deer

LATELY BIRDS

/ janpriddyoregon / 10 Comments

A deer came up our path and pooped just outside our gate.

Those little round brownish pellets in the middle of this picture are deer poop.

The nearest nesting pair of black oystercatchers were out on the sand with their youngster.

The bird at left is an adult (one of the parents. The one in the middle is the other parent. The one at right, with black shading on the end of her beak, is the “baby” already as big as her parents.

The little shorebirds are a mystery. After all these years, I can’t be certain what they are, Least sandpiper (Calidris minutilla)? Or something else?

And then the new driftwood growing up out of the sand. Usually the ocean plows them right up in a high tide, but there have been such drift logs that lasted a year or more because they were well planted.

When Portland, on the east side of the coast range, experiences seasonal hot weather, we often have morning fog. It’s been foggy the last few days when we went out for our walk, clearing once the sun is high enough to burn off the mists.

The eagle flew over our heads on its way to what Gary calls the Bird Snag on the headland north of us.

Sometimes a crow perches here a couple of hundred feet above us, but this is definitely an eagle perch.
We usually walk 3-4 miles, but the other day we walked past Arcadia, more than three miles to the north of us, better than a six mile round trip according to my old running measures. And then home.

WE MET A DEER

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments 
We Met a Deer

 We met a deer beside the wooded trail 
 over the cape and east of the highway. 
 I used to walk that way with my boys 
 when they were young and eager. 
 It is a long walk for a five year old. 
 Miles away. 

 Was it even possible to walk home 
 the way we’d come? We never did. 
 We returned north on the highway 
 and through the tunnel, a scary path 
 for any age. By then we were exhilarated, 
 high on adventure and adrenaline, and eager 
 to get home. 

 The deer was afraid in her forest. She stood 
 silent, still, breathing the same air we held 
 in our chests. She willed us not to see.
 We stood still, silent, on the narrow trail 
 above her. We watched, holding breath. 
 We had been climbing for only a short time, 
 up the north slope among alder trees, 
 a lighter green than the spruce and hemlock 
 we would find higher still. 

 There is no leveling off 
 on that early path, 
 it is all up, then steeply down, 
 always up on the right 
 as we climb. Moss, ferns, mud, 
 the dripping moisture. 
 Then the Dark Fortress. 
 Here at the crest, the land 
 slopes steeply downhill 
 on our right. Dry. The path 
 nearly level. Evergreens 
 grow darkly close together, 
 like a crowd of giants’ legs, 
 like a maze of massive pillars 
 grown black and silent. 
 We are near the ocean, 
 a hundred meters above 
 the highway, but while we stand 
 and listen, we hear nothing. 
 The ground is thirsty here
 and deep in duff, the dead 
 needles of the spruce 
 and hemlock trees, dropped 
 a thousand million times, 
 over a thousand seasons. 
 Silent. 

 The deer stood silent as if 
 her stillness might make her safe. 

 And then she turned her head,
 was gone.

 We moved on ourselves. We climbed 
 and counted mushrooms. We walked up 
 and up and up past creeks and perching birds 
 and then through darkness, quiet, 
 and finally down and down and down 
 and through young alders to pavement 
 again. We had listened for the highway, 
 for the ocean, for the sound 
 of our own footsteps, my little boys 
 and me. Everything so still 
 and far away. Quiet,

 until we are safe at home, and all
 our chatter and heat returns.
 Milk and brownies as reward
 for our long walk. “And we saw 
 a deer,” they say. 

 It was years ago. Perhaps my boys
 would not recall that day. 
 They are grown men and too far away
 for me to ask. 

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DREAMING

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

 

IMG_5660.jpegLast night, just before sunset, a deer appeared on the shore. Not a good thing in daylight. She was wet and confused and kept to the surf line. We see deer tracks frequently in the sand on our morning walks, but never the two deer themselves. This one moved along just fine, though she did not look happy, and the tourists with their dogs had all gone home. Local dog-owners came out on the beach, saw the doe, and leashed their dogs. Perhaps she had been separated from her companion, which I assumed from its smaller tracks was a yearling fawn? She stood right in front of our house, trotted north and then back south. And then the sun went down.

This morning, I dreamt we were living in our first house in Seattle again. Our dog Volant Sequoyah (“Bowzer”) had jumped the fence into the neighbor’s fenced yard and I’d left him there for a day and a half to teach him a lesson. Ian and Kerris showed up with packages of ground beef and hamburger buns just as I brought Bowzer home, and we didn’t want it because we’re vegetarian, but I thought about feeding Bowzer the meat. He was hungry. There was also a sequence of visiting the local school, which had been temporarily housed in an upper floor of a fancy office complex.

Well. Dreams are like that sometimes, a mixture of what we know and wish and experience muddled with places we have been, people we care about. Alan commented on the phone that the house yesterday that the house he and his wife first bought was up for sale and that set me thinking about our old house in Seattle. Online it is valued at nearly a million dollars. We paid less than twenty thousand for it in 1975.

At the beginning of 1978, Gary had left the zoo job and was tutoring American Indian students in the Edmonds School District. He had just been accepted to a grad program at the University of Washington’s School of Education for the fall. He planned to teach elementary school. I think he would have been wonderful at that job, he enjoys goofy humor and his impulse toward soothing and calming others would have served his students well. I was teaching art classes at Forest Ridge, an elite girls’ prep school on the other side of Lake Washington. We had six Afghan Hounds then, including Bowzer and his sister, and were active in showing and lure trials. I was a licensed field trial judge and we traveled often across the PNW and to Canada for shows and field trials. Instead, Gary’s father was dying of cancer, his family was falling apart and he quit school to support them. My grandfather’s third wife died and Genevieve left me the family house at the urging of her second husband. We thought we might buy land outside the city.

Instead we decided to have a family. We moved to my grandfather’s beach house in Oregon, the state where I was born. Gary took a job in a farmers’ co-op because he had worked in the Woodland Park Zoo commissary before he started back to school. we had our children, and I became an English teacher.

All in all, the dream seems more likely than that doe in the waves.

 

IMG_5656I should note that I took the photo above with a zoom from our deck. We are careful to avoid approaching wild animals. It is distressing for the animal and can make a bad situation deadly. Locals understand it is best not to “help” a wild thing.

Oh! I should have put up Assignment #3, only because I said I would do five. No one seems to be writing them, but I will post “The Idyllic Place” tomorrow.

 

A TASTE FOR SWEET

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My mother was pleased to read that as we age we lose our taste for sweet. She had a powerful sweet tooth and hoped this aging side effect would lesson her desire for cake and snickerdoodles. Alas, as she discovered later, the change in taste is not that we care less for sweet as we age, but that we lose our perception of sweetness. We do not crave the flavor less, we want more of it to satisfy our tongue.

There are other kinds of sweet.

Gary commented this morning on how I push off hard from my toes as I walk. “Especially the left one. While I graze the ground graceful as a dancer.” He laughed, and I wondered if the habit was left over from all those years of running.

We saw runners and dog-walkers. I followed a deer’s footprints from the tideline to the soft dry sand and lost her. Gary first spotted the raccoon prints. I found three back shells of my favorite “ugly clam” and three top shells that did not match. The back shells are always colorless, translucent, and shaped with a hole in the middle because the Pododesmus macrochisma shapes its home around the point of a rock. These C-shapes are even more delicate and far less common than the tops, which are rare enough. I found shells from four species of limpet. A tiny agate. We do not know what drew the adult bald eagle to the sand near Asbury Creek. She left no trace.