The Oregon Trail

 It has been a miserable summer in Texas. It shows all over our yard and in our gardens. The tomato season was abruptly interrupted at the end of May, an unreasonable date for production to end, but we had already had several 100+ degree days by then, and the plants were dying. Birds were eating the tomatoes as fast as they could make, while they were still green. In total aggravation, I gave up. I tore the plants out of the ground, filling up the composter! I have never had such a disastrous tomato crop, ever!

Now, three months later, record temperatures have been broken over and over. Sometimes the indoor/outdoor thermometer in my kitchen shows as high as 115 degrees in the backyard. The grass is barely alive, and that is after running up the largest water bill to date on this house, just desperate to save the roots. Most of my potted plants have also died. A neighbor and I have noticed that even with watering every day, some of the plants have simply shriveled in the hot wind. Last time I paid attention to the news we have had 63 days of temperatures of 100 or more, and that is also a record. The lack of rainfall since the beginning of this year has made it all that much worse. In July we got .02 of an inch, and August so far hasn't been a whole lot better.

People started talking about global warming in the 1970s. Maybe it was sooner but that's when I recall hearing about it for the first time. Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House, which of course, Ronald Reagan had removed almost immediately. The petroleum industry turned the whole matter into a political issue and so it has remained for some reason, because people don't always recognize when they are being manipulated by big business. But I don't see how anyone can deny the weather is changing. They point to the fact that we have these blistering cold snaps, another thing that never happened until recently, so global warming is a hoax. But that happens exactly because the polar caps are warming and that arctic air droops down into areas of the world it never used to reach when it stayed nice and firmly frozen in place, sort of like how your glass of ice water gets the coldest just before all the ice has melted away.

Anyway, this heat – desert creep, I've heard it called by meteorologists – has Wayne and I yearning for the wonderful summer weather we enjoyed when we lived in the Southern Rockies. The problem for me there was the altitude, not the weather. I couldn't breathe and it didn't get better. The longer we stayed the harder I found it to get a breath. So we came back to Texas – and both of us have pretty much been complaining about it ever since we arrived. 

In 2019 we took a trip to Oregon – because I had never been and we both wanted to see Crater Lake. I've always had a fascination with the Pacific Ocean so we made sure to spend a lot of time on the Oregon coast, and we both fell in love with a little town midway down the coastline named Florence. We stayed in a B&B style inn on a hill with a fabulous view of the town, the harbor, and close enough to walk to Old Town restaurants. Our room had a little kitchen so we visited a local supermarket and made a charcuterie tray and drank some wine from one of the Willamette wineries we had visited. We slept with the windows open. It was a gorgeous weather, blue skies and cool nights. We walked on the beach. We noticed a lot of retirees there. We even came back at the end of our circular trek around Oregon for a last look before we flew back to Texas. 

Then the pandemic struck. We daydreamed about that October in Oregon. And we planned another trip as soon as travel became a reality again, This time, we vowed we would stay in Florence the entire time and use it as our base camp. In 2021, we did just that.

This time, October again because we were spending our "anniversary" there – this time, the weather was horrendous. A howling wind came off the ocean and ravaged the deck on the VRBO we had found online in Old Town. We didn't even venture out at all for one entire day other than to dash across the street to have dinner. We moved all the deck furniture up against a wall to keep it from flying through the picture window. Once the brunt of the storm had passed, on our second whole day, we drove up to see the Sea Lions we had missed on our first trip. The ocean was misty from the crashing waves rolling in. It looked like a scene from a science fiction movie, something from outer space. I could barely keep my fearsome, awestruck eyes off of it. The sea lions, of course, were nowhere to be seen. They're not dummies.

And yet, this fascination with Florence, Oregon has not abated. We are headed back in one week. We have been scouring Realtor.com and Zillow since May. We have been giving worried glances at all the stuff we have accumulated since we've been back in Texas – not to mention burdensome real estate we have attached ourselves to. We are actually, at our age, thinking of a big cross-continent move from Texas to Oregon – if we can figure out how to make it work. We will be doing yet another HUGE downsize if we do this, but we've got an appointment with a real estate agent while we're there, and we will see just how committed to a move we feel once this trip is over. If we do it, this will absolutely be the LAST move for us so we have to find a place that is awesome – a place that ticks all the boxes, as they say on HGTV – a place that makes enough sense to us to plan another god-awful long-distance move. 

Onward…

Bear Depredations

The motion light outside the bedroom window came on at 5:00 this morning. It woke me and both the animals. My SO is out of town so the dog and the cat are sleeping with me. I listened hard but couldn’t hear anything outside. Still, I couldn’t go back to sleep either. I got up and came into the living room. I turned on the light  outside on the deck. Saw nothing. I turned on the light over the driveway. Still nothing. I went into the laundry room and turned the light on outside the back door. Nothing there either. I suppose it could have just as easily been a skunk that made the motion light go off, but I am deathly scared of bears.

Night before last, a bear broke our cylindrical bird feeder off the metal bracket where it hung from one of the pine trees near the deck. The bracket was bent in half, the hook on top of the feeder was straightened, and the bale on the lid was misshapen. Of course, the feeder was completely empty. On the same night, my across-the-street neighbor had a visit from a bear that left tracks all over their concrete patio, including some that led right up to the window to their downstairs guest bedroom. 

Saturday night, about dusk, I ran into a big cinnamon bear at the dumpster. I was headed there to drop off a bag of garbage. He was standing on the rim of the dumpster, looking at me. I had the dog in the car with me, so I rolled down the window for her to get a good look. I am trying to get her to bark at them, but she’s as scared of them as I am. The bear looked at us and dropped down behind the dumpster where I couldn’t see him. I took my bag of garbage back home with me. I’m sure the bear went back to the dumpster as soon as I left. Every time I go there lately, bear scat is on the ground. And we have had scat in our back yard as well.

I friend who lives in the next county has been plagued by bears this year. She has lived in this area for 16 years and says this is the worst bear-year she has seen yet. At her house, a bear mangled the screen over her kitchen window trying to get in. On a recent morning, her doorbell rang, and when she opened the door, there stood the bear. He had been leaning close to her door and his paw touched off the bell. 

After that, she called the New Mexico Fish and Game department. They came out and set a trap. Within an hour, she heard the trap go off. There was a bear inside the trap but not her screen-mangling, doorbell-ringing bear. The wardens came to haul off the trapped bear. The next day, they brought back the emptied trap. Again, the trap went off, and again, it was not her bear. That bear is still on the loose.

Down in our valley, a woman with goats has had five of them killed by bears. In a small town 11 miles from here, a man had a llama killed. They are hungry and they are on the prod. It’s their gorging time, when they up their caloric intake to about 20,000 calories a day to prepare for hibernation. This year with the wildfires and the drought, they are having a difficult time finding their natural forage, so they're combing decks and garbage dumpsters. Meanwhile, I am having dreams about bears. It’s constantly on my mind. If I’m going to live here full-time, I’m going to have to get over this phobia, but how? Today I think I’ll drive into town and see if the local sporting goods stores has bear pepper spray in stock. Maybe with some of that in hand I’ll stop feeling so defenseless.

Onward ....