| Paradise Lost And Found |
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If you’ve never been to Oregon in the summertime – and I grieve for you, O poor soul of missed spectacles if you haven’t – it is the prettiest place on earth. I say this with conviction because I’ve actually seen what many consider the prettiest place on the planet – New Zealand – and I think Oregon is easily its equal, and even better in some respects, such as the fact that nearly everyone here knows how to fix a hotdog and what ketchup should taste like.
So take that, you Lord-of-the-Rings, misty-watercolor-mountains and rainbow-spraying waterfalls of landscape-laden New Zealand, with your glow-worm caves and bubbling geothermal ponds. Living in Oregon is like walking into a postcard.
Here, I can look out on a snow-capped mountain just by driving the I-5 to Portland, and, if I go the other direction, I can visit the world’s most beautiful coastline, via a highway shrouded by towering pines and fir trees, a forest that looks so primeval I expect to see Robin Hood one of these days.
Why, it is the very peak of paradise … except … for one thing … sooner or later … it gets to be November … and just like that … the dark drenching begins. Rain screams down from the sky, hissing on the payment, spitting in your face, and sending a message from the clouds above … that the joke is on you, because not only is summer a thing of the past, it is slowly being erased from your memory, as the unrelenting growl of winter expresses itself in drips, drizzle and downpours -- which you are sure will cease because nature is going to run out of water, right? At least temporarily?
But it just never does.
The day I moved into my new Oregon home, in Independence, I was all by myself. My husband was at a conference, my daughter was at a summer camp, and my son stayed behind to live in Southern California since he was headed for college there in the fall. In the fine art of moseying around, I went to the local hardware store, where I met a new neighbor. I told her how lovely Oregon was. She smiled. Yes, it is, she said. Where you from? I said the word that everyone here seems to dread: California.
“Good luck,” she said. “I hope you survive the two-year test.”
When I asked the woman behind the counter to explain the two-year test, she put it to me this way: First year ex-Californians say: hey this a lot of rain. Second year, they say: I don’t think I can take this kind of rain every winter. By the third year, a for-sale sign is in their yard.
I paused. In fact, the house we now own had been placed on the market the third year after the couple we bought it from had moved into it. They were from California -- and now they were headed to Arizona.
Arizona, it turns out, is a pretty typical winter destination for those who can afford it. For people like me, the remedies are much closer to home. I bought a light box, a sun lamp, a membership to a gym with an indoor track flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows. And I got something else, too. Through sheer necessity – because nobody I know gets Seasonal Affective Disorder like I do – I passed the two-year test. Yes, I flunked adjustment to winter’s wet demands. But I prevailed, just the same.
It’s kind of metaphor for life, isn’t it? You think you can’t take a situation, it’s simply asking too much of you.
But somehow you stick it out, and then you come out the other end, and well, you’ve made it! Some, who can’t stand the rain, hightail it out for relocation to a sunnier climate. And some grow to like the rain. These are the people who are native Oregonians and -- I mean no disrespect here -- stinkin’ liars.
Because the rains can be hellish. In fact, if I live a wrongful life, a good way to punish me is to tell me at the pearly gates that I need to be 17 again, in a perpetually rainy Oregon winter. But if I make the grade at the end of my time here, I want heaven to look just like Oregon, in summer, that is -- with maybe a slice of New Zealand thrown in, kiwis and crystal lakes. And, so, I’ve learned to take the dark with the light, that summer is never that far away, so long as I keep thinking about it through the gloomy January days.
I’m Anne Scheck and this is one of the lessons I’ve learned from my small town.
If you’ve never been to Oregon in the summertime – and I grieve for you, O poor soul of missed spectacles if you haven’t – it is the prettiest place on earth. I say this with conviction because I’ve actually seen what many consider the prettiest place on the planet – New Zealand – and I think Oregon is easily its equal, and even better in some respects, such as the fact that nearly everyone here knows how to fix a hotdog and what ketchup should taste like.
So take that, you Lord-of-the-Rings, misty-watercolor-mountains and rainbow-spraying waterfalls of landscape-laden New Zealand, with your glow-worm caves and bubbling geothermal ponds. Living in Oregon is like walking into a postcard.
Here, I can look out on a snow-capped mountain just by driving the I-5 to Portland, and, if I go the other direction, I can visit the world’s most beautiful coastline, via a highway shrouded by towering pines and fir trees, a forest that looks so primeval I expect to see Robin Hood one of these days.
Why, it is the very peak of paradise … except … for one thing … sooner or later … it gets to be November … and just like that … the dark drenching begins. Rain screams down from the sky, hissing on the payment, spitting in your face, and sending a message from the clouds above … that the joke is on you, because not only is summer a thing of the past, it is slowly being erased from your memory, as the unrelenting growl of winter expresses itself in drips, drizzle and downpours -- which you are sure will cease because nature is going to run out of water, right? At least temporarily?
But it just never does.
The day I moved into my new Oregon home, in Independence, I was all by myself. My husband was at a conference, my daughter was at a summer camp, and my son stayed behind to live in Southern California since he was headed for college there in the fall. In the fine art of moseying around, I went to the local hardware store, where I met a new neighbor. I told her how lovely Oregon was. She smiled. Yes, it is, she said. Where you from? I said the word that everyone here seems to dread: California.
“Good luck,” she said. “I hope you survive the two-year test.”
When I asked the woman behind the counter to explain the two-year test, she put it to me this way: First year ex-Californians say: hey this a lot of rain. Second year, they say: I don’t think I can take this kind of rain every winter. By the third year, a for-sale sign is in their yard.
I paused. In fact, the house we now own had been placed on the market the third year after the couple we bought it from had moved into it. They were from California -- and now they were headed to Arizona.
Arizona, it turns out, is a pretty typical winter destination for those who can afford it. For people like me, the remedies are much closer to home. I bought a light box, a sun lamp, a membership to a gym with an indoor track flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows. And I got something else, too. Through sheer necessity – because nobody I know gets Seasonal Affective Disorder like I do – I passed the two-year test. Yes, I flunked adjustment to winter’s wet demands. But I prevailed, just the same.
It’s kind of metaphor for life, isn’t it? You think you can’t take a situation, it’s simply asking too much of you.
But somehow you stick it out, and then you come out the other end, and well, you’ve made it! Some, who can’t stand the rain, hightail it out for relocation to a sunnier climate. And some grow to like the rain. These are the people who are native Oregonians and -- I mean no disrespect here -- stinkin’ liars.
Because the rains can be hellish. In fact, if I live a wrongful life, a good way to punish me is to tell me at the pearly gates that I need to be 17 again, in a perpetually rainy Oregon winter. But if I make the grade at the end of my time here, I want heaven to look just like Oregon, in summer, that is -- with maybe a slice of New Zealand thrown in, kiwis and crystal lakes. And, so, I’ve learned to take the dark with the light, that summer is never that far away, so long as I keep thinking about it through the gloomy January days.
I’m Anne Scheck and this is one of the lessons I’ve learned from my small town.