There could be worse legacies than a bald hilltop with a stunning view preserved for all to enjoy.  As she recalls how that legacy began, Meg Campbell’s blue eyes twinkle.  We meet for lunch at the local bakery as the spring rains rattle the windows and begin to split open the buds on the hillside’s trees.  Unlike her eventual partner in the enterprise, Charlie Ross, she hadn’t been terribly interested in land conservation at first although she had long been an active volunteer in the community.  Charlie Ross had visited Europe in the late 1960s and brought home a vision of a green necklace of Read More

I was down in Riverside last week where there was no river and by 11 the temperature was in the 90s. Cossetted in my air-conditioned rooms behind tinted windows, all I could think about was that in Oregon the rains had started. As you know, we’d walked a long dry road, trees were dying,  the forest floor was in classic ‘potato-chip’ condition where every step crunched. And the fires, and the smoke and dust in the valley. Then the rains came, soft and steady, familiar as grandmothers.  And rains mean, among other things, mushrooms. Those in-between growths, fruit really, of unseen and often vast organisms Read More

Many of the early settlers in the Willamette Valley were rural farmers from Kentucky, Missouri and other southeastern States.  They migrated to the Willamette Valley, built rough cabins, planted grains and vegetables in river bottom ground, and grazed cattle, sheep and goats in the vast upland grass-covered prairies and savannas. I have lived in the southeast, northeast and, for the past 35 years, in the Pacific Northwest; an exception to most of my ancestors who migrated little, and lived and died in the same communities as their fathers and mothers.  Like the vast root networks and canopies of ancient legacy Oregon oaks in the Willamette Read More

A few weeks ago we flew back to the Midwest for a short family get-together. Late winter is always the best time for the drive along the river. Landing in St. Louis, we drove north up the Missouri side of the Mississippi, through little one stop-sign towns like Old Monroe, Elsberry, Annada. . . . At Clarksville, tucked under the limestone bluffs, the famous ice-cream parlour is newly shuttered, and the cement works is silent. But you get a brilliant view of Lock and Dam No. 24 and the bald eagles perched in the bare trees looking for fish. We crossed over at Louisiana and Read More