First ceremony .... cw

 

My cousin and I were having a phone visit recently, sharing our experience with the importance of Story when she said, “We, as the older generation are the bridge between the past and the future for those who follow.” She is in her seventies ~ I am eighty-three.

I look at the calendar and see this Sunday, Easter, is eighty years since Easter, 1941 with those early memories of my first two ceremonies. 

I don’t remember the drive from San Francisco where we had been living in a small apartment we’d lived in the four months since my third birthday and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I’m told our belongings were packed to move later that day into the flat on a quieter street near a park where we lived until war’s end. 

My father had the day off. He’d been working in the shipyard twelve-hour days, seven days a week since the war broke with early battles devastating damage to our navy’s ships. 

We’d made the trip for my brother and I were going to be baptized that day for the pastor had retired after years ~ since Daddy had been a boy.

I remember feeling a little cheated for the babies, including my toddler brother, were held, but  I “was too big” so stood with my father while the minister’s damp fingers touched my head, ~ with my parents promises, the Ceremony of  my welcome into the Christian Church.

What I most remember is how beautiful a spring day it was and how very glad I was to hold on tight to my Grandpa’s large, calloused hand as we climbed the steps going into the church. I felt safe in the shadow of his tall form!

Stepping into the old Two Rock church, filling with its Easter crowd of people Grandpa looked down at me, his deep voice telling me, “Kisspatch, everyone here is your relative!” 

The feeling his words caused as I looked around, has stayed with me all my life. There have been so many times that I have deeply doubted that I belonged ~ anywhere ~ but that memory ~ his voice, his words, has been an undercurrent, warming me, reassuring me. “Kisspatch, everyone here is your relative.” 

That Ceremony ~ a ceremony which, throughout my life, has helped to keep me whole.

Many years later I came to see how his words opened me, opened me to learning that everyone, everywhere is my relative ~ all of earth’s creation!

So, this Holy Week of 2020, I remember.

For Kristen, cw

 

Many years later in our new home, while unpacking to organize my new office, I pull out a box and read notes from a class I took one summer. They speak of the structure of English versus the structure of Native languages ~ how “the hoops bleed” in the process of translation. I remember the grief of a friend of mine, a member of the certification committee struggling to form what is now the university’s Rural Human Services program. His frustration and grieving came about because, as the committee worked on curriculum trying to put into English those important things of his culture, he realized what was being left out. English only provided snapshots, nothing of what was around it.

 

How often Peter said the same thing to me. “I can’t say it right in English. It doesn’t mean anything that way! English is no good for what I want to say.”

 

In one of my times in that village an Athabaskan tells me about the layers of meaning in their language. He tells that while many of the older people speak their language fluently, Peter, he said, is the last one who can speak the high language, the language that speaks to the deepest symbol, the most profound meaning of things. The man telling me speaks his language and can understand much but not all of the meaning when the “high” language is spoken. His sadness came from knowing there was no way for him to learn to speak from the depth of that which he calls the “high”.

I - Arrival of the Ovines - Lasso Lilly, vw

     

 

             Two 18-wheelers groaned up Oregon Highway 203 toward Medical Springs. Local curiosity was aroused, where in the hell would those sheep be going in this ‘ere cattle country? Yeah, Jacobs’ run a range band in Keating but these trucks are carrying way too many sheep for a place up here.

             The trucks turned at mile post 26, up Blue Mountain Ridge Road, toward the old barn, corrals, farrowing houses, and granary located one-and-a-half miles down the road. The old Ringer Place. Hmm. New people there. Calling themselves Double Diamond Ranch; kind’a high faluten for Fred’s old place.

 

 It was November 1979 and fast cooling down to winter and, yes, the newcomers were bringing 400 head of sheep to Medical Springs, long-established as cattle and timber country. We didn’t know it then, but a very cold and snowy winter was hovering…. As my mother used to say, Fools rush in …. Unlanded people, 3 generations removed, attempting to return to the land. Two families, 2 couples: a Viet Nam vet helicopter pilot, a Wallowa County gal with experience growing great vegetable gardens and raising chickens, and 2 OSU graduates: fisheries and zoology.

After all, how hard could it be?

 

One truck pulled in to the rickety old chute loader. One of the Ringer boys had built it at least 2 decades before as a 4H project. The green paint was peeling off the wood sides but the big old fat tires had just been aired up. It would do the job! It took a good 20 minutes to maneuver the livestock trailer, with a number of location adjustments of the loader, into what we hoped would be a good UNloading alignment. The men were ready at the trailer and the chute. The women were ready at the corral to direct any renegades back into the main flock body. The doors were opened; everyone tensed for the stampede. But …     not one white body was evident at the open door of the trailer.

Driver #1 took over, climbing up into the trailer. A big commotion was heard, the driver yelling, the stamp of hundreds of cloven hoofs moving from one end of the trailer to the other. Then, finally, the first ewe appeared … hesitated … and was forced by her followers, pushing her into this new world, where who knows what would be waiting; this strange new land, smelling of cows, pigs, turkeys, dust, dogs, and 4 strange humans … tensed and staring at her with sheep staffs in hand.

One-by-one they came and when the unloading ramp was filled with sheep and the bodies were finding space in the corrals, the dam was broken. Running ovine were streaming off the truck in a gushing rivulet. Don’t get in their way! Find a fairly safe place to stand that would still hinder escape from the leaning old corral that was meant to hold them! It seemed they would never end! Oh My Gosh! The corrals were filling up; did we really buy that many?

 

Sure enough, one old gal broke free in blind panic, found a hole and headed down the road, back to where they had come from. About 20 more followed her before we could plug the hole. The 2 men took after the run-aways and got them turned back to their imprisoned compadres.          All but one.         She was both the best sprinter, and long-distance runner. She looked like she was bent on running back to Idaho, coyotes and wolves notwithstanding.

But the men in the pickup had another tool at their disposal, a lariat. And one of them (to this day I don’t know which one) succeeded in lassoing her. They got her in the bed of the truck and, with one of them in the back holding her front legs and setting her up (which is a common position to work an individual sheep), drove back to the corrals.

 

As the weeks slipped by, she started slipping too! When a sheep gets sick or very stressed, they will often slip wool. Lasso Lilly’s wool started coming off in trailing streamers. Being a Rambouillet, those streamers were long and trailing the ground like a bride’s train. Her pink skin showed bare in patches, but she was queenly in her persona, long legged and graceful. She would walk along, head held high, trailing her garment behind her and would stamp in defiance if you came too close. Even in that cold winter ahead, she remained healthy in her short new growth of wool and delivered lambs in February with the rest of her sisters.

Lasso Lilly was the first sheep (remember, in the beginning they totaled 400) that distinguished herself with a name, though several exceptional such characters were to follow. These individualized themselves, being brave enough or, perhaps, unfortunate enough, to be caught in unique circumstances which marked them for life.                                                             

Shepherding: Introduction vw

 This January, I took a writing course through Fishtrap, a wonderful non-profit. It is based in Wallowa County, OR and is dedicated to "... promoting clear thinking and good writing in and about the West." This was a virtual class that gathered about a dozen students. Our teacher was Corinna Cook. Wow! She and my classmates were all amazing with encouragement and kindness, and each person, an original in their subject matter and interests.

If you are interested, Corinna has a web site; you can probably find her with Google.  She works closely with the University of Alaska. If she doesn't surface let me know; I be happy to assist. I  recommend that if any of you have the interest, don't miss an opportunity to take a class with this knowledgeable, sensitive, and considerate instructor.

So, that explains how I was prompted to taken up my posting again to the 2 Old Women Blog, I like to begin by posting my final essay from our class, "Writing as Mapmaking" in my next blog. I hope to do a series on our lives shepherding in Medical Springs through 35 years. My dearest hope is that I can improve my writing with practice, employing techniques learned in these classes. My goal? Turn out some kick-ass essays!

Your comments are so welcome. Constructive criticism encouraged. Support for the series would help me to keep going.

Thank you, Vicki