February 14th, 2010
Hike! To Your Death!
I don’t know what it is about me and death hikes. I keep finding them. I forget that many places that are beautiful to go are
- wet
- high up in the air
- made by scrabbling a barely flat surface into a cliff wall
I was pondering why we always end up like this, a white-knuckle death grip on each kid as we inch along a rock face, hissing at our dear children with each clumsy step. (I swear that Zephyr starts tripping every third or fourth step when we are up 100 feet in the air clinging to a metal cable. Swear.) Why does this always happen to us? Then it occurred to me… it is the terrain dummy. We keep hiking to these waterfalls in the gorge. Gorge + waterfalls = rock walls with just a cable to cling to. If I were in Death Valley say, this wouldn’t be happening to me.
Anyway, we had a break in the rain this last weekend and we raced for the outdoors. I feel like such a caged animal these days, eager to get out be RUN around. I am coming to terms with my true nature. The truth is that I like exercise.
So why not get it here?
This was Eagle Creek Trail. William Sullivan, Northwest hike guru has this to say about this particular trail:
The Eagle Creek Trail is one of Oregon’s most spectacular paths, passing half a dozen major waterfalls. The trail is also an engineering marvel. To maintain an easy grade through this rugged canyon, the builders blasted ledges out of sheer cliffs, bridged a colossal gorge and even chipped a tunnel through solid rock behind 120-foot Tunnel Falls.
Yes siree. It was high up there.
We did this particular hike with our friends Jason and Angela and their two boys Soren and Anders. It is fun to have a whole family of friends. Everyone has someone to love! That is definitely how we feel about these guys, so we were certainly open to risking our lives with them.
Brad is such a good sport. I have yet to decide if he really likes hiking but pretends not to or if he really does not like hiking but thinks he should or if he just doesn’t like it and… you get the picture. For him, the best thing about hiking in the gorge is that Edgefield is between us and Portland when we are done. The kids, (all five of them), were so exhausted that they were really pretty mellow at dinner. Who can resist?



“Ohhh! Wow, it is so, and everything so Christmas looking now!”
Now the house looks all pretty and peaceful. The kids are in bed, and look! St Nicholas arrived a little early. We must have been first on his list of places to stop before tomorrow morning.
There is a big fuss in Portland over what might happen to the 
Not only do the chickens have about 10 times the space as before, they now have a completely fenced outside area that is tall enough for us humans to access without stooping. We have hay bale storage inside the coop and chicken feed bin storage outside. The chickens have their own access door on the front there as well as two operating windows for the summer time. Awesome.
Inside I sort of hacked together three roosts and an access rail for the nesting boxes. Zephyr is leaning on it and it didn’t break yet, so we might be in business. The two Francis-es are bonding here: Francie is holding Frankie.
As a child, my family lived for a summer in what later became a chicken coop. It was slightly bigger than this shack, but not much! My parents were building our house in Sheridan up in the woods and we were living in a rental in Willamina. My mother hated the rental and hated living in town, so off we went to a 10 by 12 shed where my older sister and I slept in narrow bunks nailed to the wall and my parents slept on the floor on a roll out cot with (the then) baby, Kendall. We had an outdoor “kitchen” comprised of a coleman stove and some storage shelves and boxes. We sat on sawed logs and had a campfire many nights. We had an outhouse, and got washed up in a concrete utility sink filled from a hose (yes, it was cold!). On the way to the outhouse one night, I got within 10 feet of two bobcats, which was the last time I saw those in the woods. Although I was pretty young, living in “the chicken shed” was among the best memories of my life!



And, here is the classic third child left behind. It won’t be long Inez and you can be shuffled out into the world just for a bit each day, little steps at a time, testing that fleeting, giddy, joyful independence.

