Custis

Anyone who does not think that the desert is beautiful has most certainly not seen it at sunrise or at sunset. They have not seen the delicate gold of a young morning tinting golden Rabbitbush blossoms, or burnishing twisted fingers of dead Greasewood, mottled with rusty patches of lichen. Perhaps they have never listened to the birds and the coyotes, greeting each other with what sounds to the overly sentimental ear of this amateur naturalist, to be pure joy at life, or more realistically, at having survived another desert night.

On a small playa east of Christmas Valley, I find myself engrossed in these sights and sounds. The fresh scent of Sage fills the air. Here and there the cracked surface of the tawny playa is broken by clumps of vegetation, Shadscale (the first I have ever seen in Oregon), Greasewood and on a low sandy ridge, the ever present Big Sagebrush, thrusting silvery green tips skyward in company of riotously blooming Rabbitbrush. Altogether a charming miniature forest. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago I drove across Oregon’s Cascade range to find myself out in the eerie sagebrush wilds of Lake county. In a sandy, sagebrush dotted valley, there stands a large volcanic monument known as Fort Rock. Within the shadow of this immense horse-shoe shaped cliff lays the small Pioneer Cemetery.

It is a spooky place where the silent stillness is broken only by the ever-present desert winds that move across the flats in an endless race with eternity. The tombstones vary from small metal plaques to weather-cracked wooden boards standing vertically, their tops rounded like stereotypical upside down U-shaped tombstones from some old Hollywood movie. In a couple of plots, there were only small metal markers with no names, only dates. The whispering wind seemed to mock me, murmuring softly, “You’ll never know, you’ll never know.” Read the rest of this entry »

There is a place I have come to know, where the sun shines hot in summertime and the winds are bitterly cold in winter. A place where dust devils silently whisper across vast plains of sagebrush and arid alkali sands. It is a place where birds of prey wing their way across intense blue skies and wary jackrabbits skip along amongst Greasewood and Juniper. This is the place on Earth that I love above all others. It is the place that my heart has always called home.

Far out across the trackless reaches of a waterless valley, a great C shaped wall of rock rises from the bleached earth to cast it’s shadow across the northern frontier of the great basin. Sagebrush lizards skitter between the clumps and Scorpions hide beneath sun baked rocks. Here and there can be found the shed skins of snakes. Over all hangs the monumental presence of the giant rock. Here Glenn and I camped out with our guitars and lots of beer. Read the rest of this entry »

FROM THE PERSONAL DIARIES OF CAPTAIN WAYNE P. CHRISTENSEN

In those early times soon after I acquired our magnificent starship, the Snutch Society became so drunk with wonder and the fever of exploration that we zipped around the galaxy with no organized plan. We dashed off in this direction and another to look at the cosmic sights like so many gawking tourists in an intersteller Winnebago.

We thought we had seen stupendous sights, but that was before we drifted out into the great nebula of Orion and cut power in order to have a “campout”. Read the rest of this entry »

Rarer and rarer come the times when I pause to thumb through the pages of my memory. The book is yellow and the pages cracked. But if I turn them slowly and read carefully, the light comes back. I see again the warm summer days of childhood and adolescence. With some coaxing the memories will start flowing like a warm river through my mind, leaving a sad smile on my lips and wet streaks on my face. At such times in the odd hours I can only find relief from the poignant torrent by writing it all down, sharing it with the faceless friends I have never
met. It is just one more story, out of the millions upon millions that will never be known.

As I recall, I first met my childhood friend Norman in 1972. He moved into a pink house across the street from where I lived. His divorced mother was an attractive Filipino lady, raising Norm and his two younger sisters Theresa, and Marcella, alone. His estranged father was a white American veteran of the Korean war. Read the rest of this entry »

High up in a remote region somewhere near the Oregon town of Tiller, if you can call it a town, my friend Scott turns off his ignition and we get out of his silver Saturn. A strange choice of vehicles for exploring wilderness logging roads, the car nonetheless got us safely to our destination.

On the west side of the road a scrubby clearcut, grown over with golden summer-cured grass which vainly attempted to hide silver and black stumps, stretches out towards a great gully. The eastward side of the road leads into a tall forest cut with draws and spotted with grassy clearings dominated by blackcap, crawling blackberry vines and poison oak. I follow Scott into this landscape on foot, feeling dry grass and sticks crackle beneath my feet. Read the rest of this entry »

I walked from my room about an hour before sunset with wind whipping savagely at my collar. It was the last week of June in southern Nevada and I wore a heavy winter coat to ward off the cold. I could not help wondering how many years will pass before it would be this cold, in this month, in this area, again.

Outside of my room, Goldfield, Nevada lay like a dusty necropolis. Except for a handful of people who still live there, the town is completely deserted. A large brownstone hotel stood empty, looking as if it may have been deserted yesterday. The stenciled name “Hotel” on the window cast an eerie shadow of the word across the floor within while a lone pigeon clung to the side of a stone pillar at the entranceway in a most un-pigeon-like manner. Many normally familiar creatures behave in an alien manner when they are in the desert, including some humans. Read the rest of this entry »

Even as a very young boy I can remember being gripped by the compelling desire to explore mysterious, far away places. by age seven I was reading adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, novels with titles like “Tarzan of the apes” “John Carter Warlord of Mars” “The land that time forgot” etc. Filled with colorful imaginings I would play in the forest behind my parent’s house. In this quiet green realm I became the heroes of those stories, fighting giant four armed green soldiers with my stick sword and rescuing lovely alien princesses from the dungeons of ancient cities on the dead sea bottoms of Mars.

During the gusty Coos Bay summer I would stand on the edge of the bay and picture myself as captain Cook or Columbus, preparing to board my ship and depart for places unknown. Read the rest of this entry »

We live in a story with no end in sight, we experience a being with no clear beginning. With an astonishing plurality of thought and emotion we try to make sense of the multiplicity of wonders that surround us in this existence.

We, as a symptom of our humanity, seek answers to all that makes up our sphere of experience. Perhaps the most important answer that we seek is reflected in the age old question. Who am I? Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?

Aside from the feeble answers offered by thousands of different religions and mythologies, there is very little to point the way for us. What we do find tends to raise more questions instead of answering the existing ones. Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce and I wound our way alternatively through shafts of sunlight and dark forest shade as we traveled along the narrow trail with our gear in our hands. Within a few minutes we came to our spot. The sun shone brightly through leafy Alders to reflect upon the dancing waters of a clear, sandy bottomed stream. The little brook was only about a yard wide but was a focal point of living activity. Immediately upon our approach we could see lightning like streaks zipping this way and that. Occasionally one would hover still in the crystalline medium and we would have a second or two to admire the beautiful little trout before it flashed away. Read the rest of this entry »