By Garrett Reagan
Tell me again of the season
When gallivants would whistle and walk, weary eyed and bushy browed
When blackberry brambles spoke in cursive, tracing hillsides in pillowy clouds
By Mary Sharon Moore
Sitting up high in the back of the McKenzie River-bound bus, I take in a picture-window view of morning sky to the east and north. A thin marine overcast evaporates as morning summer sun climbs in the sky.
By Lamar White
My parents and sister migrated from Arkansas to the McKenzie River in 1939. My father worked for Rosboro Lumber and they lived in a tent just a few yards upriver from the rock which is Finn Rock.
By Mary Sharon Moore
The wildfires that have ravaged my beloved McKenzie River Corridor sparked into being a month ago. The evening of Labor Day, to be exact.
By Ms. Joy Sisto
You are the dirt that nourishes the tree.
So, it’s grateful for all your life giving,
and your consciousness to nourish you,
united to love with the best you can be.
By Howard Horowitz
Three Sisters, Little Belknap, Broken Top,
Yapoah Crater, Ahalapam: volcanic names
are strewn across the map.
(The bilious earth
disgorged one hundred miles of aa,
inhospitable to all feet.)
By Billie Ruth Rose
My youth was spent
in the out-of-doors
climbing hills,
climbing trees,
leaving prints on sandy shores,
collecting rocks I thought I’d keep forever.
By Bob Bumstead
It happened on Kirk Road,
you know, the one between Fern Ridge and Territorial Road…
By Mary Sharon Moore
I’m a little over an hour into my seven-hour hike along the McKenzie River Trail. And it’s a stunningly beautiful summer morning in Oregon’s western Cascades. My aim today? To hike ten miles.
by Meredith Goehring
We knew it was coming but the ash still surprised us, a startling passage from vivid green into bone grey. No warning, just a sudden muting of the world several miles into the trail. Tragedy.
I am shocked, suddenly winded, reminded of the sensation of lost love; the same breathless abandonment at finding there is no color on the ridges receding out to the horizon, no matter how high you go or how far you strain to see.
by Tom Titus
I felt the storm in my body. The spinning energy generated by that colossal pinwheel of wind and moisture coming onshore moved through my being the way a willow rod bends in the hands of a water dowser. My battered left knee began to ache. This was a warm storm, a gusting exhalation that began sometime in the late-December night. I opened my bedroom window a few inches to give the wind-driven rain room to slip its animal fingers inside and massage my sleepless ears.
by Richard Chasm
Pete Small’s father was a hard working logger. They lived in Olalla, but one summer Mr. Small got a logging job up on Twelve Mile Creek the other side of Camas Valley. The loggers camped all week coming home Saturday and going back to work at dawn on Monday.