Edge Effects: Notes From An Oregon Forest

Deeper in the Forest

We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world. -Thoreau When I first completed my study of the research harvest and the profile of McDonald Forest, I thought I'd go on to write a local history. It would begin with the history of my own house and piece of land, radiate outward to the Willamette Valley, Oregon , and the West, and include all the stories I could find about the native Kalapuya, the settlers who came on the Oregon Trail, and the founders of the city. I thought to dignify my life by seeing it as history-history in the sense of story, of drama. Maybe a mountain man once walked the ground where my children now leave out their bikes and their squirt guns. Maybe this hillside of lawns and roses was the scene for some ancient Kalapuya rite. Maybe our apparently shapeless, inconclusive lives are in fact the latest moment in some large historical progress, caused and explicable. But the longer I studied the old survey maps and pioneer journals , the more the picture blurred. Hours would pass in the rare book room or at home among the Xeroxes and still there would be no clarity, only rain and sun and the endless motion of the oxen, only the hills of grass and the forests going by. There was no defining action, only scene-only the minutiae of lives, the mud and the dwindling provisions, the sky and the sound of wind. "It is one of the attractions of the unknown," Virginia Woolf says in "Lives of the Obscure," "their multitude, their vastness; for instead of keeping their identity separate, as remarkable people do, they seem to merge into one another." The lives I found were obscure-Sarah Cummins, Bushrod Wilson, Lester Hulin-and I couldn't keep them straight, couldn't resolve their detail into pattern. But gradually that began to delight me, to lull me into some other, deeper rhythm. I was diffused DEE PER I NTH E FOR EST 109 into atmospheres. "Nothing much happens," Woolf says, reading old memoirs and autobiographies in some dusty Victorian library. "But the dim light is exquisitely refreshing to the eyes." Now one detail stands out, now one scene, but then, the silence of books all around me, the smell of yellowing pages and copying ink in my nose, "gently, beautifully, like the clouds of a balmy evening, obscurity once more traverses the sky, an obscurity which is not empty but thick with the star dust of innumerable lives." I found plenty of evidence, too, for the first kind of history I wanted, proof that mountain men did walk where the bikes now lay, leading their mules over what is now asphalt and bark dust. This is when I learned that the mud and marshes of the Willamette Valley forced the first trappers of the 1820'S to establish the California Trail in the hills just above the valley floor, where my house now stands-people like Alexander McLeod of the Hudson 's Bay Company and the great Jedediah Smith. This is when I learned that the Applegate Trail of the 1840'S and 50's, the southern spur of the Oregon Trail, went right past us, too, a little farther down, the Conestoga wagons and the dusty oxen rumbling along near what is now Highway 99. Levi Scott, one of the founders of the trail, homesteaded no more than a mile from here. Jesse Applegate himself lived not far away, in Rickreal. All the first Donation Land Claims in this part of the state were filed in these hills, above the muddy valley-Thomas Reed's, Abram Fuller's, David Carson's. And before the trappers and settlers, for maybe ten thousand years, the Kalapuya walked the ridgelines and camped along the streams, burning the forests season after season until there was only oak savannah, telling their stories over the long, rainy winters. From my own little acre and a half I could have witnessed a part of the great Western Migration, seen for myself, firsthand, a piece of the history glorified in all the movies and books. At least some of the people who came by here must have done a heroic 110 DEEPER IN THE FOREST thing, or were...