choke. “I will miss you, Papa!” she tells me with such a composed maturity I almost break down.

    At just twelve she is my golden-haired jewel, crazy curled and wise well beyond her years. I cannot express my deep love for this child, the confluence of all rivers running right through me. But still, I must go.


...


    Have you heard of the Oregon Skyline Trail? You probably haven't. Don't worry, you're not alone, no one else seems to remember. It has been forgotten.

    For over ten thousand years we have loved, lived, and died in these Oregon Cascades. If you could race backwards in time and stand on that high peak of eternal summertime, nothing would appear out of place. Even as the Sun darts across thousands of heavens and entire forests rise and fall, it all remains the same. This is the paradox of the wilderness – nothing changes, everything changes. Since the beginning, humanity has been a direct participant in the natural world. For the majority of our humble existence, our species has lived in balance with the seasons. Only at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution have our priorities - and even our very connection to the Earth shifted so drastically. Sometimes, we leave a delicate trace of our passing, a track in the dirt like a robin's footprint. Almost 100 years ago, the Oregon Skyline Trail opened for business. Not long afterwards, a rough, horse track of a road with the same name followed along like a guilty dog. The Trail was borne on the dreams and vision of two men of the Northwest: Joe Graham, a quiet and sturdy District Ranger of the U.S. Forest Service, and Fred Cleator, a forward thinking Government conservationist who believed that forests were for the people. Together they would create a long-distance hiking trail that would revolutionize how we interact with wilderness. At the russet dawn of this new mechanized age, these men would be the first U.S. Forest Service employees to bring all-weather roads into the Oregon Cascades. The Northwest would never be the same.

    Native People have been living here for thousands of years. They came after the vast ice sheets retreated for a time, to celebrate the bounty of the mountains and the sacred sites that are scattered across their flanks. The first residents of Oregon created rich cultures and many languages as they moved over the vast landscape. They settled in deserts and dense rainforests and mighty rivers. Thousands of years passed. Throughout this time, they loved and managed the land in harmony with natural processes. Peace was broken by violence as wars and skirmishes sporadically broke out. Fights for territory and slaves, or for contested fishing grounds. Sometimes these wars were fought for honor itself.

    During times of cooperation, Nations met in vast trading centers, such as The Dalles, Oregon, along the crashing Columbia river. Treasures from thousands of miles away were bartered in many different languages, salmon for seashells. For thousands of years this cycle continued uninterrupted, these rich and complex rites woven into place like a golden thread. How to build a longhouse from perfect cedar planks. How to boil water without metal cookware. What to eat in a sparse country. How to survive the long hypothermic winters. Tales of fierce volcano gods fighting for the hand of a beautiful maiden, shaggy Sasquatch and Bookwus hiding in the fringes of darkness.

    The first People also brought the first foot paths to these mountains. They are responsible for thousands of miles of trails throughout the Cascades, trails for trading, or to access an abundance of huckleberries and elk. Many of these trails would have taken you to sacred places high and far away in these deep mountains, places of prayer and deep contemplation. To this day, quite a few of these forgotten pathways are now familiar roads and highways as they thunder through high mountain passes. Not all of the ancient routes are gone, however. Some are still asleep, hiding under the dense brush. They are waiting for their people to come back to the forest.

    By the late 1830's more than three quarters of the Native population was gone. Decimated by European diseases to which they had no immunity, the People died in great numbers. Often entire villages were wiped out by smallpox or diphtheria, wailing babies lying alone and helpless next to the stiff corpses of their mothers. The remaining few, shocked and stunned by the death all around them – the Chinook Clackamas, the Molalla, the Tygh, and many other Nations were rounded up and driven to distant reservations far from their holy lands of ten-thousand generations. In their memory, they left a wake of ancient trails.

    In the early 20th Century, vast areas of unexplored and untapped wild lands still remained – in the high country of thick forests, just out of reach. They were too far from the sprawling city streets, remote and mysterious to many Oregonians. This was a time for new ideas and innovations and almost anything seemed possible. Farms that had been homesteads would be surveyed and turned into tidy towns and cities with proper sidewalks and indoor plumbing.

    By the 1920's, we had learned to fly. Biplanes filled the skies. The radio brought the news and entertainment into every dusty parlor. By the end of the 1920s, over a million radios would be in use by American families. For the first time in human history, news could be heard instantly with the turn of a switch. Moving pictures dazzled audiences in ornate theaters that would pop up overnight in every American town with great fanfare. And yet, we could not escape from the powerful call of the wild. Just past the fringes, past the twinkling end of city blocks, ancient forests continued lush in their complex processes, green and oblivious to the mischief of society.

    In 1921, when the Oregon Skyline Trail opened for business, alcohol had become illegal in the United States. Due to the newly enacted 18th Amendment, selling a glass of beer would send you to jail. Most Americans climbed out of their sleepy beds in rural farming towns, to the crow of the rooster and a hard day of toil. But a great shift had begun, and the sparkling city dazzled. Hardscrabble hicks wanted a little glamour. They wanted something young and exciting that the farm could never provide. Good paying jobs were available in the booming cities, in the factories and the boilers, in the sooty rail yards and the bellies of steamships. Just behind the waterfront docks and locomotives, you'd find wild Jazz in the speakeasies, where patrons swill homemade gin by the flirtatious glassful. Skinny women in bobbed hair danced with newfound abandon late into the neon-lit night. Their tight dresses and sparkles are now just stories to tell.

    A brutal world war had ravaged the countries of Europe, the deadliest conflict in human history. Warfare had become like a machine as men were mowed down in the trenches, choked to death by the mustard gas. By the time the fighting had ceased in November 1918, over 18 million men, women, and children had been slaughtered. Veterans returned from the European front lines, some missing limbs, others damaged in ways invisible. Fueled by the sickness and hate of the Great War, a terrible pandemic flu swept the world of 1918-19. An estimated 20-50 million worldwide gave their lives.

    In Nineteen-Twenties America, we began to feel the first stirrings of a collective wilderness movement. Artists and visionaries such as Ansel Adams and John Muir had already popularized romantic notions of the American West, “The mountains are calling...and I must go!” said John Muir famously. But these far removed lands were mostly out of reach to the average citizen in the hardscrabble logging towns that sprung up along soggy rivers where the rain hardly stopped. “Stumptown” would soon become Portland, the whitewashed tree stumps would give way to electric trolleys. The forests retreated, and the wilderness became closer.

    The logging camps came, with locomotives and men without shave or bath. Rough men who smelled like kerosene and copper, working the seven foot long crosscut saws from bouncing springboards. Brass steam whistles roared through the countryside, into ancient valleys of thick cedar and rainbow trout. Too many trees were disappearing, and concern mounted. Conservation became the bold idea of the early 20th Century. Gifford Pinchot's new school of forestry began to champion the idea of “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”.

    Cities blossomed into crowded neighborhoods filled with soot. The promise of fresh air in the healthy mountains filled the public's imagination. Sleeping in the great outdoors had suddenly evolved into a popular leisure activity enjoyed by young and old alike. People flocked to the high lakes of summertime by the thousands. Woolen outdoor fashions of the time reflected this trend: high-laced tall leather boots and baggy hipped pants became the rage.

    With a gooselike honk, the era of the automobile had also arrived, destroying some dreams and building others. A booming middle class had money to spend, and Americans fell in love with their Model T Fords spitting steam out of shiny brass radiators. Despite frequent mechanical problems, the “Tin Lizzie” gave the working class American of the Twenties a new sense of independence and freedom. Soon the woods would be full of cars, loaded with camp gear as they made their way into the high country. No other era in the 20th century has been more responsible for reshaping our collective consciousness and how we think about Nature itself.

    The Oregon Skyline Trail was a direct product of the Twenties. For over 260 miles, a horse and hiking route was dreamed over the thickly forested backbone of the Cascade Range, from glacier clad Mount Hood southward to Crater Lake - no small journey in 1920's America in your itchy wool pants. The Trail would pass through some of the most remote terrain in the American West, unrivaled in spectacular scenery, crossing countless rivers and rich trout streams along the way. Most of the route of the Skyline was already there - it had been in use for centuries by Native People. Other parts of the trail were built by trappers, miners, and explorers, and later by U.S. Forest Service. Trail crews were sent deep into the forests, equipped with hand tools, axes and crosscut saws. The men turned a rough collection of paths into a consolidated route, well marked and fit for hiking or horses. At certain points you could buy feed for your horse, or even use the telephone. The first map and guide was released to the public by the Oregon Information and Tourist Bureau in 1921. The Oregon Skyline Trail was open, and a great dream had become reality.

    It was constructed as the highest quality high mountain trail ever built, with horse camps, ranger stations, and telephone communication strung along the route in strategic locations. Wide as a highway through the old firs, the Trail symbolized a stylized remaking of mountain travel. But something else was on the horizon.

The May 8th, 1927 Oregonian newspaper reports:

“Oregon Skyline Trail – Rich in Rare Scenery

High along the summit of the Cascade Mountains, extending from Mt. Hood on the north to Crater Lake on the south, there runs the Skyline Trail, one of the most remarkable and at the same time one of the least known scenic routes of the far west. The Skyline Trail, which is, perhaps, unique in the manner in which it traverses an unbroken stretch of mountain summit and in the wide variety of country it includes...is practically unknown to native Oregonians. Although a trip is a challenge to the imagination of even the dullest of urbanites, the Skyline Trail has never taken hold of the public fancy in the Webfoot State.

There are several reasons, perhaps, for the fact that the trail in past years has not been frequented by more than a handful of persons annually. In the first place, the age is one of the automobiles, and the habit of making long trips by foot or horseback has long since disappeared. Then too, the entire trip takes at least 15 days by horseback, and about a month by foot. It is no journey for weaklings...”

    This first-modern high Cascades highway became in stages magnificent, then quaint, and finally obsolete. By then, America had long lost its brief love affair with the now-forgotten Oregon Skyline Trail. Like an old photo too long in the sun, it curled and slowly faded away. It has become a lost memory, just a fragment tossed in the wind. Today, no one remembers.

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