Yesterday I decided I needed to update the binder I keep at my desk that is labeled, "In Case of my Death." I'd been meaning to do it since I turned 80 last fall, but the pandemic has made it even more pressing. Stories are surfacing about people who have been camping or on refuge, then coming back to find a changed world, like walking through a wormhole in the universe. There's not so much change for me, since I moved here for social distance and plain living twenty years ago so I could buckle down to writing. I'm solitary in a small eastslope town in sight of Chief Mountain which is on the boundary between the US and Canada. I can't cross the border because my passport expired. I don't know my neighbors but many people on the rez next door I've known for half a century.
Over the years I discovered that my inquiries into the dynamics of the past as they persist in successive generations and my hunger for resolution -- whatever the pain resulting -- only horrified relatives who depended on denial and an appearance of respectability. They didn't want to hear about madness, sexual transgression, failure to prosper, alcoholism or even eccentricity. No one in this small town is interested either. A Blackft friend says that the old ladies of his family will tell the stories at 3AM when the men have gone to bed.
My Rolodex had ancient phone numbers but few email addresses. I had two brothers, one of whom suffered a concussion that meant he lived with my mother for the rest of her life -- more than a decade. She could never figure out how to make him safe when she was gone, and it turned out that we couldn't either. The other brother was considered more stable than myself. Yesterday I called his number and was told by his widow that he had died two years earlier of COPD and pneumonia. He was a lifelong heavy smoker, like the other brother and our mother after our father died. Smoking is an anxiety drug.
The widow was shaken. My brother had ruled "no contact" with me. I was a renegade, a tattletale, an accuser, and I refused to be my mother. I was shaken, too, though I'd already been complaining that cousins shut me out. They were afraid I'd write about them, that I would tell them to do things they didn't want, that I'd be critical and condemning because I had been clergy for ten years. This is upside down: a proper "religious" education is about understanding, support and forgiveness.
None of them were church-goers. Secretly, no one believed in God or Jesus or even church Christianity. The first task of a strong academic seminary is destroying childish ideas enforced by media. My cousins had not dared to go near the issues. They lived stubborn unconsoled lives based on security and prosperity, both of which I had abandoned. Their children suffered for it. Ancestors were blanked out.
So I began working my way through unanswered or disconnected phones, hang-ups, Google searches, and more deaths that I had never been told about. But births as well, people whose names I didn't know in locations I would not have suspected. They have educations their grandparents couldn't have dreamed of. I have a file drawer of genealogy and shelves of photos that I took from my mother's estate to save them from the dumpster, but so far I haven't been able to find young people to keep them when I'm gone. I sent some to historical societies. I tried to find archive homes with universities for some significant papers but discovered many archives are collapsing for lack of money.
Late last night I thought of one last person who might not object to contact. He'd gone to bed but his wife was up. At last I had found someone who understood what I was talking about and who would share information. As the missing story unfolded, I heard about more concussions and mental knots and the sell-offs of hard-won properties, but she had not heard about my dead brother's daughter, unsuspected except by me (we found each other through my blog), successful business owner, mother of two lively intelligent boys, ranch wife like them.
This was the old Hatfield house that burned. The family no longer lives there,
but the creek goes under this bridge.
Human life has always cherished places along a leafy stream where crops can flourish. South Deer Creek in Oregon is one of hundreds of moving water bodies across the continent that are named for deer. On my cousins' ranches they are pests in the garden and invaders among sheep and cows. But deer can easily slip into freezers. People have lived along this wide valley where the beginning of the road is almost at Crater Lake since the First People came. Kalapuya was the name of the most recent tribe and yesterday I was startled to see a person from that tribe show up on my Twitter feed. My mother used to talk about them from her girlhood.
To my child's mind this was Eden, a safe place where the Pinkerton girls had married Hatfield boys (problematic as that had been sometimes and indignant about it that my mother was) and created all those cousins who are now grandparents and great-grandparents. I had thought they had all been replaced by Californians, rich narcissists who tried to control everything, the epitome of the "Middle Class" I've come to hate for their assumption of entitlement and disregard for others. I wish there were another name for that demographic.
But late last night I heard about what really happened. A lot of it had to do with women preserving the same things I held precious -- homes they built, funny stories, protected animals. The valley is almost Californian with tall trees where turkey vultures roost, drying their wings in the morning before they can fly, then soaring on the thermals all day. Spanish moss embellishes those trees because this is damp, warm country. In Spring there are whiffs of skunk. The dusty old gravel roads have been paved. People still send their kids to Glide School but my cousins are mostly retired.
The point is that it goes on. Renewed. Pandemics come and go -- how many waves of virus have we already weathered, not counting the plagues of the frogs and songbirds? Not counting the major upheavals in history? I say geology is next to theology and place shapes life. This last version of humans may be more transient than we had planned, but the interwoven code of molecules that support life simply go on weaving.
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